Is Wittenberg University a cautionary tale of what happens when schools add too many athletes?
Wittenberg University in Springfield, Ohio has certainly had its share of public challenges during the past year. Like many similar universities, the pandemic triggered the school to cut programs and eliminate some positions as far back as June 2020. But the challenges kept coming. As the Chronicle of Higher Education reported in April 2024, Wittenberg experienced negative cash flows in FY22 and FY23, prompting the school to take withdrawals from its endowment.
In early August, the Dayton Daily News reported on a plan to cut up to 60 percent of faculty positions at Wittenberg. With 97.5 faculty members, the report said, no more than 40 would be retained. Ultimately, the school announced cuts that amounted to 24 faculty lines, roughly 25 percent of the FTE positions. Shortly thereafter the school received bomb threats forcing classes to go online after the presidential debate in which a candidate falsely accused Haitian immigrants in the town of eating pets.
Also in September, the school announced plans to discontinue men’s and women’s tennis (along with its women’s bowling team) only to reinstate the tennis programs just two weeks ago, thanks to the “generosity, persistence, and tenacity of a group of alumni who have pledged their support to fund the program.”
And, finally, late last month, the Higher Learning Commission, Wittenberg’s accreditor, placed the university in “financial distress” status, a designation “meant to apprise the public that current conditions at an accredited college or university raise potential concerns about its resource base to support its educational programs.”
Certainly, this cascade of negative news has had an impact on employee and student morale, compounding the potential problem of enrolling new students. This article is not meant to “kick them when they are down,” but rather to highlight some data relative to the school. To be clear, I know no one associated with Wittenberg University (save for a professional colleague whose son is an athlete at the school). I don’t know the exact conversations taking place. But I have a guess, because I lived through something similar at a previous institution just a year ago.
Schools seek to combat declining enrollment, by adding new sports and/or increasing roster sizes. Former university president Robin Capehart has coined this a “sports enrollment strategy.” Prominent higher education consultant Jeff Selingo recently commented on LinkedIn, in regard to something I wrote, “one of the biggest warning signs of a college about to fail is the percentage of athletes on campus.”
Even as I was drafting this article, Eric Kelderman of the Chronicle of Higher Education published an excellent piece March 19 on Lourdes University in Ohio which has substantially increased its number of athletes on campus, while the overall number of undergraduate students has declined. He and his team analyzed EADA data and reported that between 2012 and 2022 more than 80 percent of private colleges enrolling between 500 and 3,000 students increased the number of their athletes. Fifty-six percent of those schools also witnessed declining overall enrollment.
Examining publicly available data, we can observe this strategy as it relates to Wittenberg. As the chart below shows, the school added 190 athletes between 2019-20 and 2022-23, while overall undergraduate enrollment declined by 282 students. The percent of athletes on campus grew by nearly 25 percent to 58.5 percent in 2022-23. It receded some in 2023-24 but still resides well north of 50 percent.
On a sport-by-sport basis, the number of reported football athletes at Wittenberg grew from 119 in 2020-21 to 162 in 2023-24. Overall track and field athletes (both men and women) grew from 70 in 2020-21 to 102 in 2024-25. Both men’s and women’s basketball teams now roster in excess of 20 players.
While more students is great, more athletes can be problematic, as Kelderman emphasized in his article, “As an enrollment strategy, however, college athletics programs have a mixed record; in some cases, they’ve been little more than a Band-Aid on a gaping wound. Adding sports might slow a decline, the data suggest, but at a cost — because athletic teams are expensive to stand up and support.”
Consider the chart below highlighting Wittenberg’s growth in athletic expenses.
Wittenberg’s numbers of athletes and expenses remind me of where now-closed Birmingham-Southern College (BSC) was prior to its closure. In the 2022-23 EADA reporting year, the last filed by the school before it closed, BSC reported having 47% of its 962 students as athletes, and spent $9,735.32 per athlete.
Athletes simply cost more than non-athletes and small tuition-dependent institutions rely heavily on student tuition dollars to meet basic operating expenses. Adding athletes helps ensure cash flow, but also raises expenses. Universities need to have both athletes and non-athletes, and so far my research shows that having a student body that is 44% or more athletes can prove problematic. I observed 33 Division III schools with greater than 44% or more athletes, have increased that percentage by more than 10% since 2019-20 (pre-Covid). Wittenberg is one of the 33 schools on that list.