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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.
9Schools ranked
FY2019Fiscal year
$80.08MCombined athletic student aid
831Reports parsed

Scholarship dollars awarded to student-athletes.

Rank / schoolReported athletic student aidChange
01

Virginia

$20.32M · $20,322,868

no prior year
02

Texas

$13.09M · $13,085,131

+3% YoY
03

Georgia

$11.64M · $11,636,034

−3% YoY
04

Buffalo

$8.31M · $8,306,107

−5% YoY
05

Georgia State

$7.92M · $7,923,239

+6% YoY
06

Northern Illinois

$7.02M · $7,016,910

no prior year
07

Central Michigan

$6.64M · $6,635,312

+4% YoY
08

UT Arlington

$3.77M · $3,772,012

+17% YoY
09

Montana State University Billings

$1.38M · $1,381,551

−2% YoY
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.