Varsity sports programs that show deficits look to private donations and mandatory student fees as strategies for balancing budgets, usually through the mechanism of specially incorporated athletics foundations, entities that tend to drift away from academic accountability. Such practices move analysis from institutional finance to public policy. The key finding of the research is that some standard procedures of big-time sports programs jeopardize many privileges and exemptions colleges traditionally have enjoyed as nonprofit educational organizations. Sports programs managed as admittedly commercial enterprises tend to have government agencies looking at athletics foundations more as entertainment than as education. Thus, athletics foundations may have to forfeit exemptions from local property tax.
Observers agree that the key figure in such reform is the college or university president.
Yet making decisive changes in athletics policy is not easy for a president who must content with external pressures, problems of a single campus working in isolation, and the visibility of college sports. Presidents who take a stand as national leaders and spokespersons on containing the costs and abuses of college sports show a high burnout rate. Above all, a president must work within the boundaries of an institutions sports heritage. Changing policy is complicated because many important actions and attempts at reform take place beyond the campus. The really exciting contests in varsity sports are taking place not on the playing fields but in the courts, in college board rooms, at NCAA conventions, in presidents offices, and at television network headquarters.