Florida State’s athletics-related debt stood at $17 million at the end of fiscal year 2020. Five years later, it ballooned to $437 million, an increase of 2,465%. Rutgers’ athletics department has lost $517 million since joining the Big Ten Conference in 2014, a move explicitly undertaken to improve the department’s self-sufficiency.
And those are just the programs making headlines. Across Division I, athletics departments are carrying debt loads that would have been unthinkable a decade ago. It’s all the product of a perfect storm: the House v. NCAA settlement mandating revenue sharing with athletes, coaching buyouts that routinely reach eight figures, a facilities arms race that never seems to end, and conference realignments that promise more revenue while adding new competitive expectations, and in some cases, exorbitant coast-to-coast travel costs.
The House settlement alone has reshaped the financial calculus at virtually every D-I institution. Beginning in 2025, schools can share up to $20.5 million directly with athletes, a number that rises incrementally in subsequent years. For the blue bloods, the amount is a manageable line item in a massive budget. For everyone else, it’s a mandate without a funding mechanism. Add to that the scholarship expansions many programs have voluntarily undertaken, coaching contract obligations, Title IX compliance costs, and the ongoing capital investment required to recruit in the era of NIL and the transfer portal, and you begin to understand why athletic directors are turning over couch cushions looking for any bit of revenue.
The cushion many are turning to? Student fees.
From Clemson, S.C., to Fresno, Calif., to Denton, Texas, Athletic Business spoke with three schools that are either implementing athletics fees for the first time, raising existing ones or trying to convince skeptical student bodies that the investment — their investment — is worth it. The results have been decidedly mixed, and the conversations happening on those campuses reveal the depth of the financial pressure bearing down on collegiate athletics.
Pulling every lever
Athletics administrators at Clemson, which boasts two national football titles won within the past decade, have spent the past two years methodically working through a list of novel revenue initiatives. Clemson was among the last holdouts in the country, alongside Utah and BYU, to approve alcohol sales in its sports venues. A lawsuit against the ACC to renegotiate Clemson’s media rights arrangement is expected to unlock between $10 million and $15 million per year. The reclaiming of the athletic department’s own multimedia rights from third-party operator JMI Sports has given rise to Clemson Ventures and direct control over the program’s own IP.
As of fall 2025, the university is charging a $150-per-semester student athletics fee for the first time in its history.
For a long time, student fees weren’t something Clemson needed. Students had always attended sporting events for free, and the department had been largely self-sufficient. Even with the new fee in place, Clemson has kept student access intact, allowing undergraduates to attend every athletic event without purchasing a ticket, with roughly half the football allotment reserved for students at no charge. The fee, rather than a turnstile, is more accurately a cost-recovery mechanism, given that the department hosts 300 to 400 non-athletics campus events annually inside its facilities — staffing, cleaning and turning them over at its own expense, with no return revenue stream. Once fully mature, the department projects the fee will generate between $3.5 million and $4 million per semester.
The combined financial weight of the House settlement hits Clemson to the tune of roughly $26 million to $27 million annually, when revenue sharing, expanded scholarships and operational costs are tallied together. The school chose not only to participate in revenue sharing at the $20.5 million level but also brought nearly all of its rosters to full scholarship — adding 150 new full scholarships at a cost of around $6 million, according to a senior member of the athletics department who spoke on background.
The fee rollout was timed deliberately. Approved in October 2024 but not implemented until fall 2025, it meant the entire senior class never saw it on their bill. By the time the next freshman class arrived, the fee was simply part of the cost of attendance. The pushback that did materialize came almost entirely from graduate and part-time students who felt they couldn’t access the services the fee was meant to fund — a concern the department views as consistent with how any standard campus fee operates, from science building assessments to health fees, regardless of individual use.
