With the announcement of the Big Ten’s seven-year contract with Fox, CBS and NBC worth upwards to $8 billion dollars, it’s not just college football that will be impacted. It’s all of higher ed. And if you don’t think so, have you talked to your endowment folks lately? A TV deal for seven years, $8 billion?
Brown University’s endowment for 2021 was at $6.9 billion. And that’s if the stock market does well. Not if its football team does.
But here’s another comparison that will hit home. Grambling State’s endowment is at just $7 million. It’s barely a shadow in the Big Ten’s $8 billion dollar deal. Essentially, the Big Ten has realigned your world. The “Haves” just added on an extra layer of inequality into all of higher ed.
If you’re not thinking about what the Big Ten explosion means to every single college in America, then you’re not understanding the repercussions of an unabashed money era in higher ed, where college football is the most important tool announcing your institution’s existence to the world.
The mega deal makes the biggest research institutions in the country suddenly the research institution of the NFL. It even makes the best non-Big 10 Division 1 schools look like intramural sports. That’s why it’s time for those more traditionally inclined to reassert what higher ed is all about and to push back at the forces in this era where money seems to rule all. 
Emil Guillermo
