There’s a new study out today that does the math:

Intercollegiate amateur athletics in the US largely bars student-athletes from sharing in any of the profits generated by their participation, which creates substantial economic rents for universities. These rents are primarily generated by men’s football and men’s basketball programs. . . . [We] measure how rents flow to women’s sports and other men’s sports and lead to increased spending on facilities, coaches’ salaries, and other athletic department personnel.

The result? This process “effectively transfers resources away from students who are more likely to be black and more likely to come from poor neighborhoods towards students who are more likely to be white and come from higher-income neighborhoods.”

I don’t pay much attention to college athletics, but I’ve long believed they don’t make sense on several levels. You shouldn’t need to get admitted to an academic institution to play on the sports teams that feed into the professional leagues. (About 85 percent of NFL players come from “Football Bowl Subdivision” college programs, for example.) And colleges shouldn’t be positioned to confiscate all the proceeds from this highly lucrative endeavor.

Given the racial obsessions of the modern academy, maybe adding “it takes money away from poor blacks and gives it to richer whites” to the arguments against this setup will change some minds.