By Patricia Alex, Staff Writer, The Record
Rutgers University is poised to bump up spending by millions of dollars on athletics, a program already awash in red ink, as its leadership committed this week to “doing what it takes” to make the football team competitive in the powerhouse Big Ten Athletic Conference. That means costly buyouts of the current sports leadership — and the likely hiring of a considerably more expensive football coach and staff.
Athletics at Rutgers is substantially underwritten by the state university, where tuition at $14,000 for a commuter student is among the highest of any flagship public school in the nation. But moves this week indicate the university is ready to spend more to reorder its beleaguered football program.
Rutgers spent $172 million from 2010 to 2014 to underwrite intercollegiate sports, more than any other college in the country during that five-year period, according to an analysis of NCAA reports released by the Chronicle of Higher Education last month.
[…]“It’s pretty clear that athletic spending will take a big jump — we’re all hoping Rutgers athletics will not turn into the Port Authority,” said Professor Mark Killingsworth, referring to the notoriously political agency that runs the region’s airports and Hudson River crossings.
Killingsworth has long studied athletic spending at Rutgers and has been part of a group of faculty critical of its escalation.
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