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And can someone explain to me how these universities are in so much debt?  They charge infinite money to attend these places now.  Where does it all go?!?

Which major universities are in a lot of debt?  I missed that somehow.

And can someone explain to me how these universities are in so much debt?  They charge infinite money to attend these places now.  Where does it all go?!?

no one said the schools were in debt. it's the athletics departments of said schools that are in debt.

the athletics departments of most of the B1G schools are in pretty hefty debt. 12 athletics departments of the 16 public schools in the B1G are $90+ million each in debt. Eight of the sixteen...that's half for those counting...are $130+ million in debt. Six of the sixteen are $225+ million in debit. Illinois AD leads the way at $312+ million in debt.

why are they all in so much debt? they borrow money like no tomorrow to spend on facilities/stadiums to try and keep up with the Jones' and have huge overheard/high operating expenses think: coaching salaries, coaching buyouts, salaries, travel, etc., etc..

A lot of the athletics departments wind up in the red every year and have to burn through reserves, beg for donations, or worse take out loans from the schools- and they do this all to cover the short falls which are 100% caused by subsidizing bullshit like women's basketball, waterbuttfucking polo, women's volley ball, softball, or gymnastics- which is literally nothing but throwing money down the drain and burning a hole in the pockets of these athletics departments and the good money they actually make from football and men's BB gets wasted and turned into bad money spent providing welfare for a bunch of other sports that no one really cares for or gives a shit about. #YayCommunism! #IThoughtThisWasAmerica #WhatHappenedToCapitalism?

the judge said ya gotta do right by the women's sports - regardless of economic impact

the Husker athletic department runs in the black and has for a longtime
one reason I have hope for the future 

would hopefully vote no to the cash windfall to bail out their opponents

would seem silly to vote to bail out the gophers

I assume that you folks are also against wrestling programs, track and field, tennis, and swimming/diving, right?

FWIW, long ago--Badge847 remembers--I worked intimately on a lawsuit involving the funding of Division I major athletics. Most of the money cut from men's non-revenue sports (and women's) was diverted to football and men's basketball, not to women's programs. Right around the time that I was working on that case, Syracuse and Rutgers were two good examples: they cut a bunch of men's programs to fund more for football and basketball, because that's where they needed to invest to stay (somewhat) relevant. And that's where the debt primarily comes from: facilities for football and men's basketball.

Title IX is a drop in the bucket compared to the spending on those major programs.

I specifically asked Barry Alvarez if baseball would ever come back to UW; he laughed. It didn't have anything to do with women's sports, it had to do with the expense vs. the expected competitiveness and utility to the athletic department.

Title IX is a handy scapegoat, but it's not the problem. The problem is the arms race in football and men's basketball. 

Several reasons. First, the NCAA requires that schools have a minimum number of athletic programs to qualify for participation. For FBS, it's sixteen, with a minimum of two of each gender for Fall, Winter, and Spring seasons.

Additionally, the athletic department's historical role is not just revenue from football and basketball (good thing, because historically, most schools lost money even on those, particularly football). Competitive sports draws not just athletes, but students to a university, making them a part of the university's brand. That matters for recruiting students more broadly than athletes, which translates into all kinds of good things for the school. A person I'm close with spent his life helping small and underperforming schools increase their enrollment. One way to do that was to become good in a niche NCAA sport. The one that sticks out to me was rodeo. One of the schools he worked with in the western states focused on having a great rodeo program, not because the program would make money, but because it would become a draw for non-athletes as part of the brand of the school.

Frankly, this is how Notre Dame became a great school (not football program)--by leveraging its football success to attract more and more students, making it more competitive, turning it into a great university in addition to having a strong football program. The same could also probably be said about Michigan and Ohio State (and many other B1G schools). 

So, as part of that history, the athletic departments created and maintain sports programs that maybe they wouldn't start today. Example: Washington has a history of having a strong crew team, so Washington cares about crew.

Some schools--many, actually--also care about their standing among collegiate athletics, again, as a selling point, beyond the revenue sports. Stanford doesn't spend enough on football to truly be competitive, but it likes winning the Director's Cup, so it keeps 36 athletic teams (for reference, Michigan has 27, Wisconsin and UCLA have 25). That's also why Stanford routinely wins the Director's Cup: it has the most teams. Alumni (and probably students) at these schools like those programs, so they don't want to see the universities drop them.