The other day I was flipping through public policy maven Charles Clotfelter’s new book Big Time Sports in American Universities (you can get the gist via this interview on YouTube). It reminded me to check up a bit on a subject which intrigued me a few years ago, namely the evolution of sports scholarships in Canadian universities.

Fifteen years ago, Canadian athletic scholarships were still both small and rare: even in 2001-02, CIS schools were distributing just $3.4 million in scholarships to 2,439 athletes. By 2009-10, those figures had risen substantially: now, just over 4,000 students per year receive a combined $10 million in athletic scholarships (all data from CIS’s statistics page).

But what’s really interesting is where the increases have occurred. Since 2001-02, scholarships at prestige schools like U of T, UBC and Alberta haven’t increased that much. The Atlantic schools for the most part have kept their increases below the average in the rest of the country (the exceptions being Dalhousie, up 395% to $414,000, and Acadia, up 477% to $550,000), though it is nevertheless significant that this tiny region, home to less than 10% of Canadian students, accounts for 32% of all scholarship spending.

No, the real change in Canadian athletics is happening in big central Canadian universities – basically, the OUA plus the Anglophone Quebec universities. Check out some of these eye-popping percentage increases: McGill up 664% to $222,000, Concordia up 886% to $224,000, Carleton, up 1138% to $265,560. And that’s only the ones for whom it makes a modicum of sense to express change in percentage terms, i.e., who were spending more than $20,000 to begin with. We could get into others: Queen’s, up from $18,000 to $177,000, McMaster up from $5,000 to $218,000, and Wilfrid Laurier, up from $12,000 to $299,000.

Is this really where these universities want to be seen to be spending money on the eve of a serious downturn in public funding? Even assuming most of this is from alumni donations (which I suspect is not in fact universally the case), what’s the point? Have these universities become noticeably better at inter-university sport? Or has a scholarships arms race just created windfall benefits for a particular group of students?

Sport is about performance. It would be nice if we thought of university budgets the same way.