Meanwhile, Clemson is carrying the cost of a Title IX correction that took an expensive turn. In 2020, facing a roster imbalance of 50 more male athletes than female, the department announced it would discontinue men’s track and field. The decision was reversed under pressure, and then compounded, as Clemson also launched lacrosse and gymnastics from scratch. The cumulative investment in facilities, startup costs and ongoing operations for those three programs has reached approximately $70 million, none of which will be recouped through revenue. Clemson gymnastics ranks in the top 10 nationally in attendance and still runs a deficit of about $3 million annually, while women’s basketball is in the red by roughly $4 million. The revenue-sharing mandate lands on top of a financial structure already running deficits in the overwhelming majority of
its sports.
A different kind of pitch
Garrett Klassy has been the athletics director at Fresno State for roughly a year and a half — long enough to understand what makes the institution tick and how to speak to it. When the opportunity arose to implement a student fee of $495 per year, structured under a designation used for student services rather than athletics directly, he knew the pitch couldn’t be about football budgets. It had to be about students.
“The big thing that we needed to do was justify how this would impact not just athletes, but all the students,” Klassy says.
The Fresno State model threaded that needle in a way that made a student vote unnecessary. The fee fell under a student services classification administered through an advisory board, with final approval resting with the university president. The fund was distributed broadly to encompass a variety of student resources, including the campus rec center, the marching band and the student newspaper. Athletics received $5 million of a $13 million pool.
The case Klassy made to administrators leaned on data. In the year before the fee, Fresno State averaged roughly 5,000 students per home football game, all attending on heavily subsidized tickets. Last season, more than 16,000 unique students attended at least one game, representing nearly 60% of the 25,000-student enrollment at FSU.
“People come for the tailgating,” Klassy says, “and a football game just happens to break out.” That wasn’t a complaint. It was proof of concept, revealing that athletics at Fresno are a community institution, not just a campus amenity.
The fee was also used as a catalyst for expanding the university’s workforce pipeline. Working with the sports management and business school programs, Klassy created roughly 15 new internship positions within the athletics department. “The emphasis of our president is really around creating ready-made students for the real world,” he says. “That was a big part of it, as well.”
Adding to the fiscal pressure, Fresno State has joined the reconstituted Pac-12, a move that raises the bar on competitive expectations while also increasing operational spending. “By any metric possible, we’re going to be near the bottom as far as operating budgets in the new Pac-12,” Klassy admits. “But one thing I’ve learned in a year and half at Fresno State, we’ve won a lot of championships here with not a lot of bells and whistles, but with the people. We’re one of the few schools at our level where the kids still grow up with the dream of having a Bulldog on their uniform. We need to tap into that.”
The current environment has forced Klassy to think less like an athletics administrator and more like a business owner. Fresno State held its first concert ever at Valley Children’s Stadium last year. The department is exploring premium seating options in a stadium with only 20 suites, eyeing party decks, loge boxes and hospitality areas that could convert the tailgating culture from a parking lot phenomenon into a revenue-generating one inside the gates. He’s even exploring the use of private capital, not to fund athlete compensation, but to build out the department’s commercial infrastructure — expanding the ticket sales staff from four people to 18, funding facility enhancements and testing AI-driven marketing tools. “Gone are the days,” Klassy says, “where you just push debt onto the next year and keep moving.”
Klassy’s long-term vision is unapologetically based in community. “I want Fresno State football to be the Green Bay Packers of college football,” he says, stressing the school’s teams should be community-sustained. The Valley Co-Op, the athletics department’s NIL and revenue-sharing vehicle, is built around that ethos. If enough people across the Central Valley contribute even $50 a year, Klassy argues, no program in the new Pac-12 will be able to touch them for talent retention and development. “Everybody owns the team. That’s what we’re going toward.”
When students push back
Jared Mosely didn’t sugarcoat the results of a November 2024 vote at the University of North Texas, where he has served as athletic director since 2002. The proposal to raise the per-credit-hour athletics fee from $18.25 to $25 over three years — a roughly 37% increase — was rejected by 57% of voters.
Part of the failure to pass the proposal was lack of outreach, but not by any fault of the administration.
