Why Colleges Are Spending Money Wrong.

William Dunson
Christy Vance
English 102
November 12, 2009
Why College Coaches need to be Paid Less.
In the today’s world of high unemployment and massive budget cuts around the country would you think anyone profession was seeing exponential growth in pay increases? When Florida budget is supposed to be cutting 365 million dollars of the education budget, as reported by the Miami Herald earlier this year, then why did they increase the University of Florida’s head coach earnings from $3.4 million to $6 million a year. He is a employee just like everyone else that works for the state of Florida. No other state employee is receiving a raise of nearly double their salary every year. There needs to be a stop to the ridiculously sized contracts that state schools are still giving out to coaches in the middle of the economic crisis we are in. All this public universities are reporting budget cuts and job losses, but continue to pay their football coaches multi-million dollar contracts. In a USA Today article, written by multiple people, states that at the University of California-Berkeley head football coach makes $2.8 million dollars this year making him one of 25 coaches who make more than $2 million a year raising the average pay of the top 120 of top level college programs up 46% in just three years. The university is also planning a $430 million dollar project to upgrade an 80 year old football stadium on campus. All this money is being spent while at the same time the university is losing $150 million in state funds, laying off faculty, imposing furloughs, cutting enrollment, paring courses, and raising tuition. This is the most unjust thing I could ever imagine. You are spending money you don’t have on a football program, while your university is in an economic crisis. People are losing jobs but you are spending almost a half billion dollars on a football stadium. This is unjust as much as that word could mean. Universities are supposed to be about students first and not about one team that plays on Saturdays. This needs to be stopped and someone in Congress needs to do something about it.
I’m not the only one who is concerned with how much these coaches get paid. In a different article in the USA Today article written by Jodi Upton and Steve Wieberg Representative Bill Thomas from California who is the Chairman of the House of Ways and Means Committee sent a letter to Myles Brand the President of the NCAA saying “excessive compensation ... makes less revenue available for other sports, causes many athletic departments to operate at a net loss, and may call into question the priorities of educational institutions.” He is pretty much saying they need to spend their money more wisely and fairly around the university. Brand responded back saying the NCAA can’t set individual limits at schools on how much they can pay a coach without violating anti-trust laws. I say congress should step in and make limits and regulations on how much state schools can spend and take it out of the hands of the NCAA.