Soobahk40050
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RE: Why It Is Virtually Inevitable That There Will Be Consolidation Within The Upper Tier
(06-30-2021 05:32 PM)JRsec Wrote: We will start local and move to the national and corporate reasons it will happen.
State: No government is quite as stressed as that of the states. With trade having been localized to county seats in the 70's, moving to their largest cities by the mid 80's and 90's to in the past 10 years being usurped by internet trade giants, the states have constantly had to adjust their portions of sales and income taxes to try keep infrastructure and state programs inclusive of all education levels funded.
They've had to adjust cuts in taxes to attract industry, cuts in state sales tax to attract giant retailers to help with low end jobs and provide citizens with affordable wares.
And they've done all of this in the midst of ballooning national debt and shrinking federal grant money.
So forced to look for efficiency in state budgets one of their largest line items had to be at the forefront of restructuring, education.
Have you noticed all of the building at your largest State Universities? It's not an accident but a prerequisite of budgetary moves. A lack in state and federal funding necessitates these schools grow enrollment for undergraduate work to fund research programs. I suspect the days of high out of state tuition is going to vanish as students nationally seek solid but cheaper undergraduate degrees.
Complicit with this will be the closing, re-tasking, and systemizing of smaller state schools. Some will become vocationally oriented in tech ways, some tasked with a singular function like the old "Normal" schools of old, and the rest will be under the State U system. There will be more adjunct and fewer tenured professors in non STEM fields and this pattern will emerge in most if not all states.
Nationally:
Demographics are front and center. The WWII generation is gone. Boomers are beginning their exit. X'er's are past their school years and Millennials are struggling to reconcile high educational debt with ROI and there are fewer of them and even less behind them to fill the classrooms of any college let alone Big State U. Exchange students are fairly limited to research graduate positions.
Add a massive black hole of national debt to the equation and downsizing and streamlining of all education, but particularly higher education, is inevitable.
This is why smaller schools needed to be ushered out of sports because almost all athletics below the P5 level are fully subsidized, with the G5 all subsidizing at least 25% or more forming the buffer and with all but a handful of them with no chance to make a move up from their current status.
Since the problem is national in scope and no congress person wants political liability it makes perfect sense politically for the SCOTUS to handle the dirty work, unpopular work, for DC and the states so NIL and STIPENDS are the catalyst for a massive and long overdue change. Semi pro status, and affording it, becomes the method of triage for schools that shall have a high public profile and those that will not. And make no mistake schools like Texas and Ohio State and North Carolina and Florida are going to privately care how many schools within their states are included in the new upper echelon and how many are culled. Texas and Florida to regain enhanced brand advantage and Ohio State and North Carolina to hold onto it. (Schools selected just for examples)
I expect to see some schools currently excluded, but the sole potential representative of their state, included. Duplicate schools, particularly privates, not. And I expect our third organization will have plans for this.
Corporate:
Networks will use the necessities of the moment to their advantage. They know that ultimately expanding the playoffs will not level a playing field that has advantages built into its demographics and culture. But professional sports don't have that issue because they hire and because they have a draft. College ball will not move to a draft immediately because the concept is too radical to them, it will take those with the most stipend money continuing a tilting of the talent pool before it will happen. Until then the networks will settle for a large condensing of upper tier schools as most G5 become an amateur scholarship only tier, and others drop sports altogether.
The mere shrinking of the number of schools to offer pay for play amid closures of small schools, the dropping of sports at many others, and scholarship only play at nearly half of what will be the former FBS will mean more players and more talented players for the pay for play tier. That alone will help competitiveness within that tier. At some point should we draft high school talent similarly to the NFL then we will have more parity. In either case it bodes well for networks as a new interest and fan association would be created in all markets. It also means more money with a smaller pool of high profile schools which will also like the association for exposure and enrollment competition.
How much of a culling is coming? I don't think we can know yet, but I can's see how schools which are already heavily subsidized can make the jump.
UConn, BYU, USF and UCF, San Diego St, and perhaps a Wyoming or Cincinnati make the jump. We'll see. Small Privates will have to have extremely deep pockets and the desire for exposure. The better funded really could go Ivy or form another Ivy like association.
Summation:
What's coming is not sports motivated. It will be financially motivated to reduce budget stress at the Federal and State levels. The only way sports figures into it will be from a brand identity angle for school exposure.
Networks will shape conferences / leagues and their playoffs to their advantage and revenue will be a tool through which to leverage the change.
It won't happen all at once but the initial change of pay for play will. The rest logically follows.
None of this is what I would want, what presidents or AD's would want, or what our conferences would want. They are coming because of National debt, reduced demand for higher ed both in numbers of potential applicants and among those unwilling to assimilate the debt necessary to do so. And our states have to cut funding somewhere and streamlining higher ed just makes sense.
There will be plenty of sky screaming and misapplied blame, but we simply have no choice.
Will this impact the CFP? Probably But big time college football will adapt and overcome and hopefully in a more competitive way than what we currently have. The quality had gone way down. There were simply too many drawing from too few and that's the only silver lining I see in this ominously dark cloud of fiscal reality in a world of diminishing resources beyond football. And why pay for play? Because it thins the herd drastically, Boomers are dying and donations are down and will keep going down because those following can't afford the cost so the market must.
Well stated. Only part I disagree with has nothing to do with sports.
I think that there may be a correction on adjuncts and online education. I am an adjunct professor and I have seen time and again the research that shows full-time professors get better student evaluations, etc. Now student evaluations are pretty much worthless 95 percent of the time, but as the university system shifts more and more to a consumer based approach where the students have the power, I wonder if we will see a return to full time faculty.
Add to this recent adjunct walk out days (I did not participate) and the call for higher pay for adjuncts, and the cost benefit analysis might shift again.
On the other hand, the shift might happen the other way too, and go away from a consumer based approach back to a more classical approach. As more students choose community college options or trade schools or vocational schools, I wonder if massive enrollments might become a thing of the past too.
If a school with say 60,000 cut back to say 40,000, they could probably cut out a great deal of administrative overrun. Don't replace retiring teachers in programs that you will be cutting, and soon your student to teacher ratio works out, your administrative costs dwindle, and you no longer have to continue to lower your academic standards to accept enough students to make ends meet.
On the other other hand, maybe we are really going to see massive 100,000+ enrollment schools become the norm, swallowing up those smaller schools as college becomes what high school was, and a masters becomes what college was.
In other words, maybe I don't know anything. But I'm guessing everyone here already knew that
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