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Originally Posted by manchambo
Can we overstate the importance of penn state football any more? Maybe the whole state of Pennsylvania would fail. And if that happened, would the united states be far behind?
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You are talking about 44,000 jobs lost. You are talking about 100,00 students per year who will either have to resort for higher tuition or reduced quality of education. You are talking about stripping one of the most critical ways Pennsylvania is able to keep students and good residents in state. You are talking about potentially stripping away scholarships or affordable tuition to a 17-year old student who can't afford a private institution but has worked her ass off her entire life to get straight A's so she can get into Penn State. You are talking about stripping away $8.5B of economic impact. Indirectly, you are talking about taking away good future lawyers, doctors, businesspeople, etc.... And you're not even factoring the massive amounts of help state schools provide to businesses in terms of expertise, research, etc.... Penn State is one of the lifebloods, for example, of the Pennsylvania farming industry. I think it's rather hilarious that people actually think you can take a public university of that magnitude away and think it wouldn't have a devastating economic effect.
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Back in reality, there is zero reason to think that losing football for a few years would appreciably affect the well being of the school as a whole. Some reality checks: are there thriving schools without football programs? Of course. Are there thriving schools that have football programs that are lucky to break even or at best turn an insignificant profit? Oh my god yes. In fact that probably describes the majority. Finally, did SMU curl up and die? Of course not.
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Penn State is a school that enrolls 100,000 students. It is an extremely expensive school to run. You have to employ the faculty to cover all those students, pay for facilities, and have students that pay the room & board to house them because any reasonable person knows that the further you are from capacity to fill a building, the more your costs go up. Many schools thrive without a competitive program because they have higher tuition rates or else they don't offer quality educational programming. Most schools don't have the challenge of attracting 100,000 students in order to keep the school running. In most cases, they're happy with a few thousand.
More importantly, we know the direct impact. We're talking about $50M in direct losses if you take away their home games. I can't even imagine how many millions of dollars would be lost in alumni donations. You're talking about hundreds of millions dollars lost.
But like you said... no big deal. Most universities have hundreds of millions of dollars in money just lying around to cover it.