Bunker Hill Community College in Boston, Massachusetts, assigned $35,613 to its women’s basketball teams for 2024. U.S. Department of Education figures show this total is $497,313 less than the Massachusetts average of $532,926 spent on comparable programs.
The allocation represented 5.2% of the school’s entire athletics budget for 2024.
Bunker Hill Community College’s overall sports spending has climbed by 380.2% since 2010.
Basketball is among the most popular collegiate sports in the United States along with football, and high-profile NCAA programs draw fans and television audiences comparable to those of the NBA. March Madness and similar tournaments attract millions of viewers annually.
Athlete compensation has undergone significant change after a federal settlement permitted colleges to directly distribute revenue to players for the first time. The settlement also compels the NCAA to pay $2.8 billion over 10 years in back damages to athletes who participated from 2016 onward.
By 2022, following continued legal and legislative action, student-athletes earned the opportunity to benefit financially from their names, images and likenesses with a shift in NCAA rules and state legislation.
The NCAA reported about $900 million in revenue from March Madness and associated Division I men’s basketball tournament media rights for fiscal 2024, making basketball its leading revenue producer.
| Year | Basketball team’s expenditures | % from grand total sport team expenditures |
|---|---|---|
| 2020 | $33,584 | 14.1% |
| 2021 | $0 | 0% |
| 2022 | $25,150 | 10.7% |
| 2023 | $31,399 | 16.4% |
| 2024 | $35,613 | 5.2% |
Information in this story is sourced from the U.S. Department of Education. The original data is available here.
