Richard J. Paulsen
Previously, if you wanted to change institutions, you’d have to have a red shirt year, which would mean you’d have to give up a year of eligibility. You couldn’t play for that year before joining your new team. That has since changed. So now students can move more freely, or these athletes can move more freely across schools, just like regular students can do. And then the other thing that has happened, and this is a even more recent change, conference realignment, right?

Keith Edwards
Hello and welcome to Student Affairs NOW I’m your host. Keith Edwards, today, we’re talking about changes to college sports for athletes around name, image and likeness, revenue sharing and impacts across higher education. I’ve got an amazing group of experts joining me today, experts on college sports, law, economics and higher ed, to help us understand what has happened, what is happening. This will probably be out of date by the time we release it, because things are moving so quickly and so fast. And we’re also going to talk about the implications across higher ed. These are major shifts that will have impacts far and wide, beyond the athletes and the athletic departments, I’m so grateful for these folks for joining me today to help us all learn more about what is, what might be ahead and the consequences. Student Affairs NOW is the premier podcast and online learning community for 1000s of us who work in alongside or adjacent to the field of higher education and student affairs. We release new episodes every week on Wednesdays. You can find details about this episode or browse our archives at studentaffairsnow.com This episode is sponsored by Evolve. Evolve Empowers higher ed leaders to lead with and through perilous times by releasing fear, gaining courage and taking action through an executive coaching program, including individual and group coaching and an intentionally designed and curated curriculum to maximize impact. This is also sponsored by Huron. Huron is an educational research expert to help institutions transform their strategy, operations, technology and culture, to foster innovation, financial health and student success. As I mentioned, I’m your host. Keith Edwards, my pronouns are he him his I’m a speaker, author and coach, helping higher ed leaders transform for better tomorrows for us all through leadership, learning and equity. Find out more about me at Keith edwards.com and I’m recording this from my home in Minneapolis, Minnesota, which is at the intersections of the current and ancestral homelands of both the Dakota and the Ojibwe peoples. We’ve got a great group of folks here. Let’s go ahead and learn just a little bit about each of you before we jump into the conversation, Karen, we’re gonna start with you.

Karen Weaver
So hi everybody. It’s great to be with you. My name is Dr Karen Weaver. I’m currently on the graduate faculty at the University of Pennsylvania. I teach in the higher education management programs, which is unusual for many people who work in the college athletic space, most people teach in finance or law or in the even the sport business. But I graduated from Penn with my doctorate about 15 years ago, and realized that in my cohort of 24 students, we had five sitting or about to become presidents, and there was nothing in the curriculum or in their preparation for what college presidents needed to know about college athletics. So I have, since, after receiving my doctorate, evolved into a practice and a focus in my research and my teaching on what university leaders need to know about this moment in time in college athletics, I’m excited to be here my previous slide. I was a head coach in Division One and division three, and I was also an athletics director in Division One and Division three.

Keith Edwards
Yeah, it just gets more impressive from here, folks. Gabe, tell us about you.

Gabe Feldman
Hi everyone. My name is Gabe Feldman, Keith, thank you for having me on. It’s a pleasure to be here, and pleasure to share a podcast with all these great folks. I am a law professor at Tulane. I’m the director of the Tulane sports law program, the co director of the Tulane center for sport. I’ve been teaching, writing, researching in college sports, particularly the intersection of antitrust, labor and intellectual property law. For most of my career. Was a litigator, first part of my career now full time academic, also do some consulting and host my own podcast sports wise, a podcast about sports and the law. But it’s great to be here, looking forward to the conversation.

Keith Edwards
Awesome and Richard. Tell us about you.

Richard J. Paulsen
Hello. Richard Paulson, great to be here with you all. I use he, him pronouns. Now. I’m an assistant professor in the sport management department at the University of Michigan. My PhD is in economics. I specialize in labor and antitrust or industrial organization. I do research on labor market issues in the broader sport and entertainment space, with a focus on athletes and other sport industry workers, and I’ve shared my expertise in the media a number of these issues that we’ll likely discuss today related to college athletics.

Keith Edwards
Awesome. Well, these are our experts, and I’m joined by by Nell, who has helped organize and I think has talked with all of these folks, and is really great at helping frame this for a broader audience. So Nell tell us all a little bit about you

Nell Gluckman
Sure. I’m Nell Gluckman. I’m a reporter at The Chronicle of Higher Education. I’m also very happy to be here and talking with all my sources. I. I have covered athletics for only about a year and a half. I’d been a higher ed reporter at The Chronicle for many years before that, so I started covering this world right when a lot of the changes were really coming into effect, and it was a very exciting time to start. But, like, like, we’ve talked about very complex and and intricate and, but I think important for for college students, yeah, it’s exciting to do it. Yeah, yeah.

