Coffee With the President

In the wake of recent tuition hikes and cuts to education funding, plenty of students are naturally concerned about the future of higher education. On March 22, President Boggess hosted a meeting in which she welcomed comments, suggestions, and questions about Concord including how to improve student life and the budget after these recent cuts.

    “We’re doing everything we can think of, all the contracts that we have with vendors, Aramark, bookstore, everything, to see how we can avoid increasing the cost of education for students,” the President stated.

    Only three students were in attendance, but it did not discourage the President or the several members of her cabinet there for student questions. A common concern that the members addressed was the state of sports in the midst of the recent cuts. For many students, Concord’s funding for sports programs doesn’t make much sense when other aspects of campus life and other departments obviously need funding, work and attention.

    President Boggess stated in response “Most universities are having problem with enrollment. Kids come to play. We have 338 students who might not have come here if they couldn’t play a sport. We couldn’t lose 338 students right now. Should we do anything drastic in that area, it could really harm enrollment. We want [the sports programs] to be as economic as possible, but it brings students here.” 

    According to the President, a lot of donors the school has approached in the past typically prefer to support sports over other needs in academic departments, the theater being a sore example. “They feel very strongly about it. [Sports] help to get your name out there, and it’s a form of marketing for the university. Any time you can do that, while it might not bring in money, you never know when it might bring in some students.” Dr. Peter Viscusi, Vice President and Academic Dean, also pointed out that some of the games are now televised, which helps to spread Concord’s name. Rick Dillon, Vice President of Administration, pointed out that, in the past, Concord faced painful backlash when they axed a sport, namely men’s soccer.

    He pointed out other benefits of having sports on a campus, some obvious to both residential students as well as commuters. “[Sports] bring diversity, they bring people from out of state. It allows for a more cultural difference. It’s all kind of positive stuff happening with our athletes…they’re graduating, their GPA is high collectively. And it helps us raise money for things like the track, which our non-athletic students walk on and run on. I don’t know if we would have that if we didn’t have the sport that utilized the track and if we didn’t have people that liked sports giving the school money for the track. The town uses that track. In fact, the football turf on the football field was totally donated money, it’s not student money. Lots of students use that and people forget that. If you don’t have a football team you don’t get all that. You have to take in the whole picture before you get an understanding.”

    Dr. Chuck Becker, Vice President for Business and Finance, pointed out what he understood to be a fundamental misunderstanding of the financial side of the situation. “There’s a lot of people around here that say we spend too much money on [sports] than on [other things], and what they’ve been told is that when you take the revenue that comes in from those athletes and you subtract the cost of their education, and then you subtract the cost of actually running the athletic program, the coaches, the travel, the uniforms…there is still some money left over that is a contribution to the other costs of running the university. They’ve got it in their minds that athletics loses money because you hear about that all the time, but what they’re talking about is if you had athletics that has to support itself, by television rights. Sure, none of them make money except Alabama and a handful of others. But when you take the revenue that’s generated and you subtract all those costs, this last year, there was almost 550,000 dollars left over.”

    With that projected revenue, it is unlikely that any sports funding will be reduced at Concord. Since the University largely works under the restrictions of the edowments given and donors’ wishes, it is unlikely that a cut to sports would even benefit another area of the University. For any interested student, the budget is available for viewing upon request.