Athletics and Budget Cuts

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I saw an interesting report about the costs of college sports on the PBS program Need to Know tonight. According to the report, the football coach at the University of Alabama earns 6 million a year, more than twice the salary of the nation’s highest paid college president. The Men’s Basketball Coach at the University of Connecticut is the highest paid employee in the state. These are both public universities, by the way.

That, alone, is shocking. It is often argued that the sports teams bring in revenue in ticket sales and merchandise licensing, but people buy plenty of merchandise from colleges that don’t play in the big tournaments. It’s also argued the sports teams bring in exposure, but Harvard and Yale don’t field NCAA teams and they seem to have little trouble attracting students. Ultimately, if a potential student has a choice between a really prestigious school that places graduates in great jobs and and a college well known for athletics, I dare say, most would pick the college that offers the better job prospects.

Watch the full episode. See more Need To Know.

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Economists on the Budget Freeze

Here’s how one economist responded to President Obama’s idea of a spending freeze, which is likely to be a major topic of his State of the Union speech.

A spending freeze? That’s the brilliant response of the Obama team to their first serious political setback?

It’s appalling on every level.

It’s bad economics, depressing demand when the economy is still suffering from mass unemployment. Jonathan Zasloff writes that Obama seems to have decided to fire Tim Geithner and replace him with “the rotting corpse of Andrew Mellon” (Mellon was Herbert Hoover’s Treasury Secretary, who according to Hoover told him to “liquidate the workers, liquidate the farmers, purge the rottenness”.)

That economist is Princeton professor Paul Krugman, winner of the 2008 Nobel Prize in Economics.
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