The Yale Bowl was built in 1914 and their football team does just fine in it. You seem to have confused the real purpose of college with the encroachment of commerce and pimping athletes into the educational process.

Tuition is probably linked more to the economy, inflation, and teacher/admistrative salaries and benefits, than sports.

Don’t go to a big D1 school if you don’t like sports/issues.

It would be interesting to see a survey of students, who picked their schools based on sports teams, name recognition and party index vs how many soley for classes.

http://kaarme.com/Most_Profitable_College_Athletic_Programs

Mind you, that model started to shift in the early 1900s, and a few of our cultural heroes from modest circumstances went to college while working themselves through. Then the post-WWII GI Bill absolutely exploded the college population, and the children of the veterans were just expected to go as a matter of course. There was now this wonderful big educational infrastructure and as a society we decided that one HAD to have a “college education” to be a respectable middle-class (or better yet, upper middle-class) American. And voila, what had been an idyllic retreat for the children of the aristocracy was now a product, the perfect product, in fact. And what better way to promote that product than sports, the things people watch on TV?

The creme de la creme of our colleges have never had to use sports as a marketing vehicle (the Yale Bowl, for example, is 90% empty at every football game except the Harvard game). And smaller select colleges such as Williams have good athletics programs, but they are rolled into the package of overall achievement. It’s the intellectual second-tier schools that need to pimp themselves. It’s nothing new, and it ain’t going away until the entire “you must go to college” ethos is blown to hell.

Thirty-plus years ago, I took a course called “Philosophy of Sport” at a regional football factory in the Southeast. I was a club lacrosse player, meaning I had no coaching apparatus watching over me and no university investment in my sport. Most my classmates were football players, in whom the university had invested a lot in order to sell the university as a leading-edge place to learn. More than one of these fellas had trouble reading aloud. I had already received a regular paycheck for sportswriting. I got the lowest grade in the class. I was shocked, shocked, and remain traumatized by the whole sordid mess. Jack Nicklaus is still supporting Tressel, and as long as guys like Jack aren’t calling for the demolition of the current structure, I doubt anybody’ll listen to you or me, Local Treasure.