An alert reader tipped us off to this.
According to the slide below UTEP loses more money on its athletic program than it makes.
The slide says that they raise $14.4 million in revenue and end up losing $18.0 million.
The numbers are from 2015-2016. They actually won some football games that year.
We deserve better
Brutus
elpasospeak 
That, combined with UTEP’s lack of competitiveness, might suggest it is time for UTEP to drop athletics completely.
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Wish that had a snowball’s chance in July of happening. Too many people love athletics. They can celebrate when winning, complain when losing. I agree with you though.
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The problem is, that Football is by far, the largest Moneymaker for a University. It supports the other sports that lose money, and in some cases is a huge revenue generator. Unfortunately, you have to have a winning football program in order for that to happen. So, women’s field hockey, men’s water polo, etc. cannot be sustained with a losing football program.
Unless UTEP starts winning—which doesn’t appear very likely, they will continue to lose money until happens. The problem with El Paso is that NO ONE wants to play here. Nothing to do. No national exposure. No too many athletes have gone to the pros. For every Aaron Jones or Fred Carr, there are 1,000 nobodies who didn’t go anyplace. I would be curious to see UTEPS w-L record in the last 20 years.
Texas A&M and College station? Yes, not a very exciting place to enjoy the nightlife, but it doesn’t matter because they have a winning football program and a huge amount of athletes who have gone on to the NFL. Johnny Manziel and Vonn Miller were in the same class.
UTEP has to compete with: Texas(Austin), A&M, Houston, Texas Tech, SMU, North Texas, UTSA and hell, even the San Marcos Bobcats.
They should do what the smaller Catholic Univrsities do (Georgetown, St. Bonaventure, St. Johns, Gonzaga, St. Mary’s, Loyola, etc) and Focus on Basketball, which is ONE strength that UTEP does have.
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get rid of the money-losing sports and reduce the cost of tuition
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The state university I got my Master’s degree at in Alabama has no football team. Their strongest team is ice hockey. That state recognizes that its university system needs to target different universities at different things . Some schools (notably Alabama and Auburn) focus on the needs of traditional students and have outstanding sports programs including football. Others like the University of Alabama in Huntsville are more focused on the needs of working students. They were offering evening Master’s degree programs in the 80s tailored to the needs of local employers. Similarly my husband went to a state university in Illinois with no football program. They have a basketball program and once again, it is a commuter school. UTEP keeps trying to morph itself into a Tier One University. It is just a step above a commuter school and if it did a better job of focusing on that mission, perhaps its graduation rates would be higher. The root cause of tuition inflation is that easy availability of student loans has made cost control a lost art. Universities waste money on programs that don’t pay for themselves (and use the argument that those programs help them better compete against other universities).
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