Keith Edwards
I’m glad. I’m glad you’re here, and you have really helped me sort of keep up to this. Your pieces in the Chronicle has been super helpful in helping me keep up with it. And I’m a sports person, so I’m reading all the sports things from the sports angles, like the athletic and other sources, in your view, from higher ed and talking with these different folks. Yeah, what a great time to take on the college athletics beat as you exciting. It’s a good word. Yeah, that’s a good one, really

Keith Edwards
appreciated many, many pieces that you’ve been doing now around getting things organized, helping explain, keeping us up to date, and maybe you can kind of do a cliff notes version for our audience here. So what is going on in the realm of college athletics and some of these changes that were here? So maybe you can frame this a little bit, and we’ll hear some. And we’ll hear some from some

Nell Gluckman
other folks, sure. So I’ll give the layman’s version of it. I think it makes sense to start in 2021 when the NCAA, because of some state law changes, notably in California, changed their rules to allow athletes to make money off their name, image and likeness, so their brands, in other words, and so that meant that athletes, college athletes, could be in a Gatorade ad. They could, in the summer, teach a sports camp, you know, and market it as you know the Come, come play volleyball with a d1 athlete, that sort of thing, but they still couldn’t make money. They still could be, couldn’t be paid by their colleges. And also, in the last few years, several cases have been making their way through the court system, particularly a group of antitrust cases where athletes challenged the NCAA and claimed that they, among other things, were owed back pay for name, image, likeness, payments that they should have been eligible for but weren’t because of the NCAA rules. And so this is a very simple version, but they those cases gain traction, and the NCAA decided to settle. They had not had a lot of success in recent history with antitrust cases and the estimates for what they might have had to pay out if they lost in court, could have bankrupted the association. So they settled, and this has become known as the house settlement. It went into effect July 1, and the terms of the settlement really rewrite a lot of the rules of college athletics. The big thing is they change the rules so some colleges can now pay athletes directly make payments to their college athletes. The NCAA agreed to make to pay those back pay, pay damages, essentially that do the back payments. The amount is 2.8 billion, which is a lot less than what experts think they would have had to pay. That number, by the way, will be shared by will be paid by all division one colleges in the NCAA, and they agreed to get rid of certain scholarship limits and roster caps, which we can talk about further. But basically that means there are limits to the number of players that can be on, on on their sports teams. But the big thing is that they the the schools that were the named defendants in this in this case, these cases, which collectively are referred to as the house cases, can pay up to 20 point 5 million to their athletes in the first year that the settlement goes into effect, which is now. And that number will go up a little bit each year for the 10 years that this settlement is in effect. And the defendant schools, I should say, are the power five schools. The schools are in the most lucrative and powerful conferences, the SEC, the big 10, etc, but other division one colleges are allowed to opt into the settlement. And most division one colleges, but not all, have decided. To do so. So that means that the settlement applies to most division one colleges going forward. So the Yeah, the big bottom line is now colleges can pay their athletes, make payments to their athletes up to a certain point. Many of the schools that do so won’t be paying 20 point 5 million. But you know, your your big sports powerhouses likely will, yeah, yeah. My, you all can correct me. The details are on summary. It really is.

Keith Edwards
It really is the tip of the iceberg. But I this is a great, great summary to kind of get us started here. What we’re going to do is we’re going to get into the effect on college athletics, and we’re going to get into the broader impacts on higher education, then we’re going to give all these folks a chance to predict the future. Good luck. But before we get into that, I just want to see if each of you wants to add anything, just as we get the context and our bearings here, we’re going to start with Gabe, then Richard and Karen. So Gabe, what else do you want to add here to our listeners, just helped him get up to speed with what is going on here.

