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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.
20Schools ranked
FY2017Fiscal year
$144.62MCombined athletic student aid
831Reports parsed

Scholarship dollars awarded to student-athletes.

Rank / schoolReported athletic student aidChange
01

Oklahoma

$14.02M · $14,015,222

no prior year
02

Georgia

$13.19M · $13,187,218

+11% YoY
03

Texas

$12.77M · $12,767,491

+9% YoY
04

Missouri

$10.83M · $10,831,611

no prior year
05

Buffalo

$9.42M · $9,418,613

no prior year
06

Coastal Carolina

$8.62M · $8,621,818

no prior year
07

Western Michigan

$8.61M · $8,613,182

no prior year
08

Boise State

$7.80M · $7,798,848

no prior year
09

Georgia State

$7.42M · $7,415,845

+1% YoY
10

Arkansas State

$6.86M · $6,858,838

no prior year
11

Georgia Southern

$6.85M · $6,846,751

+222% YoY
12

App State

$6.27M · $6,267,280

+15% YoY
13

Central Michigan

$5.86M · $5,862,595

+6% YoY
14

Texas State

$5.44M · $5,442,920

+4% YoY
15

UMBC

$5.03M · $5,028,337

no prior year
16

Murray State

$4.78M · $4,782,538

no prior year
17

Radford

$3.23M · $3,229,526

no prior year
18

Northern Kentucky

$3.10M · $3,096,523

no prior year
19

UT Arlington

$3.07M · $3,067,458

no prior year
20

Montana State University Billings

$1.47M · $1,466,600

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.