So, um, yea. Mega-multi-quote reply incoming.
Maybe it's a response to them losing money on them (But they've always lost money on them)?
They pretty clearly say this in the statement.
Maybe the alumni don't care?
I assure you that's not the case. I've been hit with 3 petitions so far (because of my friend group, mostly related to men's volleyball).
The letter discusses "financial challenges", and says they'll continue as club sports. But Stanford has the 3rd highest endowment of any university at almost $28 Bn, behind only Harvard and (within spitting distance of) Yale. They cry poverty at length here in almost farcical terms, bemoaning the voluntary staff pay reductions in Athletics (but let's not ask them about administrative staff bloat around the rest of the university).
I don't read that as bemoaning, I read that as, "everyone is tightening their belt here" and demonstrating it with pay cuts. If they were overpaid to begin with, that's perhaps a separate issue.
The letter also compares their own budget to that of other "peers at the Power Five level", which makes me think this is all about being able to better-fund the football program.
It's not, from all that I can see. What you are missing is that the vocal sports-focused alumni see Stanford as competing at the P5 level. Even though Stanford is TINY compared to almost any other program (definitely smallest
undergrad population in the Pac-12). Which is one of many reasons why our "big football stadium" is also small (and still doesn't fill most of the time). The university is going through a pretty big change in status/attitude - the heavy donor group, alums from 50s/60s, were part of a very very different Stanford, much more of a "country club" vibe (with all the country club sports), with huge % of enrollment coming from California - Stanford's real ascendance as a (national/international) powerhouse came later, along with a much bigger focus on diversity. (See
the war to change the mascot in '72 - older alums get Stanford Indians stuff printed up and walk around with it at the tailgates.)
I had to go look to see who the other P5 program was with similar number of varsity teams - my guess is that it's
Ohio State - 35 varsity squads in 2015. Everyone else on that list is either Ivy, D3, or a service academy, until you get to BC/Michigan. (EDIT: whoops, I missed Cal. Shocker.)
20. Why doesn’t the university use some of its endowment to keep these sports?
While Stanford may be perceived to have limitless resources, the truth is that we do not. In general, athletics has been a self-sustaining entity on our campus, and we are striving to preserve that model in a time when budgetary support for our academic mission is already under significant stress. Academic and administrative units across the university already have been
planning budget cuts of up to 10% in response to the university’s constrained resources as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. The vast majority of Stanford’s endowment is directed toward specific long-term uses, including need-based financial aid for students, and is not available to backfill an ongoing structural budget deficit in a specific department. In addition, the endowment is meant to last in perpetuity, providing for future generations of Stanford scholars and faculty members.
I actually have heard this discussion about lack of flexibility in the endowment even 15-20 years ago - I know many people who work in alumni relations and development (fundraising). So I don't think it's (totally) made-up. Is there probably some slush in there, yes. But a running joke is the construction rate at Stanford. And these aren't cheap buildings.
21. Athletics has its own endowment and a number of generous donors. Why not tap into that money to keep these sports?
While it is true that Stanford Athletics benefits from a robust community of generous supporters, their philanthropy simply could not cover the escalating costs of ensuring excellence across the board in our 36-sport model any longer.
Similar to the university’s endowment, the vast majority of the Stanford Athletics endowment is directed toward specific long-term uses, including scholarships for student-athletes. Even with those endowments and their annual proceeds, Stanford’s varsity athletics budget is smaller than that of many of our athletic peer institutions, most which will still offer fewer varsity sports than will Stanford.
This is also for sure true. I know people whose names are on scholarships. There just aren't enough of them (again, see the "smallest enrollment" problem) to actually be able to fund something as big as the program we have with 36 varsity sports. And it's way easier to get an alum to fund a football scholarship than squash, almost for sure.
22. Why didn’t Stanford launch a fundraising campaign to fund these sports before making these decisions?
Stanford Athletics benefits from a robust community of generous supporters, but their philanthropy simply cannot cover the escalating costs of ensuring excellence across the board in our 36-sport model any longer.
We have calculated that the total incremental funding needed to permanently sustain these 11 sports at a nationally-competitive varsity level exceeds $200 million. In fact, even after recognizing the full expense savings resulting from this decision, closing the remaining athletics structural deficit and ensuring the continued success of our remaining 25 varsity sports will itself require garnering resources that exceed that amount, and we are fully committed to that endeavor.
This $200 million seems like a key figure. I honestly cannot figure out if that is on an annual basis (gulp) or what. But what they are saying, is if we're doing this, we're going to try to win, and we need to know what that will take. Which is very much a Stanford mindset.
Question 23 there is particularly hilarious since they basically don't answer the question.
I did find it a little humorous. I also know that they aren't paying Shaw top of "market" rate - (he made $4.1m in
total comp in 2014 - a lot for a private school, but #21 on
list of comparables - probably about where he should be, given the results, and the cost of living in Palo Alto.)
If they took the .7 off the 27.7 billion, that's $700 million. That would fund the deficit for a couple of decades.
