THE COLD WAR BETWEEN ADMINISTRATORS AND ECONOMISTS CONTINUES. Two University Diaries posts feature economists throwing the flag on sports subsidies.

At Rutgers, it's Mark R. Killingsworth in the Newark Star-Ledger, questioning the connection between sports visibility and enrollments.

The hoped-for spillover benefits from football to the academic program have also failed to materialize. According to the university’s Office of Institutional Research, there has been no appreciable change in SAT scores or in the enrollment “yield” — the percentage of admitted students who actually attend — at Rutgers’ flagship New Brunswick campus, relative to other large public-research universities.

The article doesn't say opportunity cost, but resources are going into sports facilities, not academic departments.

It reduced the number of classes it offers and increased the size of the classes that weren’t canceled. Hiring of faculty has been restricted; support for research has been cut; faculty pay has been frozen. In my own department, Economics — which has the third-largest number of majors in the School of Arts and Sciences — two-thirds of student credit hours are taught by part-timers, adjuncts, teaching assistants and others who are not tenure or tenure-track faculty.

So the inevitable happened. In 1997, U.S. News & World Report ranked Rutgers 16th among undergraduate programs at major state universities. As of the latest rankings, released in September, Rutgers slipped to 23rd. As of 1995, the National Research Council ranked 11 Rutgers graduate programs among the top 25 in their respective fields. In contrast, in the 2010 NRC rankings of the same departments, only eight programs are among the top 25 in their field.

University money goes to the positional arms race in sports. Tuition money goes to the positional arms race in U.S. News.

At [Southwest] Missouri State, it's Reed Olsen in the Springfield News-Leader. The university has a new basketball arena that's losing money.

Olsen, who last year disputed a university claim that the arena was paying for itself, questioned the makeup of the committee, saying it consists of people who were part of the problem.

Nothing to see here, move along. But the powers that be don't understand sunk costs.

Now the viability of the athletics department is even more important because it is linked to the financial health of JQH Arena.

"If you don't have athletics, you can't pay off JQH," [new president James] Cofer said.

So you lose more money on sports, but gosh darn it, you're slowly paying off the arena. That's called throwing good money after bad, even in the Ozarks, and you might lose less money dropping the athletics and having the bank foreclose on the arena. Springfield is close enough to Branson that some country-music promoter might be willing to work out a short sale.