Future of Division III

[IC798891]

I think this could be a bigger problem than is highlighted in the article. I suspect most full time employees at a college/university can't actually take a 20% pay cut for an extended period of time. I would not be surprised if a lot of them look for other jobs.

[Ron Boerger]

I think this could be a bigger problem than is highlighted in the article. I suspect most full time employees at a college/university can't actually take a 20% pay cut for an extended period of time. I would not be surprised if a lot of them look for other jobs.

With all of the school closures and cutbacks, finding a comparable position in academia isn't going to be easy right now.  For tenured faculty, the problem is even more acute as moving to a new school would mean at least temporary loss of tenure and non-tenured positions, even tenure track, generally pay less than fully tenured.  Certainly, they can look for employment in other areas but that would likely entail a move to Lexington or Louisville, at least.

Looking at Averett's last two 990s (2022 and 2023), the school reported losses of $6.4M in 2022 and $5.4M in 2023.  Net assets have decreased from $57.1M in June 2021 to $44.6M in June 2023.  They reported $24.4M in investments.  That's not a lot of breathing room if someone spent a significant amount of money unexpectedly (on what?).

[IC798891]

I think this could be a bigger problem than is highlighted in the article. I suspect most full time employees at a college/university can't actually take a 20% pay cut for an extended period of time. I would not be surprised if a lot of them look for other jobs.

With all of the school closures and cutbacks, finding a comparable position in academia isn't going to be easy right now.  For tenured faculty, the problem is even more acute as moving to a new school would mean at least temporary loss of tenure and non-tenured positions, even tenure track, generally pay less than fully tenured.  Certainly, they can look for employment in other areas but that would likely entail a move to Lexington or Louisville, at least.

Looking at Averett's last two 990s (2022 and 2023), the school reported losses of $6.4M in 2022 and $5.4M in 2023.  Net assets have decreased from $57.1M in June 2021 to $44.6M in June 2023.  They reported $24.4M in investments.  That's not a lot of breathing room if someone spent a significant amount of money unexpectedly (on what?).

It's well worth remembering that faculty are not the only full-time employees on a college campus and many staff are capable of working jobs outside academia.

Administrative positions, support staff, development and communications people. Those are the people I'd be worried about losing to non-college jobs. Because unless they are really high on the ladder, they're probably already not getting a great salary compared to non-college jobs. And now they're losing 20% of that? Good luck

EDIT: Don't forget the facilities/grounds people too!.

EDIT 2: Never ever forget this: https://x.com/edburmila/status/1575117245000327170

"Universities pay staggering salaries to Presidents, Chancellors, VPs and provosts by the dozens, etc and in every administrative office there is a 57 year old woman named Peggy with a title like "Admin Assistant II" and that's the person who actually runs the university."

[Kuiper]

I think this could be a bigger problem than is highlighted in the article. I suspect most full time employees at a college/university can't actually take a 20% pay cut for an extended period of time. I would not be surprised if a lot of them look for other jobs.

Looking at Averett's last two 990s (2022 and 2023), the school reported losses of $6.4M in 2022 and $5.4M in 2023.  Net assets have decreased from $57.1M in June 2021 to $44.6M in June 2023.  They reported $24.4M in investments.  That's not a lot of breathing room if someone spent a significant amount of money unexpectedly (on what?).

This is one of the things that gets me about this story.  Averett wants to blame one rogue employee for unauthorized, but not illegal, expenditures out of the endowment, that effectively match the decline in the endowment and the operating losses they have been experiencing for several years.  Sounds like deflection to me.  If there is financial mismanagement here, it is on a much larger scale and if it really involves one rogue employee, it starts with the governance failure that allows one employee to lose $6 million on his or her own.

There's always been lots of mismanagement and incompetence in higher education, partly because academics, or, in some types of schools, clergy, are expected to run many colleges even though their formal training is in something completely unrelated to management like chemistry, religion or even finance, and partly because colleges and universities are structured in a way that makes change difficult until after the crisis has hit.  This can affect everything from endowment growth to strategic decisions to data security.  That mismanagement isn't worth going after and sacrificing the academic mission of the school when applications are high and donors are plentiful.  When margins start getting tighter, though, the fallout from these kinds of failures becomes more dire.  There are plenty of schools closing or belt-tightening right now that are blaming it on the pandemic and the demographic cliff or population migration in their regions when those are just the moments that revealed the long-standing mismanagement that is at the root of their problems.

[Gray Fox]

Here is some info from the LA Times about California high school sports.  Transfers are not just for college.

The 10 commissioners keep repeating the line they've used for years — that only 2% of all participants transfer — but that hardly explains the impact and issues involved with a record of more than 17,000 transfers when it's supposed to be education-based high school sports and not AAU sports.