And then their endowment, earning just 4% on the remaining $27 billion, would earn $1.08 billion (or $380 million more than the $700,000,000 they'd spend over ten years) over just ONE year.
So yeah, not buying that a school with these resources couldn't fund athletics, even at the kind of deficit they're talking about, rather easily. That they choose not to is different. They easily could. Like....without breaking a sweat.
I had a sarcastic point here, but I'll leave it out. If that $200m/year cited above is real, then this is wrong. I suspect they could fund the short-term shortfalls ($25-70m) and keep things as-is for quite a while, yes.
Well, it’s always a matter of choices. If I were a Stanford alum, I’d rather see that $700 million spent on more faculty (provided they actually teach) and financial aid than on athletics. And when you look at the sports they’re cutting, the point about diversity makes sense — wrestling and volleyball aside, those sports must be overwhelmingly upper-class and white.
Men's volleyball is (was?) overwhelmingly white as well.
Yeah, several of these sports have very recently proven embarrassing from an admissions perspective. It’s hard to argue that they’d be better off with these sports than they would giving the money to public school kids with equal grades.
Sailing,
most notably. Not surprised to see it go, given the cost profile and the negative reputation hit it brought.
Yes but there’s something to be said for being the premier athletic university in the world. Cutting 11 sports really works against that. And these students are still quality students worthy of Stanford.
There is definitely a different standard for athletic (or other "talent" - musical, artistic, etc) than raw academic admits. I distinctly remember a conversation with a women's volleyball player who asked us if we got a "pink envelope" to submit our applications - i.e. something that put her application in a different pile/bin than the normal applications. The athletes I know from Stanford are all very smart, but many of the non-athletes are off in another galaxy. I really enjoyed having the mix during my time there.
What I found interesting is that I think most casual observers of NCAA sports presume there is a population numbering in the thousands of scholarship athletes at major / P5 schools. As an alum, I am most familiar with Penn State, and
this article places the number of scholarship athletes, even at a school with 50K+ main-campus students, at only 800+. I imagine that Stanford is probably in the same neighborhood. So cutting the cited 240 student-athletes is a fairly sizable chop
For most of them, yes. Apparently 12% of the Stanford undergrad population played a varsity sport. That's like a high-school level of varsity participation. I'm sure the academic folks would rather admit some of the many, many academically elite students who don't get into Stanford in a given year because they don't know how to fence. Much of the list is low-hanging fruit in terms of eliminating one back door for lesser-qualified students from wealthier families, which many universities would like to do if possible without pissing off donors. Plus some of those sports require unique facilities or equipment that makes them disproportionately expensive. (WTF is the boat budget for the sailing team? Can you imagine what marina space costs in the SF area?)
That said, some of the choices are odd. Field hockey and volleyball are widely played, have minimal equipment, and are comparatively financially accessible. So I'm not entirely sure what is going on there.
Combining response to these two - the Stanford undergrad enrollment is just over 17k students (see link above) EDIT - I used the wrong table, it's 7000 undergrads, 17k was total grad+undergrad (17k did seem awfully high to me!). Being generous (because "played" means at any time during studies, I suspect) - 12% of that is ~2100 (EDIT: 840 if you use the right number), and for sure not all of them are on scholarship. (I actually have a hard time believing that there are only 800 scholarship athletes at PSU?! EDIT: ok, with the corrected numbers I can believe it now.)
They did address some of the specific sport issues in the FAQ, btw:
For example, in simply looking at sponsorship of the sports at a national level as one consideration:
- Of the 11 sports being discontinued, six (lightweight rowing, men’s rowing, co-ed and women’s sailing, squash, synchronized swimming) are not NCAA-sponsored championship sports.
- All 11 sports being discontinued are sponsored by less than 22% of the more than 350 Division I institutions, and nine (men’s and women’s fencing, lightweight rowing, men’s rowing, co-ed and women’s sailing, squash, synchronized swimming, men’s volleyball) are sponsored by less than 9%.
- There are only two other Division I field hockey programs and one fencing program on the West Coast, and there are no other lightweight rowing, sailing, squash or synchronized swimming programs on the West Coast.
I remember from going to games that the men's volleyball team didn't used to compete in Pac-12 (it's wasn't a sponsored sport in the Pac-10 at the time), but rather the Mountain Pacific Sports Federation - it looks like that changed to be both Pac-12 and MPSF, but I have no idea when that happened. MPSF is also where sports like water polo, indoor track, and men's gymnastics are competing. And Stanford is a member of a specific conference just for Field Hockey - the Northern Pacific Field Hockey Conference. That seems... excessive. Also, the travel costs for some of these conferences have to be pretty high, since they are spanning a much much larger region than the east coast, just to get enough schools to have viable competition.
TL;DR: it sucks, but I think it was coming for a while, and they decided to rip off the bandaid now rather than wait. Alums aren't happy, petitions are flying around. I've read almost all the material, probably there is a shift in priorities (academics vs atheletics) happening here, but I think there legitimately were some constraints in terms of how they were going to fund some of these programs.