So argue Rich Vedder and Joseph Hartge in this Inside Higher Ed piece.

They begin with the decision at the University of Alabama–Birmingham to drop intercollegiate football, which had been a huge drain in school resources in exchange for no educational benefits. Cheers for UAB president Ray Watts. Then they contrast the good sense at UAB with the folly at their own institution, Ohio U, where Vedder has been on the faculty for many years and Hartge is a student. Ohio U’s president Roderick McDavis looks at the mediocre OU football program and says, “Let’s spend more to make it a winner!” That will include spending (oops — I mean “investing”) more than $5 million on a new “academic center” that will be, they write, “a gated community of sorts where athletes but not ordinary students can study.”

Having a winning football team is just a positional good, so no matter how much a school spends, it is merely racing with all the other schools that also want winning teams. That is obvious with regard to sports, but no less so with the many other ways schools spend (there I go again — “invest”) money trying to improve their rankings and reputations. The education offered to students doesn’t improve along with those positional measures; it just gets more costly.