Gabe Feldman
Sure, I think Nell gave a great summary, and I’m not allowed to hand out honorary law degrees, but if I, if I could, you’re definitely on the list. Thank you. I do want to just give a little bit of context around what’s gone on and why these changes are so significant. But I’ll try to be brief, because I think we’ll talk about this throughout our conversation. For basically the entire existence of the NCAA, their belief, or at least their their position, was that college athletes were different than pro athletes and the college sports venture. The reason that college sports existed and the reason they were different than pro sports was based on two primary things. One is that the college athletes, unlike pro athletes, were students. The second is that the college athletes were not paid based on their athletic ability, and that really meant two things. One is they were not paid to play the game, but two, they were also not paid based on the value that their name, image and likeness had from their athletic ability. So if you were an athlete, but were also a musician, you could, in theory, make money off of your talent and name, image and likeness from music, but not from sports and the courts. For decades, gave great deference to the NCAA to maintain that definition of college sports and what they called amateurism your students and you’re not paid to play and over the last several decades, but more so over the last few decades, there’s been a lot more pressure. As television revenues exploded, coaching salaries exploded, they started to look a lot like more like pro sports, at least at the FBS football and men’s and women’s division one basketball, people started to question, well, everybody else is making more money? Why aren’t the athletes and the athletes not to say that they weren’t being compensated? They received, often, a full athletic scholarship and then other benefits around that. But the question was, why is it capped there? Why can’t the schools to decide, decide to give more? And so there were lots of attacks brought against the NCAA on antitrust grounds, as Nell talked about, also on employment status. There have been a lot of Title Nine issues. There’s also been some state laws have been passed. So there’s a lot of different angles that were used to attack the status quo at the NCAA. And for a lot of reasons that we can talk about, we got to a moment of change. And ever since, I’ve been involved in college sports, and way before Malcolm Gladwell was Malcolm Gladwell, we’ve been talking about possible tipping points in college sports, and we finally, I think, are at a tipping point. And we’ve seen with the house settlement that other than maybe Title Nine in 1972 this might be the biggest change we’ve ever seen in college, with college athletes now have the ability to receive money for their name, image and likeness, and the ability to be received, to receive compensation directly from the schools, which, again, if you think about the two pillars of amateurism, at least part of one of Those pillars is now gone, or it’s now at least significantly changed so that athletes can be paid based on their athletic ability. Yeah,

Keith Edwards
just for folks who are listening and not watching, that’s a bold statement. Gabe just make about the other than Title Nine the biggest shift. And everyone nodded their head in agreement. So that’s, that’s, that is what the panel thinks today. Richard, what would you add to the context here?

Richard J. Paulsen
There are a couple of additional changes that have happened over the past few years that I think are important to consider, in part because they, in many ways, interact with the n, i l rule changes and the house settlement. The first that I’ll mention happened last year with the Dartmouth men’s basketball team’s effort at Union. Organization. To this point in time, our college athletes, previously, the term student athletes have been used. There’s controversy surrounding that term. We’re not viewed as employees, and with the unionization effort that at least came into question. The regional National Labor Relations Board had deemed that, you know, in fact, the Dartmouth mountains basketball players qualified as employees so they could unionize. They voted to unionize. Their significant pushback from Dartmouth and the Ivy League. They’ve since dropped those efforts, in part because of everything happening with the house case. So that’s one point, a couple of other changes, and these are maybe a little bit less directly related, but important in thinking about the broader picture and impacts here. Shortly before 2021 there were changes to the ways in which athletes could move across schools with kind of the opening of the transfer portal. Previously, if you wanted to change institutions, you’d have to have a red shirt year, which would mean you’d have to give up a year of eligibility. You couldn’t play for that year before joining your new team. That has since changed. So now students can move more freely, or these athletes can move more freely across schools, just like regular students can do. And then the other thing that has happened, and this is a even more recent change, conference realignment, right? And with this big conference realignment concept, previously, schools that participated in collegiate athletics, they would be located in conferences where you’d primarily play opponents that are pretty close to you geographically. You know, if you’re a school in the big 10, you’re spending most of your conference season playing opponents that are pretty close by geographically, a couple states over at most, and within smaller conferences, it might even be within a state, right with this change, this conference realignment, now, there are some big 10 schools, you know, where I’m at Michigan. Now, Michigan travels to California to play USC and UCLA, which, again, when we think about kind of this broader picture of, you know, are these students? Are these athletes? Conference realignment is another important concept that kind of comes into this whole big picture.

Keith Edwards
Awesome, awesome. Karen, you get to back clean up here. What do you want to

Karen Weaver
add? I want to offer a little bit of perspective. And it’s only in the last 10 or 11 years that this happened. So think about this for a second. In 2014 there was a Michigan men’s basketball player who was playing in the in the Final Four, who actually told the media, I go to bed hungry at night, because when I come back to campus, the residence halls are closed, the dining halls are closed. I don’t have any money in my pocket to go get something to eat at the local store. This is not good, and the NCAA rules say that I can’t have any assistance. Well, that, of course, rocketed around the media ecosystem, and people really started noticing the vast differences between how the coaches, administrators others in college athletics were being treated and the athletes themselves. So I’d like to think of that as a brief moment where insight, and ultimately, the NCAA was put back on its heels and did not respond to opportunities. And certainly, we could talk about Edward Bannon if we wanted to with the video game imaging. But there were so many opportunities where I think the NCAA could have averted some of the issues that are around today if they had just responded, but they didn’t.

