Unrelated Actions: Ohio State Provides iPads For Student-Athletes and Proposes Tuition Increase

Ohio State University

E. Gordon Gee is the president of Ohio State University

The Ohio State University Lantern reports that Ohio State’s athletics department plans to spend $400,000 to buy iPads for all student-athletes starting this fall. The iPads will be “loaned out to the student-athletes and returned at the end of every term,” the Lantern says.

The cost of the iPads is less than 1 percent of the Ohio State’s athletics department’s $9.5 million “profit” last year. (Of course, Ohio State is actually a nonprofit, so by profit we mean revenues minus expenses.)

The move comes as the Ohio State administration proposes a 3.2 percent increase in tuition and fees for undergrads starting this year. That’s just short of the state cap on tuition increases, according to the Columbus Dispatch.

Ohio State President E. Gordon Gee told the New York Times earlier this year that public colleges public colleges and universities needed to come up with “a new business model to pay for the costs of education, beyond sticking students with higher tuition and greater debt.”

Gee said:

“The notion that universities can do business the very same way has to stop.”

The Cost of Attending Ohio State University

SOURCE: IPEDS Data Center | Download data