Colleges, NIL, and Funding

A Lot of Discontent

This is a dual post.

First post:

Trump is pulling a lot of funding from many colleges and universities across the country. I can see why you would be uncomfortable with it. Shouldn’t colleges be allowed to have classes in any subject they want?

Yup. They should. Free intellectual inquiry is essential to a well-functioning Democratic Republic.

Of course, if you are conservative, you don’t get to have free intellectual inquiry. I have spoken to many students who tailored answers on tests to the political ideology of the professor so they received a better grade, knowing full well the answer was incorrect.

Try being a conservative public speaker on a college campus. Even at campuses that supposedly embrace rigorous and free intellectual inquiry, they are shouted down and run off the campus. Extra security is required. The leading institutional departments at those colleges are often run by professors or experts from the private sector who have a left-wing political bent. I am talking about places like the Institute of Politics at the University of Chicago or things like The Belfer Center at Harvard.

But it doesn’t mean taxpayers ought to be compelled to send money to those colleges. Maybe taking a step back and rethinking the model is a good idea. If colleges want to sponsor courses that are pro-Hamas and anti-American, maybe getting money from ideological donors is better than milking taxpayers. If they want to engage in politicized research, same thing.

No doubt, much of the research done at colleges and universities is beneficial. But, taking a step back and examining trillions of dollars sent to them isn’t a bad idea when the country is running a massive budget deficit.

We were exposed to all the fraud in NGOs. There has to be a lot of it in this sort of thing. It is disgusting to me to see money I am forced to pay for taxes and will go to jail if I decline payment spent on grift, waste, and corruption.

I also think foreign aid is mostly a tremendous waste of taxpayer dollars. So do distinguished people with credentials. It’s not like the Marshall Plan post-WW2.

I feel the same about organizations like Planned Parenthood. Get ideological donors to give them money, not taxpayer dollars.

Second post:

In college sports, athletes are now allowed to transfer from school to school without penalty. In the old days, you couldn’t play right away, and you couldn’t transfer in your conference.

They are also getting paid via Name Image and Likeness (NIL).

What’s happened is the producer surplus that used to be entirely given to schools and coaches is now being shared with athletes. We have a free market in athletics.

Most fans hate it. You don’t get to follow a kid on their journey through time at your favored school. During the NCAA this year, a lot of the experts said it hurt mid-major schools, and the idyllic upsets with Cinderella running through the tournament are gone.

Maybe, but maybe not. Free markets are incredibly messy and incredibly frustrating when they don’t meet the expectations you put on them. This whole thing will work itself out, and the less some centralized governing body exerts on the process, the better the end result will be.

I don’t think the dust has settled on NIL and transferring. Right now, everyone is upset that the Tennessee quarterback is leaving Tennessee over an impasse on how much he will get paid. He wants $4MM. They are willing to give him $2MM. The coach said to take a walk. The QB is shopping himself. He’s going to find out what the market for his talent is.

Predictably, I have seen some other coaches take a hard line. “Transfer if you don’t like what we are paying you.” Let’s see what happens.

I don’t understand why schools aren’t doing multi-year contracts. Unlike the pros, there are no salary caps. I think having no salary cap is a good thing. Salary caps are artificial and arbitrary. They are price ceilings. However, having a multi-year contract with an athlete seems like a good idea and will help coaches bring some stability to their roster.

But what about a situation like Maryland basketball this year? Maryland had a nice basketball team. They were in the NCAA tournament and won a couple of games. Before the next game, the coach announced he was leaving the program and going to Villanova. What are you supposed to do if you are a player?

The entire team is in the transfer portal.

The people who say the big guys pick off the best players from the mid-majors are wrong. It goes both ways. UNLV, a mid-major, just announced over the past two days that they secured a commitment from a kid who was a highly regarded recruit and is transferring from Arizona. They did the same with a kid from Illinois.

Kids at the big schools who aren’t finding the place they chose as a fit for them are often transferring down to a smaller school where they think they will be more of a fit.

The other thing NIL has done is open up competition. For basketball, that means a lot more players from Europe and the rest of the world. In baseball, it means that instead of high schools being the primary place to recruit, it’s JUCO.

The competition for a scholarship just got a lot more intense, and it should because all of a sudden there is money at stake, not just tuition, housing, and books. The flip side of that is that young kids are exposed to a fan base expectation. Many of them are not mentally or emotionally ready for it.

Be careful what you wish for. You might be buying gold jewelry and driving a Lambo, but when performance doesn’t match the contract, fans can get angry and personally hurtful.

Remember, players in high school now have agents and a whole team of people. College programs have hired “general managers” to set up entire scouting operations and budgets to figure out how much to pay each player on the team. This whole thing is a business and it has been a business for years, but now it is a lot more transparent.

Transparency is unforgiving. Transparency exposes things people might not care for. But, in a situation like this, transparency will help the free market figure things out faster, and it will be better than before.