Gabe Feldman
And just one, if I can one, one, follow up on that. Again, that that basis for the identity of college sports from a marketing perspective, from a lot of different perspectives, from the mission of the universities, again, was was anchored on athletes or students, and they’re not paid for athletic ability, and the NCAA was notorious and much maligned for how strictly they interpreted that, and some of that was the direction of the leadership, which is, again, NCAA, is the schools. And so what the NCAA does is at the direction of the schools, for the most part, but there was also just with many large organizations, people want the decision makers, or the sort of on the enforcement side, or people who are hearing these cases, they want some flexibility, and they want it to be based more on principles and specific rules. But that can be challenging, and so the really the MO they had was to strictly enforce the rules, because if we allowed one exception. Here, then it would eat up the whole system. But one of the most criticized rules, among many others, was the old spreads and bagels rules. So to try to ensure that university athletic departments were not providing improper benefits to college athletes, they said you can provide them with snacks, but not meals, right? This is under the old rule. So this is as of 2012 and so what schools could do is they could provide bagels to their athletes, but they couldn’t provide the spread. They couldn’t provide cream cheese, because if you put cream cheese on the bagel, that would turn it into a meal. And there were enforcement issues around spreads and bagels and how much food you could eat and whether a coach could give you a ride to practice when it was raining or that would be considered an improper benefit. And so, as Karen said, the NCAA some of this was self inflicted, where they held on so tightly to their rules and enforced it so strictly, in part because they could, because they got away with it, yeah, and and the courts were deferring to it, and now we’ve seen a shift. And people said, All right, if the coach is making $10 million a year, maybe the player can get cream cheese. Yeah, I think that may be a fair start of a fair

Keith Edwards
compromise. It does seem reasonable. I’ve never heard the the bagels and spread story. So thank you for adding that in. Let’s move on. We’re gonna we’re gonna do this next section in two pieces. We’re gonna talk about what’s gonna change in college athletics, and then we’re gonna talk about what’s gonna change with higher ed as a result of this. So how are these changes going to have a broader impact beyond the athletic department? But Gabe, let’s start with you. What’s gonna happen, what’s gonna shift with college athletics ahead, for the departments, for the coaches, for the athletes, for what we see on the field or on TV. What do you see ahead?

Gabe Feldman
Yeah, it’s a great question, and I think it’s interesting, and maybe there’s something we can talk about later that you did draw a distinction between the impact on the one hand, on college athletics and higher ed on the other hand, as if those are separate. And the question is whether they are separate, whether they should be separate, because if we talk about the music student, we don’t typically say what’s going to be the effect on the music department, and then what’s going to be the effect on higher ed. Music Department is part of higher ed, so just putting that in music department also isn’t making $100 million in revenue every year. Dollars in revenue every year. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Although lots of athletic departments are also not making millions of dollars, I think

Keith Edwards
that’s such that’s such an important point, because we do sort of talk about the Michigans and the UCLA is as though the everyone is that, and there are lots of even Division One schools that are nowhere near those

Gabe Feldman
realities, right? And I also think it’s, it is a challenging discussion, whether you call them college athletes or student athletes or something else, or refer to college sports, where, if you’re referring to d1 it’s very different than d2 or d3 if you’re referring to FBS, that’s very different than group of six. But also if you’re referring to or referring to power four versus group of six. But also, if you’re referring to even at Michigan, the football team versus the Olympic sports, that the the treatment and the experience that the athletes have, in many ways is similar, but in many ways is completely different. Certainly the economics are different. But going back to answer your your question, and I’ll be brief, because I’ve just filibustered most of my time. But the I think the I would put it as the biggest changes among many others in athletic departments for most of the history of college sports, the number one enemy, or number number one and number two enemies of athletic departments were boosters and agents, because the fear was that boosters and agents would destroy college sports, would destroy amateurism, would shift the focus away from education, make it look like professional sports. And so there was a bubble around college athletes and athletic departments. The bubble was often penetrated, or people dug a tunnel underneath the bubble to get to the athletes. But that athletic directors would have been thrilled if their athletes never talked to an agent or a booster, and we have now seen over the last few years, where you have to have your athletes talking well, you would like to have your athletes talking to agents to make sure that the deals they’re doing are fair and they’re well represented, but also boosters, that’s where so much of the money has come from, whether that’s directly to the athletes for their name, image and likeness under the pre house, but post 2021, system, or that’s now boosters giving money to the schools to then distribute To the athletes as part of that $20.5 million so dollars that Nell mentioned. So having boosters and agents be part of the ecosystem is a massive change. But then, just with the the house settlement, it’s a settlement, but it may be will lead to more litigation than it resolved. And. And I think athletic directors and staff have to be prepared for additional antitrust cases, for additional employment efforts, maybe not at the NLRB level because of the change in administration. But litigation continues on Fair Labor Standards Act in the Johnson case. Title Nine issues to other gender equity issues with how this money is being distributed. There are that they’ve maybe solved one issue and created 100 others. And the job of the athletic director and Karen can speak to this better than any of us. Is so different in 2025 than what is that it was in 2000 we’re just

Keith Edwards
making sure that Nell’s sports and higher ed beat just keeps thriving and thriving. No shortage of people. Lots to write about. Yeah.

