Examining money and college athletics
This week, my colleagues and I published the first story in an ongoing series on money going to college athletic programs. The stories are the result of our collecting tens of thousands of pages of financial documents, which universities must report to the NCAA each year. The process, which began months ago (and even longer for my colleague Jodi Upton), has been cumbersome at times — having to scan and pull out, withpainstakingly detailed programming, the underlying data. It’s part of a process that geeks call “optical character recognition,” and can be difficult. Luckily for us, the documents have enough uniformity and subtotals that work as built-in methods for error-checking. Our first story found that $800 million in subsidies (tax money, university support and student fees) were propping up large, public football schools in 2008. Here’s thelink to that story, and to our searchable database.
