Your kid’s tuition bill has a line item that isn’t printed on it. According to a Government Accountability Office report this summer, cited in the weekend Journal’s lead editorial, the median college puts about $8,500 per undergraduate into its sports programs over a four-year degree — before anyone buys a ticket, a jersey or a parking pass. Ninety-four percent of Division I athletic programs ran in the red in 2023-24, the median hole was $20.6 million, and colleges plugged $7.2 billion of it with money from elsewhere, federal student aid included. Much of that money, the GAO said, was “funded by tuition and fees paid by students.”
The editorial’s subject is the bill the Senate looks ready to vote on Monday, Sept. 28. Brokered by Sen. Ted Cruz (R., Texas) and Sen. Maria Cantwell (D., Wash.), it would effectively write last summer’s NCAA settlement into law: a school’s total athlete pay capped at $21.6 million, indexed to inflation, with up to $22.5 million more in a retention pool and another $5 million for women’s and Olympic sports. Boosters could no longer route pay to players and call it a name-image-likeness deal. Players could transfer once, the five-year eligibility clock would go into statute, state laws would yield, and the NCAA would get a limited antitrust shield. Unions are against it because it stops short of calling athletes employees — a status the board suspects most players would decline once it came with union dues and a tax bill on their scholarships.
How we got here, in the board’s telling
The bidding began with the Supreme Court’s unanimous 2021 decision in NCAA v. Alston, which put the association’s rules within reach of antitrust law. At most Division I schools a donor-funded collective now pays the players, some schools pay them outright, and the best football and basketball players clear upward of $5 million. This month the SEC’s leaders talked of expelling LSU after coach Lane Kiffin tried to sign players with NFL time, against a conference rule; a Louisiana judge then barred the SEC from enforcing it, and Kiffin backed off. The board tallies the tax breaks too: no federal tax on the gate or the broadcast money, no property tax on the stadium, and tax-exempt bonds to build it. Its conclusion: Congress is nobody’s idea of a referee, but it may be the one body able to stop the states from taking advantage of the court’s ruling — and the people being taken advantage of now, the board says, are taxpayers.
Our read
This desk doesn’t score the bill and stays out of the politics of it. The families’ number is what matters here (M5). Tuition and mandatory fees fund things the brochure doesn’t always itemize, and at the median college that’s a four-figure sports subsidy per student over four years — paid by the engineering major who never sees a game as surely as by the season-ticket holder. When you compare two schools on net price, ask for the fee schedule and what the fees fund; a school whose athletic department covers itself leaves more of your tuition for everything else, and one that doesn’t leaves less. It pairs with the sticker-price story on the same paper’s front page: the price is one number, and what it buys is another.
One tax note for the general file. Scholarships that pay tuition are generally income-tax-free for a degree candidate; wages aren’t, which is the fork in the road the board is pointing at for athletes, and it’s worth knowing for any family with a scholarship in the house. If a college bill is on your horizon, spend fifteen minutes with the fee schedule before the acceptance letter makes you sentimental.