Gabe Feldman
So I would just say that it is hard to succinctly capture the changes that are coming and have come to college sports, but some of the other we hear a lot about private equity and the potential for schools to lean on private equity to try to generate additional funding. There’s talk about whether they’re going to be federal legislation. There’s so many different issues out there and so many unknowns that most athletic directors throughout their careers just thought, all right, how am I going to raise money? How am I going to hire coaches? How am I going to win games? How am I going to keep my students eligible and happy and safe? That’s all still priority number one, but now it’s in the backdrop of all of these other challenges. So it’s become a much more complex, much more multifaceted, and I would say, interdisciplinary enterprise than it’s been in the past. Yeah,

Keith Edwards
Richard, what would you add here about the impact in college athletics.

Richard J. Paulsen
I mean, I’d like to talk a little bit about some of these other Athletics Department employees. You know, we’ve talked a lot about the athletes, right? But if we think about impacts, and maybe taking a step back here, right? There was a point in time where these head coaches say that Mike just have ski, you know, Duke men’s basketball head coach, right? Was making more than just about, if not all NBA head coaches, right? And you know, Duke’s men’s basketball does not have revenue coming in anywhere near the Lakers or the Knicks the NBA, right? But because you couldn’t pay the athletes, right, there was money to go around to everyone else, right? You know, I highlight the coaches, but that also includes other athletics departments, staff, right? You know, if I were to make some predictions here, I would predict that potentially, some of this money, you know, there needs to be money to pay the athletes now, now there’s this potential to pay up to 20 point 5 million. It’s gotta come from somewhere, right? And certainly there’s discussion from a number of athletics departments about how they’re going to raise that additional money, but some of that money is going to come from cutting costs elsewhere, right? So we might see head coaching salaries go down. We might see smaller head coaching staffs. We might see cuts to some other employees in these athletics departments. So that’s, that’s certainly one thing to think about. You know, there are other concerns that we may or may not want to get into further. But, you know, how does this affect competitive balance? Right? You know, are we going to move to a point? You know, that’s already the case, that we’ve got the top programs and we’ve got others. Is that gap going to get worse? Maybe, maybe not. How is this impacting athlete decision making? Right? We saw the fewest number of NCAA division one men’s basketball players that were freshmen the clear declare for the NBA Draft this year relative to any year in recent past, right? And that’s likely in part, because now they can make money in college that they weren’t making before, right? The NBA doesn’t seem like such a big jump. So there are lots of these other kind of potential follow up impacts that could be coming from this decision, from these recent changes. Yeah.

Gabe Feldman
Can I ask Richard a question if he thinks in that prediction I’m a triple Dukey, so I get, I get a little sensitive at any time anybody mentions Coach K or Duke but do you think that the the current Coach K or the football coach? Do you think their salaries are going to go down? Do you think this is going to be the other coaches salaries?

Richard J. Paulsen
I think it’s probably, in the short term, going to be nobody’s the head coach is not going to see a pay cut right now, right? Do they pay the next head coach as much? You know that that’s that’s the question, right? But I do think we might see fewer assistant coaches, right, or maybe smaller salaries for assistant coaches, right? You know, at a school like Alabama, let’s say they’ve got some assistant coaches that are making over a million dollars, right? Not just their head coach, right, but they’ve got a few top assistants making that for football, for football, yes, absolutely, for football, right? Yeah. So I do think probably the size of the staffs may decrease, you know, maybe the salaries that some of the assistants. But I think longer term, we’re going to see, you know, head coaching salaries potentially decline because. Because, you know, before you needed that top head coach to attract the best athletes. Right now, if you can throw a few million bucks at that top quarterback, do you need, you know, Nick Saban or something, right?

Keith Edwards
Or a million dollar offensive coordinator,

Gabe Feldman
exactly, Keith? One other thing to sorry. I will, I will release the reins the I do think another part of that, and Karen can probably speak to this as well as anyone, is the fear, at least, that those increased costs for football and basketball primarily are going to lead to cuts for other sports, and whether that’s cutting actual entire sports in the Olympic sports, or gutting them so creating tiers where football and basketballs are in the top tier and then the other sports are still varsity, but they are essentially in a different category, because just the expenses are much, much lower. They’re not traveling as much. They’re not spending nearly as much, just to again, in theory, find the way to have that additional cost born. But I will say, When? When? When a coach salary goes from 8 million to 12 million, and then the coach gets fired three years later, and they have to pay them $60 million as a buyout? Yeah? You don’t want to hear a lot of conversation about, well, where are we going to find that money? It only seems to be, or maybe seems to be loudest, when it’s the athletes who are going to be getting the money, where people say, Well, I don’t think we can do this, because we’re going to have to cut all this other stuff. So

Karen Weaver
and we’re going to have to drop Olympic sports. My goodness, we’ll have to drop Olympic sports. And what will people think that’s part of the challenge here is that the Olympic development system has been predicated on a broad based Olympic sports portfolio at many, many colleges. So that’s a legitimate concern in this era, when you can see where high profile division one football programs want to put their emphasis and their money into division one football in order to be successful.

