An individual on the W4C site made the following statement: "It seems now that the chosen few sports are somewhat set in terms of budget (football, MBB, and WBB) and the rest have to duke it out for fund-raising. I hope that the fundraising for the lesser-known sports is robust because the goal is to give students access to as many sports as possible." The W4C author did not bold the text; I did, just to emphasize the issue. I thought this was kind of a weird, though entirely Berkeleyish statement and the following questions popped up in my brain so I thought they'd be good points for discussion:

• Is giving students access to as many sports as possible really the goal of endowment-related fund-raising?
• Should it be the goal?
• Who benefits, besides those athletes and coaches, from well-endowed and successful programs like golf, swimming, and rugby? Does being successful here generate much of a halo effect over Cal athletics as a whole?
• Is there an adverse effect on Cal athletics as a whole when each sport focuses on building its own endowment, or is it actually beneficial?
• Does anybody have a feeling for whether fully endowed non-revenue sports ultimately pull donor money that would otherwise go to the revenue sports?

EDIT - I'm not criticizing or calling out the W4C poster. I just think his statement is worthy of discussion.

Interesting questions...

There are reportedly 850 student-athletes competing at Cal. Football, MBB, and WBB are approximately 15% of that total. This leaves ~725 slots for all other intercollegiate sports.

Cal has 33,000 undergraduate students. Outside of football, MBB, and WBB, this means 2% of undergrads participate in the other intercollegiate athletic teams.

So if these other athletic teams were cut/reduced, how much impact would there really be to the Cal student body?

Cal_79 said:

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Interesting questions...

There are reportedly 850 student-athletes competing at Cal. Football, MBB, and WBB are approximately 15% of that total. This leaves ~725 slots for all other intercollegiate sports.

Cal has 33,000 undergraduate students. Outside of football, MBB, and WBB, this means 2% of undergrads participate in the other intercollegiate athletic teams.

So if these other athletic teams were cut/reduced, how much impact would there really be to the Cal student body?

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If those programs were "club" teams filled by admission preference only with only endowed scholarships offered, would that be more or less access to "sports opportunity" for Cal students.

725 scholarships valued at $50,000 (?) per year is $36 million per year the AD "transfers" to the central campus.

calumnus said:

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Cal_79 said:

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Interesting questions...

There are reportedly 850 student-athletes competing at Cal. Football, MBB, and WBB are approximately 15% of that total. This leaves ~725 slots for all other intercollegiate sports.

Cal has 33,000 undergraduate students. Outside of football, MBB, and WBB, this means 2% of undergrads participate in the other intercollegiate athletic teams.

So if these other athletic teams were cut/reduced, how much impact would there really be to the Cal student body?

---

If those programs were "club" teams filled by admission preference only with only endowed scholarships offered, would that be more or less access to "sports opportunity" for Cal students.

725 scholarships valued at $50,000 (?) per year is $36 million per year the AD "transfers" to the central campus.

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Cal currently only funds 350 scholarships. Most of the sports have partial scholarships or none at all (Rugby, for example). The house settlement makes full scholarships a thing for all sports, but I am not sure how that will end up in reality - is Rugby going to start to give full rides? I doubt it.

40 million per endowed sport means if we get 20 endowed sports - that is about an 800 million dollar endowment for Cal AD. If you think of the return on that - say 6.5% for overall endowed programs at Cal, that is 52 million more to the AD. 10 sports is 26 million. So that helps. If after the endowment run-up period is over - then the rest will be cut I guess. We'll see.