Student support shows true deficit

To the editor:

Sunday's articles by Marty Mishow and Toby Carrig regarding Southeast Missouri State University's athletic expenditures represent some of the best in-depth reporting I have ever seen in the Missourian. They portray in a reasonable manner some of the real money issues facing university athletic departments.

However, one fact was under-emphasized. Mishow and Carrig point out that Southeast athletics "showed a collective deficit of only $7,724." This is a terribly misleading statement. In fact, the $3.7 million in "unallocated funds" represents a subsidy provided by students in support of athletics and thus better represents the true deficit of the program.

In the 2002-2003 academic year, which was used as a reference in the article, the total number of full-time equivalent students at Southeast was 7,329. This means each student paid approximately $500 for the privilege of attending a school which spends at a middle level in the Ohio Valley Conference on athletics. Put another way, of the approximately $148 per credit hour that students paid in fees during that year, $21 per credit hour (15 percent) went to pay for athletics. For a student graduating with 124 credit hours, the cost to support athletics runs in excess of $2,500. The cost is even greater for students who borrow money to pay those fees -- and will be paying for the 2002-2003 football season (and all the other sports seasons during their education) with interest for many years to come.

WALT LILLY, Cape Girardeau