12. Athletics

12.1 How big is the business of college sports? Lucrative contracts, high visibility, and college rivalries cause much to be said about how the money works across the variety of sports and types of schools involved in intercollegiate athletics. The total athletics budget across all schools in our dataset exceeded $18B in FY2018 (Office of Postsecondary Education 2020). That’s about 4.2 % of the $435B total non-hospital revenues for all of the nearly 1,200 institutions (IPEDS 2020). More inter..