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| Maryland and Bowling Green football warms up before a game. |
The school charged full-time undergraduate students more than $400.
In return, students could enter lotteries to claim free basketball and football tickets.
Those student fees helped generate revenue for an athletic department that was in dire financial straits two years earlier.
The school cut seven athletic teams in 2012.
The previous fiscal year, the state university had to borrow more than $1 million to cover an athletics department deficit.
Student fees help support lower-profile sports, Diamondback editor says
Matt Schnabel, the editor-in-chief of The Diamondback, Maryland’s independent student newspaper, believes the fees help benefit non-revenue sports.
Those sports, which range from women’s tennis to men’s lacrosse, typically don’t bring in enough revenue to cover their costs.
“It’s not ideal, obviously,” Schnabel said. “But none of these programs could fund themselves aside from typically men’s basketball and football and occasionally women’s basketball. That’s just the reality if we want to fund all these programs.”
Maryland isn't the only local school to rely on student fees, either.
James Madison, located in Virginia, generated more than $33 million in student fees in 2014.
That same year, the University of Virginia charged full-time undergrad students $657.
“Colleges spend a lot of money, particularly on new facilities and new lures for the best athletes,” former Washington Post sports editor George Solomon said. “It’s become a huge business.”
Many of these colleges are trying to compete with football powerhouses like Alabama of basketball powerhouses like North Carolina.
Both schools are in one of the Power Five conferences - Big Ten, Pac-12, ACC, SEC and Big 12.
More than 90 percent of the athletic funding for the New Jersey Institute of Technology in 2014 came from subsidies
For smaller school student fees are a lifeline.
“They don’t have the television revenue,” journalist Brad Wolverton said. “You’re going to start to see a lot of the money for conferences outside the Power Five dry up, and where else are these institutions going to turn?”
Wolverton, a writer at The Chronicle of Higher Education, co-wrote an article in 2015 titled “The $10-Billion Sports Tab: How College Students are funding the athletics arm race.”
At the bottom of the article was a chart ranking the percent to which subsidies, including student fees, accounted for a school’s total athletic funding.
The New Jersey Institute of Technology was at the top of that chart.
NJIT moved to the top level of college athletics in 2006. In 2014, more than 90 percent of the total athletic funding came from subsidies.
The athletic department generated $1.24 million in 2014 while subsidies accounted for nearly $12, including $2.3 million in student fees.
While Wolverton sees the benefits of student fees for smaller universities, he said schools should be more transparent.
“The schools often don’t have a system that allows the students to have a true democratic voice in the fees levied on them,” Wolverton said.
“The schools certainly don’t often communicate adequately with the students about how the fees are charged and what they are used for.”
Despite high athletic fees, Maryland students struggled to secure tickets for NCAA basketball tournament
Some students don’t have a problem with the fees. Maryland senior journalism major Dan Russo enjoys getting tickets to football and men’s basketball games.
But those tickets don't guarantee access to the biggest games of the year.
For the first time since 2003, the men’s basketball team advanced to the Sweet Sixteen of the NCAA Tournament.
But most students, such as Russo, couldn’t get free tickets to the games in Louisville, Kentucky.
After paying a $406 fee, students had to buy tickets for the basketball team’s most important games of the year.
