Some basic comments on data

First, thanks to Scott for setting this up and my apologies for being slow to respond. In separate conversations, Troy and Scott and I have been talking about creating a private forum of smart people doing serious research college sports. This is the first stab at an online version; the in-person version hopefully will involve beer.

The goal is to provide a venue for seeking help on research projects, exchanging news and information, and group projects. Since we have one of those, onward!

To start with the basics, colleges are requires to publish quantitative data on athletics under the Equity in Athletics Disclosure Act of 1994. A few years ago the Department of Ed began collecting these data and publishing them online. I'd encourage you to look up your own schools and see if the data make sense. A lot of the financial information is somewhat problematic, but I think it will suffice for our purposes

To show you the information we have, I've created a couple of files of descriptives here (there's two sheets of data) for the 2004-5 academic year. Take a look at them. I have full files for 2002-3, 2003-4, 2004-5, and 2005-6, and the Ed Dept website has cutting tools to download more files. The basic idea was to combine these data with IPEDS data on attendance costs to answer the questions Scott outlines below. Also it would be helpful to look at the data on a conference-by-conference basis as Kyle has discussed to see if we can say something useful about the cost of attendance.

Thoughts?