Keith Edwards
Yeah, let’s zoom out, right? We don’t want to oppose athletics versus higher education, but with a zoom out to the broader context. Great point. Gabe, Karen, what do you see the implications of all of this on higher ed? Well,

Karen Weaver
this is something I think a lot about, and I have conversations with presidents and other university leaders about many of us are talking about the enrollment cliff, and for those who don’t know what that is, particularly in northeast, the Mid Atlantic and the Upper Midwest, we are simply not graduating the number of high school seniors that we were 20 or 25 years ago. It started in the Great Recession in 2008 and now there’s more competition for fewer regionally based high school seniors in that area. Other parts of the country, the southwest and the southern Southeastern part, are doing just fine, and in fact, they’re attracting a lot of out of state students who will pay out of state tuition to come to those schools. But this part of the country, where I’m in Philadelphia, there are a whole host of schools that are either very worried about closing or have closed on the smaller side. So that’s a problem. There is this concern over the value of a college degree for traditional age students. The costs of college education has risen. I’m sure every one of our listeners understands that, but parents are really starting to actively voice maybe a full time experience isn’t right, or maybe I should go somewhere else, or maybe I can get certificates or mini credentials to move myself into this space. This has accelerated by AI, and that’s a whole nother conversation for another podcast, but I know this is a big topic of conversation. Then we have the assault from the current presidential administration on federal funding over dei and transgender issues. By my colleague Gabe mentioned Duke this morning. Duke has already been attacked by the federal government and may lose over $100 million in funding over their perceived devaluation of white students. I mean, this just flows into the the whole upcycle of college and higher education. Right now we’ve had confusion on the status of international students. That’s particularly important for Olympic sports, because they attract a lot of international students. Now, Keith, I know you wanted me to address, how are these institutions, then, with all these financial difficulties outside of college athletics, addressing this, well, they’re raising tuition, not a good thing to do in this environment, but that’s what they’re doing. I’m seeing some tuition increases up to 9% for this year, which is in this environment staggering. We’re seeing very much a move towards increasing student fees. If you want to come be part of a big time division one program, you’re going to have to pay more to. A part of it on the campus. I don’t know if that’s a good idea. A lot of internal loans are being refinanced, repackaged on campus. We’re seeing a lot of lot of places say we will bypass your payment for this year and double it up next year just to get through this first year of opting in and revenue sharing. We’re seeing external credit partnerships with local and regional companies that want to work with colleges in this space. And we’re also seeing lots of conversation around private equity and private credit, not so much in paying the athletes, but in making sure they can find areas of the university to invest in, entertainment districts, stadium districts upgrading premium seating in stadiums where they can guarantee their return. If this sounds nothing like what you used to think of higher education as you are, correct?

Keith Edwards
Yeah, it’s a great point. I was just with leading a retreat with the senior leadership team on a campus yesterday and the challenges before them. I mean, you listed them just like they listed them, just like I would, yeah, and the complexity, as Gabe was mentioning, all the things that now athletic directors are going to have to manage, I don’t see how you’re not going to pay athletic directors more money, because the jobs just got about eight times more complex. You’re going to need, like a former lawyer CEO, to run these operations with all the complexity. Now, what would you like to jump in and add here to the sort of the context of higher ed? I know you’re focused on boards in higher ed, but you previously have done a lot of work broadly in higher ed. Anything else you want to add here,

Nell Gluckman
I guess I would just emphasize like something that was surprising to me in coming into this world is that, yes, there are some some athletic departments that are making 100 you know, huge amount of revenue, but the vast majority of schools in Division One aren’t just not generating revenue like they are a cost, usually for their schools. And like Karen was saying, this is coming at a time when they’re right now this house settlement is coming at a time when their research funding is getting cut. And I think international students shouldn’t be under emphasize, like it’s not just international athletes that come in. It’s that so many of these schools rely on international students for tuition revenue. They often pay full tuition, and even if some of these research funding cuts are reversed due to some of the settlements that we’re starting to see, international students have been on the gentle decline in the last few years, and that could increase because of the visa issues put it lightly that we saw this past spring. So, yeah, I think, I think athletics is just like another sort of piece of this difficult financial puzzle that college leaders are dealing with now and then. Another thing I would just say is Richard mentioned the transfer portal, and that becoming making it easier for athletes to move around. And this is something I’m really interested in, and if people know about it. Who are listening? I’d love to hear from you. I’m hearing that athletes are it’s not uncommon to move to three four schools now within your academic career. And there’s a lot of reasons for that, one, that it’s easier to do it, but also, athletes are chasing better and I L deals at different places because of the pandemic, they were given more years of eligibility. That’s another complicated issue, but I think that a lot of the what this has meant for a lot of students is that the academic career just looks a lot different, too, because of all the professionalization of of of athletics. They’re spending time working through these maid deals, you know, on Instagram, promoting themselves. It just, it’s a it’s a good thing in a lot of ways, but it’s just a lot a lot different, traveling, more

