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Hello reader! Welcome to Higher Stakes, your North Carolina higher education newsletter. I’m reporter Jane Winik Sartwell.
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This week, the UNC System’s Board of Governors will meet in Raleigh. It’s set to be a packed two-day affair. Here are some items that stood out to me when reviewing the Board’s materials:
In this tumultuous and transformative era of college sports, the UNC System is taking a hard look at athletic department finances. That may mean taking steps to more closely monitor and hold programs accountable, the Board’s meeting materials reveal.
By and large, athletic departments are not money-makers.
“No UNC System [athletic] program is fully self-sufficient: athletics-generated revenue covered approximately 64 cents of every dollar spent in fiscal year 2024-25,” the report reads.
While NC State and UNC-Chapel Hill are the schools that “come closest to paying their own way,” even those powerhouses struggle to completely break even. NC State is projected to face an $18 million athletics department deficit. UNC-Chapel Hill ran a $15 million deficit in FY2025, and its budget for its football program alone is rising more than $8 million per year.
Those increasing costs affect the academic mission of universities, the report says. “Every subsidized dollar competes with academic priorities,” the report reads. “… [R]evenue sharing is already ‘affecting academic budgets.’”
Risks like this one “become challenging to manage if athletic revenues can’t keep pace with spending,” the report says.
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This week, the Board of Governors is set to explore “a policy framework that keeps athletics financially responsible — competitive where we choose to compete, without open-ended subsidies from institutional funds that carry other obligations.” That could include subsidy limits, approval requirements and reporting standards, according to the report.
We’ll see how their discussion goes this week.
UNC-Chapel Hill received a $35 million federal research award to help doctors use artificial intelligence to diagnose rare diseases. Researchers at UNC will help link “scattered, inconsistent, or incomplete” data like “health records, insurance claims, medical imaging, even drug molecules.”
“Designed to power AI-driven insights, new and existing tools will enable analysis of these large-scale clinical and biological data to help rare disease experts make earlier diagnoses, better inform medical care, and accelerate treatment discovery,” the university’s press release about the award reads.
It’s a joint effort between UNC and Emory University.
Major tech companies like OpenAI, Anthropic, Amazon Web Services, Google and Palantir are supporting the project.
It’s connected to UNC’s work on the All of Us project, a federal effort to amass a huge data set of health information from consenting Americans.
Thanks for reading, as always. See you back here next week.
— Jane Winik Sartwell
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