The governance structure at UNT constrains the department in ways that Fresno State and Clemson simply don’t face. When the Eagles’ football stadium was built, language was embedded in the legal documents allowing the institution to raise the student athletics fee by up to 10% one time without a student vote. That unilateral increase was exercised two years ago. Every future adjustment now requires a referendum, and those referendums come with strict rules: student government must remain neutral, outreach to off-campus housing is restricted, and the athletics department cannot use its own student database to send educational (read lobbying) materials.
“For a campus and for students who maybe haven’t gone to games or don’t realize what’s in it for them,” Mosely says, “it’s really hard to reach them and educate them when you have to do it face to face, because so many of them aren’t going to take advantage of that opportunity.”
Three students showed up to a town hall where the administration made its case.
“We’ve got a database of students we know who do come to games and do support athletics, but we couldn’t even send educational material out to them through our channels,” Mosely says, noting that the result was a campaign fought largely in the student union with whoever happened to walk by.
North Texas intends to try again. New student government leadership is elected every year, and Mosely believes framing the argument in terms of what kind of value athletics delivers to every student’s UNT degree can move the needle. His argument, when he gets to make it, is expansive and based in the belief that visibility afforded by an 11-2 football season, which the Eagles achieved last year, is advertising no university department can buy. “There’s not another program on your campus that rallies alumni and donors and philanthropy and community engagement like that,” he says. “When more people hear about and see North Texas, it enhances your ability to go in and land a job. People know you went to a school they just heard about, and they’re going to perceive it as successful. That’s value for everybody who’s earning a degree.”
The broader picture is one Mosely describes with candor. He frames the revenue coming from one of three buckets: institutional support, student athletic fees and self-generated revenues from familiar streams, including ticket sales, licensing, multimedia deals and events. For most schools, the campus subsidy is the largest bucket. Mosely says that even those schools that used to brag about having no subsidy at all have quietly leaned into institutional support to help fund the $20.5 million revenue-sharing cap.
But it’s the third bucket that Mosely says his department is most concerned with. That’s where the creativity comes in, and that’s where there may still be room for growth.
“Campus can continue to do a little more, and those student fees can maybe grow a little more,” says Mosely, “but the self-generated revenue streams are where we spend most of our time, because those are really the only levers we can control.”
No end in sight
Where does it end? The short answer, based on the trajectory of the past two years, is that it doesn’t end, but rather compounds. The $20.5 million revenue-sharing cap rises annually. Facilities expectations don’t recede. The transfer portal has made roster construction an ongoing, year-round financial commitment rather than a seasonal one. And the conference realignment era isn’t finished reshuffling competitive expectations against funding realities. If anything, the schools now scrambling to implement fees, close multimedia rights deals and explore private capital partnerships are the ones that waited. Many others made these moves years ago but are still trying to make up ground in an unforgiving budgetary environment.
Mosely believes the structural fix, if it comes at all, runs through Congress. Not to cap spending or regulate NIL directly, but to give the NCAA and other governing bodies the federal backstop to enforce their own rules uniformly, and to stop individual states from essentially nullifying those rules on behalf of their flagship programs. “Until you can get some type of federal mandate that says you can enforce your rules and states cannot come in and blow up the system, we’re going to have states trying to sway the rules for the benefit of their institutions,” he says.
Whether that intervention arrives before more programs tip into financial crisis is an open question.
What seems increasingly clear is that the student fee conversation, contentious as it is, may be the least complicated piece of the puzzle. The schools that frame it as a student services investment, tie it to tangible campus benefits and perceived professional development prestige, and build the political groundwork before putting it to a vote stand a reasonable chance of getting it done. But continual fee increases in perpetuity is likely an unsustainable strategy for any institution.
The deeper question is what happens at the programs where none of these levers — fees, multimedia rights, private capital, conference litigation — are enough to close the gap?
Mosely thinks that for the vast majority of Division I programs, there is a ceiling on what can be self-generated, a limit on what students will bear and a cap on what the institution can absorb. Within those constraints, the mandate to compete keeps growing.
For many athletics departments, the math is getting harder to ignore. Says Mosley, “There’s only so far we can go, period.”