[jknezek]

Kind of expected this. Roster change to 105 for football... That's a lot more D1 scholarships. I suspect this will hit all elite D3 programs though as roster sizes, and therefore possible scholarships, are going to swallow up those "preferred walk-ons" that elite D3 schools are used to having.

Doubling the size of basically every Olympic sport scholarship potential is going to hurt as well. I suspect a lot of schools will not give all scholarships possible, especially on the men's side, but it's still going to be a large number going from partials to full, or none to full.

[Ron Boerger]

But D1 football (and all sports) can now award partial scholarships, and certainly the number of schools able to fully fund all 105 is somewhat limited.   (edit:) Another factor reducing the amount of new football financial aid is the mandate to provide matching additional aid on the women's side due to Title IX. 

[EnmoreCat]

Uninformed question from an Australian (although currently vacationing in Vienna), what was the roster size before this change please?

[Ron Boerger]

Uninformed question from an Australian (although currently vacationing in Vienna), what was the roster size before this change please?

Vienna is lovely.  My wife and I just returned from a week in Austria, though we didn't make it to Vienna this year.

In terms of scholarships, 85 in D1 FBS, 63 in D1 FCS.  All FBS had to be full rides.

You could have more players than that on your roster (one data point, University of Texas listed 119 in 2023; another, Alabama, had 137).

[EnmoreCat]

Uninformed question from an Australian (although currently vacationing in Vienna), what was the roster size before this change please?

Vienna is lovely.  My wife and I just returned from a week in Austria, though we didn't make it to Vienna this year.

In terms of scholarships, 85 in D1 FBS, 63 in D1 FCS.  All had to be full rides.

You could have more players than that on your roster (one data point, University of Texas listed 119 in 2023; another, Alabama, had 137).

Thanks, appreciate that.

[Kuiper]

Uninformed question from an Australian (although currently vacationing in Vienna), what was the roster size before this change please?

Vienna is lovely.  My wife and I just returned from a week in Austria, though we didn't make it to Vienna this year.

In terms of scholarships, 85 in D1 FBS, 63 in D1 FCS.  All had to be full rides.

You could have more players than that on your roster (one data point, University of Texas listed 119 in 2023; another, Alabama, had 137).

In soccer, they are talking about a limit of 27, but removing the equivalency limit on overall scholarships.  So, while more players could get scholarships (and bigger ones) if the school chose to fund them, there would be fewer available slots than there are now at many schools.  In most sports, those roster limits would reduce the training/practice squad/walk-on players, possibly producing a cascade effect that would push some of those players to other schools and other divisions.

[Ron Boerger]

Thanks, appreciate that.

Sure.  One correction:  FCS scholarships didn't have to be full rides.  My bad. 

[Kuiper]

Wittenberg is considering $7 million in budget cuts

Tax documents for the 2022-2023 school year show the university spent about $17 million more than it brought in, and had a deficit in tax years 2020 and 2022. In 2021, the university had a surplus of about $3.5 million.

The university said in an email to its alumni obtained by the Springfield News-Sun and Dayton Daily News the administration is working on a plan to make the university more financially stable.

According to the email, such a plan would cut projected deficits, eliminating a deficit entirely by the third year; cut staff positions at a minimum of $3 million in the current 2025 fiscal year and beyond, and eliminate "faculty lines" at $4 million in the 2026 fiscal year and beyond, "while retaining those academy programs necessary for the university to maintain and grow its current enrollment." The university's entire budget in tax year 2023 was about $96 million.

The university's board will consider the new plan at its next meeting on Aug. 15

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[Little Giant 89]

Wittenberg is considering $7 million in budget cuts

Tax documents for the 2022-2023 school year show the university spent about $17 million more than it brought in, and had a deficit in tax years 2020 and 2022. In 2021, the university had a surplus of about $3.5 million.

The university said in an email to its alumni obtained by the Springfield News-Sun and Dayton Daily News the administration is working on a plan to make the university more financially stable.

According to the email, such a plan would cut projected deficits, eliminating a deficit entirely by the third year; cut staff positions at a minimum of $3 million in the current 2025 fiscal year and beyond, and eliminate "faculty lines" at $4 million in the 2026 fiscal year and beyond, "while retaining those academy programs necessary for the university to maintain and grow its current enrollment." The university's entire budget in tax year 2023 was about $96 million.

The university's board will consider the new plan at its next meeting on Aug. 15

.

YIKES!

[IC798891]

Ithaca adds women's wrestling.

This is an interesting move because unlike adding a sport where you probably have non-student athletes who played the sport in high school, I suspect girls' wrestling, while the fastest-growing HS sport, is probably still so uncommon that you're not likely to have those athletes on your campus already (notwithstanding some who might want to take it up for the first time), so the people you're going to be recruiting are probably going to be people who weren't looking at your college to begin with, who now are.

And with the infrastructure already in place, you don't add a lot of costs