Keith Edwards
things are really shifting. Well, we were going to try and get in a question about, what do you see ahead in the future? Good luck. But we’re pressed for time, so we’re going to try and merge this. So I want to sort of do a quick fire round with each of you. We’ll start with Nell, then Gabe, then Karen, then Richard, and I’d love for you to try and do three things. And this is the worst thing a podcast host can do, is ask three questions at once, but I’m going to do it anyway. You’re very smart. I am confident. One, what do you see ahead? Two, what are you really thinking about now and then? Three, if folks want to connect with you, learn more, see your stuff, connect with your podcast. Asked, Where can they do that? So now, what do you see ahead? What’s on your mind now, and where can folks find you?

Nell Gluckman
I think I’d be remiss to try to predict the future on this, but you’re just following a lot more, a lot more penny pinching. And what I was just talking about, you know, just the college athletic experience looking a lot different for athletes. It’s, it’s, you’re not necessarily going to enter college and be with the same team for four years, and they’re gonna be your best friends, and then afterwards, you, you know, graduate with your nursing degree, and go on like I am not sure how that will change, but I think it’s starting to look different for athletes. And what I’m thinking about now is I want to hear from people who want to talk about that experience for students and what they’re seeing, and people working in student affairs and how they’re how they’re seeing that experience change, because that’s something I’d love to be reporting on more of. And yeah, you can reach me at nell.gluckman@chronicle.com that’s that’s the best way to

Keith Edwards
reach me. Yeah, thanks so much for your reporting and framing and for being here today and connecting me with these, with these great folks. Really appreciate it. Gabe, what do you see in the future? What are you worried about now? And where can folks connect with you?

Gabe Feldman
I am going to quote rocky three, just to really not usually high on the rocky list, but good for you. I know well, I’d say there are people either too young to have seen it, or even people who have the right age may not really be fond of it, but my prediction is pain. I think that’s what we’re going to see over the next few years. I think things are going to get worse before they get better. I think they’re going to get more unstable before we reach equilibrium. That might come through federal legislation, that might come through additional lawsuits, but I just think there is much more change ahead. So I’m not going to predict what that outcome of that change will be, just that there will be change the What am I kind of focused on now ties into a little bit what I talked about earlier, the relationship between college athletics and universities and how it fits, and whether it should fit, and whether it might make sense, as discussions have taken place about separating out football and letting football run itself and not have all the rules apply to all the sports, so that, as we talked about, you don’t have to have volleyball players and softball players traveling across the country multiple times a week because we want to see USC play a school on the East Coast, or they have to play a school on the east coast because they’re because their conference re alignment. But also, as part of that, is spent a lot of time thinking about working with others, including Arian wait at UNC to ask the question and answer the question, potentially, of, why do we treat college sports so differently than college music and theater and dance, where all of those they were slow to become part of the academy, but they are part of the academy now, and when a musician is practicing or rehearsing, we don’t say, why are you spending so much time rehearsing? You should spend more time in your studies. That is their study. But when an athlete is practicing, we say, Why are you interfering with your academics? Now, part of it’s just the way it’s been structured. But the question is, can we make college sports be a better, more integrated part of the academy, and can we extract more and formalize educational value from athletic participation. Because I think if we can, at least at the Olympic sport level and some of the other levels, I think that’ll it’ll be clear answers to a lot of the questions we have, and clear direction about why we’re doing the things we’re doing, and then where people can follow me. I mentioned I have my podcast, sports wise, a podcast about sports and law. Or you can follow me on Twitter at sports law guy.

Keith Edwards
Awesome, awesome. Karen. What do you see ahead? What are you thinking about now? And where can folks connect with you?

