The Real March Madness?

Soaring athletic bills catch students off guard

Matthew Hollister for TIME

What ticks off many college students even more than an 8 a.m. class? Finding out how much they pay for sports. B. David Ridpath, a professor of sports administration at Ohio University and a former president of the Drake Group, a college-sports watchdog organization, just finished polling about 4,000 students attending schools in the Mid-American Conference (MAC), a group of a dozen public institutions mostly in Ohio and Michigan. He asked if they knew that a significant chunk of their annual student fees--payments on top of tuition that fund various student services--helped finance their school's intercollegiate athletic department. For example, at...

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