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Filed athletics finances

Who spends the most on athletic student aid

Every figure is read from the school's own NCAA financial report — the annual filing each Division I athletics department submits to the NCAA. Ranked by reported dollars, not by results.
11Schools ranked
FY2016Fiscal year
$57.87MCombined athletic student aid
831Reports parsed

Scholarship dollars awarded to student-athletes.

Rank / schoolReported athletic student aidChange
01

Georgia

$11.86M · $11,855,375

no prior year
02

Texas

$11.75M · $11,747,308

no prior year
03

Georgia State

$7.31M · $7,313,407

no prior year
04

Central Michigan

$5.54M · $5,535,288

no prior year
05

App State

$5.43M · $5,426,717

no prior year
06

Texas State

$5.22M · $5,218,297

no prior year
07

Southeast Missouri State University

$3.47M · $3,468,642

no prior year
08

Akron

$2.74M · $2,739,501

no prior year
09

Bowling Green

$2.44M · $2,443,044

no prior year
10

Georgia Southern

$2.13M · $2,125,967

no prior year
11

Marshall

$2 · $2

no prior year
How to read these rankings

These figures come from filed NCAA financial reports collected in our document corpus and parsed from the report text. 831 reports parsed cleanly; 56 could not be read and are absent from these rankings, so a school missing from a year has not necessarily reported nothing.

Football and basketball views come from the report's per-sport allocation tables. They cover recruiting and team travel, not aviation alone: commercial airfare, buses, hotels, meals, and other eligible costs share the same lines. A school can also leave some expenses unallocated.

Private universities have no public-disclosure obligation and generally do not appear. Fiscal years are not uniform — most close June 30, but some schools close on a different date, so a single “FY” column compares slightly different periods. Schools also categorize inconsistently between reports, so treat cross-school gaps of a few percent as noise rather than signal.