Use sports money on education

Your recent press releases concerning Delaware Valley athletes who were accepted at Colgate University got me thinking. While no one knows exactly how much DV spends on sports - the facilities are multiple-use, the coaches sometimes teach, busing and utilities operate under existing contracts, etc. - let’s say DV spends 5% of its budget on sports. That’s $3 million a year. (The number could be a lot higher but not much lower.) That kind of money, if devoted to helping graduating seniors with their first year of college, would cover the entire graduating class at schools like Penn State, where most of them go. Or it could pay for 100 students at places like Colgate, Rutgers, UMass, UConn, USC, UCLA or Syracuse, all very good schools. At the extreme, it would cover all costs for 60 students at the nation’s most selective and expensive private schools - the Ivies, Stanford and MIT, for example. In other words, that money could be much better spent. As for sports, we could make the facilities available all summer long with volunteer coaching and referees; let the kids knock themselves out ten or twelve hours a day for twelve weeks, then have a huge DV Invitational Meet, give out medals and trophies and be done with it for the school year, when education becomes the priority. Why is it we don’t hear much about education these days? Tony Splendora Milford