Invesigative Report: Tuition

 $29,125

By Gwen Schultz

It’s the full tuition for a boarding student at National Sports Academy.

It may seem like the school is charging a lot for tuition, but here are the facts.

The overall budget of the school is $2.5 million, and it seems as though every penny is squeezed in order to make the school function.

The biggest expense is payroll, which includes the salaries for administrators, teachers, staff, and coaches. I couldn’t get an actual number for the payroll, but I do know that it gets very expensive when factoring in benefits, social security, and government taxes.

The second biggest expense for NSA is financial aid, and when considering financial aid, there are two things that one must keep in mind.

Educating tomorrow’s Olympians is expensive

1. There are few full-pay students. One of the great things about NSA is the amount of financial aid that it awards: 30% of the overall budget goes to financial aid. Some of the full tuition goes to helping fund this financial aid, and the average award given is 25-35%.

2. Tuition is about 82% of the overall budget. What we pay in tuition does not even come close to paying for all of the things that the school has to do for the students.

There are the expenses of the athletic programs (which athletic fees do not fully cover), the leases on the vehicles, insurance on the building and the student-athletes, department budgets, the dining room, and finally repairs and maintenance.

The school does, however, have other major sources of income. Fundraising, which is overseen by Angela Price, the Director of Development, is biggest source of income after gross tuition.

She works with trustees and alumni to raise money for the school, and has raised $300,000 in the last year.

Steve Preston, Chief Financial Officer of NSA, mentioned that getting participation from alumni is the most important way to make sure the school will have sufficient funding. After graduating NSA, alumni are depended on to give back to their school.

NSA also has investments that earn money, a small amount of government funding, summer revenue (a big one), as well as revenue from selling school apparel.

In terms of an endowment, Preston said, “we don’t really have one.” He added that, “if we had a big endowment, we might be able to have a nicer building and the ability to offer even more scholarships.”

The school is, however, looking to make economical improvements around the building.

The addition to the dining room was a great expense, but in terms of energy conservation it looks like it will be well worth the price. Preston said that he looks forward to comparing energy bills from this year and past years to see how much money was saved.

Occasionally there will be those students who hold grudges about the quality of food in the kitchen or the lack of space around school, but if you think about it, we really have everything we need to be comfortable in this school.

And, in the end, most prep schools that are comparable to the academic and athletic standards of NSA have tuitions bordering on $40,000.

Preston mentioned that hidden expenses, such as attorney fees when the school must pursue money from those student-athletes who leave with balances still due, are what the school really cannot afford to deal with.

So, is the school struggling to keep up with all the adventures and mishaps of the National Sports Academy? The answer: a little bit.

It probably didn’t help that, during my time talking to CFO Steve Preston, Mergs (a ski coach) popped in the door to inform Steve that one of the mirrors on his car was just knocked off by one of the smiley buses.

Steve just looked at me, shrugged, and said, “things like that.”