By Preston Derrick and Abby Aldrich
When Texas Tech University opened in the fall of 1925, it boasted a total enrollment of 910 students, almost three-quarters of whom were men.
Fast-forward to this fall, when Tech registered a total enrollment of almost 36,000 students. In 2015, men and women attend Tech in almost equal numbers, with 46 percent of the total student body being female.
But that gender ratio would not be easy to guess by looking at the athletic scholarships numbers for Tech, the state and the entire country.
Allison Terry/The Hub@TTU
In 2014, Tech gave $3.6 million to men as opposed to $2.3 million to women. If the numbers were consistent with the 2014 enrollment by gender, Tech’s scholarships and financial aid to women should have amounted to about $2.7 million.
The same can be seen across the entire state, and the entire country. It is a pattern that has not changed over time.
In 2003, the first year for which data are available online through the U.S. Department of Education, higher education institutions in Texas gave a total of $50.3 million in athletically related student aid to men’s teams and $38.3 million to female athletes, according to the Equity in Athletics Data Analysis Cutting Tool.
Jumping ahead to 2014, these amounts had more than doubled, but the gender gap remained. Female athletes in Texas received $91.9 million and male athletes received $118.8, the website shows.
Kristina Schulz, a sophomore from Keller, Texas, plays soccer at the University of Houston. Schulz is on a full athletic scholarship — meaning room and board, tuition, books, and certain fees related to courses are covered. Schulz said she is frustrated that men athletics give out higher amounts of scholarships.
“If we get more money, they get more money, too,” Schulz said. “It’s kind of aggravating how we do the same work as male athletes, and they still get more.”
Across the entire U.S., the Equity in Athletics website shows men’s teams received a total of $1.9 billion and women’s teams $1.6 billion, at a ratio of 54:45.
Allison Terry/ The Hub@TTU
By contrast, the National Center for Education Statistics shows that, as of 2013, 56 percent of undergraduate students and 59 percent of graduate students in the U.S. were female.
Mismatch? Not so fast. The main reason why male athletics generate larger amounts of scholarship money is simple: football.
Division I football is treated as a head count sport, or a sport that is considered to be a revenue producer. Other sports, by contrast, fall under the “equivalency” category.
According to TIME, college football is the second most popular spectator sport in America, second to the NFL.
According to the Equity in Athletics website, “while scholarships to athletes in head count sports provide a full ride, the monetary value of equivalency sport scholarships can be, and usually is, divided by the university among more athletes than there are scholarships.”
Cameron Knight ran track and field at Texas Tech on a scholarship during his freshman year . The current junior media strategies major said the gap of scholarships is because of the attention and popularity that college football creates.
“Many institutions hold football to a higher standard and want to recruit the best,” Knight said. “So, they will pay the best for an athlete.”
Men’s basketball is also a head count sport. On the women’s side, basketball, volleyball, tennis and gymnastics are the moneymakers.
Allison Terry/ The Hub@TTU
Bret Brown, a junior media strategies major and the senior student executive producer of the student produced sports show, the Double T Insider, said it is disappointing to see how the figures shaped out, but sees why there would be a gap.
“Texas Tech is in a very interesting position with having men’s and women’s teams that are at the highest level,” Brown said. “With a Big 12 champion team, like the Texas Tech soccer team, you would still think they would be closer to the same amount of money given to both programs,” Brown said.
Ronald Phillips, the Title IX coordinator for Texas Tech, said he thinks other universities are no different from Tech when it comes to the number of sports they have, but there is always room for improvement in equity in sports. Universities should always find ways to provide equal opportunities to women, he added.
An external Title IX consultant comes in regularly to evaluate the university’s compliance, Phillips said, and Tech’s last report was “a good one.”
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