Karen Weaver
Yeah, so I’m thinking a lot about the non powerful schools, Division One, Division Two, Division Three, they don’t have these kinds of resources. They’re not attractive in the media markets to attract these kind of resources, and they are desperately trying to manage all the other things I talked about, not the least of which is enrollment and trying to retain students and some of our best people who’ve had the best relationships with both students and athletes, our academic advisors, athletic trainers, strength and conditioning coaches, assistant coaches, and they are getting burned out. They have so much going on, so much pressure on them right now, and what we’re hearing is they’re actually being. Has to do more because they’re trying to find administrators are trying to find resources from other places to pay the athletes, and I just think that’s completely unsustainable. So some of our best people who work in college athletics work in those areas. I also see some of our top coaches saying, I can’t do it anymore. This is not consistent with my values and belief system, so I’m tracking on that. I’m seeing a lot of non powerful Division One programs opt in this year to the settlement. I’m wondering if they’re going to opt in next year. It might have been an enrollment strategy to get involved in the roster rostering, but really it’s going to become a competitive strategy going forward. And I don’t know how sustainable it is for schools and some of the men major basketball centric ones, how to reach out to me. So obviously, a teacher at Penn, I have a podcast like Gabe. It’s called trustees and presidents managing intercollegiate athletics. I’m in my sixth season, and I try to talk to presidents and other senior leaders as well as industry experts about how to manage and understand all of this. I have a book coming out later this year from Johns Hopkins press. We’re working on the title, but navigating this new era, a guide for senior leaders. That’s one of the potential titles. And I also write for Forbes so on this very space. So follow me, connect with me. I’m on blue sky at at Dr. Karen Weaver,

Keith Edwards
great, great. Well, good luck with that book, right? Thank you. As soon as you’re done, the next week you’ll be like, I gotta add more. I gotta change this. That is done. It’ll be great. Well, maybe we have to have you back for that. Richard, what’s what do you see ahead? What’s with you now, and where can folks connect with

Richard J. Paulsen
you? Try to keep this quick, but you know, when I think about what’s to come, you know some of the upcoming challenges. And these have been alluded to or mentioned a little bit previously, but there are all these questions about title nine, right? You know, Biden administration’s Department of Education said yes, the settlement payment should comply with Title Nine split at 5050 men’s and women’s sports. Trump administration got rid of that guidance. Schools do not seem to be planning to split that money. 5050, a lot of money gotta go to a football, men’s basketball, women’s basketball, not a lot of money going elsewhere, right? There’s also this question of, yes, 20 point 5 million is great, but it’s still price fixing, which is still potentially not legal under US antitrust law. So there are these kind of broader concerns, right? So, you know, what are solutions? How do we get around the title nine question? How do we get around the price fixing question? There’s still that possibility of unionization and collective bargaining that could happen. Labor Law supersedes antitrust law. So maybe that’s a solution that we see somewhere far down the road, maybe, maybe not. There’s a question of, do we have college sports be affiliated with universities, but not maybe part of the universities, right? Maybe, you know, college athletes don’t need to be students, right? And if they’re employees and not part of the university directly, but affiliated Title Nine kind of goes out the door. So maybe that’s something, or maybe there’s congressional action, right? That’s, that’s certainly something that’s on all of our minds as a possibility here, too. But yeah, so lots of, lots of remaining questions, and, you know, maybe some solutions, but there’s, a lot still to be determined. So you know a lot of change coming still, I think. But yeah, how do you get in touch with me? I’m faculty here at Michigan, so you can find my faculty page. Got an email address there. I’m also on LinkedIn, if you want to connect there. Thanks, awesome.

Keith Edwards
Thank you. Thank you all. This has been terrific. I really appreciate you helping us learn about all of this. We’ll have to do a round two, maybe when things change. So we’ll get that scheduled for next week. We’ll see how this all plays out. But I really appreciate you brought up so many great points and really helped us understand at least what is happening now as we move forward. So thanks to all of you. I also want to thank our sponsors of today’s episode, evolve and Huron higher ed leaders are facing unprecedented challenges, uncertainty and feeling under attack, as you just heard. Many are understandably feeling overwhelmed in your burnout, yet yearning to make a powerful, different difference for students, their organizations and all of us Evolve, led by me, along with my colleagues, Dr Brian around Don Lee, is an executive coaching program to empower leaders like you to release fear, gain courage and take transformative action, to unleash your leadership for social change. Evolve, is a three month coaching program offering individual and group coaching as well as an intentionally curated, curated curriculum to maximize impact for our busiest senior leaders. Visit us and learn how to be a part of our next cohort, or consider evolve for your senior leadership team and Huron. Huron collaborates with colleges and universities create sound strategies, optimize operations, accelerate digital transformation by embracing diverse perspectives, encouraging new ideas and challenging the status quo. Huron promotes institutional resilience in higher education for more, visit them at go.hcg.com/now, as always, a huge shout out to our producer, Nat Ambrosey, who makes us all look and sound good. We love your support for these important conversations. You can really help us by subscribing to the podcast, to the newsletter, or on YouTube, or sharing review on any of those places. It really helps great conversations like this reach an even larger audience. My name is Keith Edwards, thanks again to our fabulous guest today and to everyone who’s watching and listening. Make it a great week. Thank you all.

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