Introduction In the realm of collegiate athletes, a constant debate surrounds the allocation of financial resources between a university’s revenue and non-revenue sports. At every college and university, the financial distribution between revenue and non-revenue sports is much more complex than how much money each team gets. Other factors that are taken into consideration when making these multi-million dollar decisions include scholarship allocation, academic success, facility needs, and equipment needs for each program. Some will argue for a more equitable approach to the distribution of funds, while others advocate for athletic departments to prioritize revenue-generating sports to sustain the financial viability of athletic programs. Arguments For Equitable Distribution of Funds Advocates for the equitable distribution of funds argue that all sports …show more content…
Even off the field, many non-revenue sports continuously outperform revenue sports, especially in the classroom. As a whole, non-revenue sports have twelve percent higher graduation rates (90% vs. 78%) than the student-athletes that participate in the revenue generating sports (Healy, 2021). In the Fall 2023 term, Liberty University recorded the single highest end-of-semester GPA for their athletic department, having a cumulative grade point average of 3.34 (Liberty, 2024). However, it was many of the university’s non-revenue sports that carried the bulk of this weight, with the top five performing programs being all non-revenue sports (volleyball at 3.82, women’s swimming & diving at 3.75, women’s tennis at 3.63, women’s lacrosse at 3.55, women’s soccer at