Clemson approves new athletics fee for students. Here’s what we know

Starting next year, Clemson students will pay an athletics fee for the first time.

The Clemson University Board of Trustees’ finances and facilities committee on Friday unanimously approved a proposal for each Clemson student to pay a mandatory athletics fee of $150 per semester starting in fall 2025.

The fee comes out to $300 annually per student per regular academic year (two semesters) and will be used “solely for athletic operations expenses directly associated with student-athlete services and student experience,” according to a presentation from athletic director Graham Neff.

Neff said in his presentation that every Division I public university in the state of South Carolina currently charges an athletics fee (that includes Clemson’s top rival, South Carolina, and Coastal Carolina, the state’s only other D1 FBS school).

Neff added that across college sports, the majority of Power 4 schools either have an athletics fee or require students to purchase student tickets. At Clemson, Neff said, students have “free access” to all sporting events, including up to four home football games each season (half the home schedule) via a lottery system.

That access will now come with a $150 per-semester fee that will be added into students’ tuition bills starting with the fall 2025 semester.

“Athletics is a key component to delivering the No. 1 student experience,” Neff said during a presentation to the committee Friday during the last day of Clemson’s 2024 fall quarterly trustees’ meeting.

Although name, image and likeness (NIL) compensation has become a big part of college sports, Neff, the Clemson AD, went out of his way Friday to clarify that Clemson’s new student fee will only be used on athletic operating expenses “directly” related to athlete services and student experience.

Clemson has weighed the addition of an athletics fee in the past (including about a decade ago when Dan Radakovich was the athletic director) but faced pushback and never went through with such a proposal.

The Tigers are now following in the footsteps of most Power 4 schools as well as other schools in S.C., in charging an athletics fee at a time where the costs of competition (especially in the department-driving sports of football and basketball) are rising and extra revenue, in Neff’s words, has “never been more important.”

Clemson’s total student enrollment for 2023 was 28,747 students, according to a presentation from the university. Of those students, 22,875 were undergraduates and 5,872 were graduate students.

That number will fluctuate, of course. But a $300 fee ($150 per semester for two semesters) applied to all 28,747 students would’ve generated $8.624 million in new revenue for the Clemson athletic department in 2023.

Applied exclusively to undergraduates, the total would be $6.862 million.

Clemson reported $174.276 million in athletics operating expenses during the 2022-23 fiscal year, according to the sports business website Sportico’s database .

How much are student fees at other schools?

At the University of South Carolina, undergraduate and graduate students can pay an “optional” athletics event fee of $86 per semester, according to the USC bursar’s office . That comes out to $172 per student annually.

At Coastal Carolina, the university said that annual athletic subsidy per student is $2,090, the Myrtle Beach Sun News reported earlier this year .

As a general rule of thumb, schools competing at the FBS Group of Five level (which have smaller athletic departments, revenues and operating budgets) charge students a higher athletics fee than FBS Power 4 schools.

That’s true in the state of South Carolina, when comparing the annual fees of Clemson ($300) and USC ($172) to Coastal Carolina ($2,090). And it holds up nationally, too.

The website Sportico reported earlier this year that James Madison, which competes in the Sun Belt Conference with CCU and recently made the jump from FCS to FBS, has relied on an “ unprecedented amount ” of direct student funding.

The JMU athletic department spent $68 million on athletics in the most recent fiscal year and funded $53.3 million of those expenses via mandatory student fees, per the website. Each JMU student pays $2,362 to the school specifically for athletics.

Sportico said that Old Dominion (another Sun Belt school) was second nationally in student fee subsidy but still trailed JMU by $23 million.