What is the EADA Survey in College Sports?
The EADA survey is one of college sports most useful reports for understanding where the money in college sports actually goes. I said last week that I wanted to spend some time looking at the financial performance of the Big Ten teams and the best way to do so is via their EADA surveys. The 2025 data is not yet available on the public database, so whilst waiting, I wanted to ask “What is the EADA survey in College Sports?”. It will serve as a useful backdrop for my next piece of work.
It Starts With Regulation
It is worth spending a moment to set out the high-level timeline of key regulation.
I will start with the Higher Education Act of 1965. This act essentially authorised and governs federal student aid. One of its purposes was to make universities accessible to a wider range of people, which required some federal funding.
In 1972, Title IX was passed which set out that no person can be discriminated against based on sex, in any educational programme receiving federal funding. College sports are the tip of the spear when it comes to this act as the most visible testing ground.
By the early 1990s it was felt that there was limited public reporting regarding Title IX, especially in college sports and greater transparency was required. The EADA was passed in 1994 to provide the mechanism for this to happen.
The EADA stands for the Equity in Athletics Disclosure Act. It’s a piece of legislation that requires any college or university receiving federal financial aid funding to publicly report information about its intercollegiate athletics programme every year.
The EADA acts like a consumer protection measure. It gives prospective student athletes an insight into whether a university is living up to its obligations on equality and how much focus (in terms of resources) their chosen sport gets. Schools submit their data to the US Department of Education, and the full dataset is publicly available to download.
Who Must File Returns?
Any institution that receives federal funding (under Title IV of the 1965 act) and operates an intercollegiate athletics programme must file. This practically covers most US universities.
The dataset therefore runs from the Power Four giants down to small Division III colleges. There are thousands of schools in there.
Schools must file their data with the Department of Education by the 15th October for a 12-month period normally to 30th June. This information is then available upon request from the schools, until the data is uploaded into the public database, at some point later the next year. Some schools (like Oregon) choose to post the EADA returns on their website but this is not mandatory.
The reason why I am waiting for the 2025 figures is that it gives you a consistent, comparable data across all schools. Every school is filling in the same form.
What does the data tell us?
The EADA covers several distinct areas.
Firstly, it covers participation numbers. Each school reports how many student-athletes compete in each sport, broken down by men’s, women’s, and mixed teams. For Big Ten schools, that range of sports is broad, from football, basketball and soccer through to fencing, rowing, rifle, water polo, and gymnastics. It gives you a real picture of the breadth of a college athletics programme beyond the sports that get TV time.
In addition it covers athletic aid. The data shows total scholarship expenditure split between men’s and women’s programmes. This is one of the core equity metrics. It tells you whether scholarship money is being distributed proportionally across genders relative to participation numbers.
The third area of interest is recruitment expenditure. The reports set out what each school spends recruiting athletes, again broken out by men’s and women’s programmes. In the Big Ten, these numbers can be substantial.
It also covers coaching staff. This section is more granular than you might expect. It covers head coach and assistant coach salaries and numbers, broken down by sport, the gender of the team being coached, and whether coaches are employed full-time or part-time. It is not always a clean per-person figure as in some cases it reports a combined total across a group of coaches.
Finally, we get a breakdown of revenues and expenses by sport. Total revenue generated and total operating expenditure for each sport, which is where football’s financial dominance becomes immediately visible in the numbers.
What The Data Doesn’t Say
It’s worth being clear about the limitations. The EADA captures what schools choose to report within a defined framework, and it doesn’t fully break down where revenue comes from. You can see that a football programme generated a certain amount, but the split between TV money, ticket sales, and donor contributions is not always clear. There are also known variations in how different schools allocate certain costs, which can make direct comparisons a little tricky at times.
The issue is that the report is designed to give visibility and consumer confidence, rather than as a tool for detailed financial analysis.
Is there anything better?
The NCAA has its own required reporting system called the Mandatory Financial Reporting System (MFRS). This has been around since 2003 and is the system schools use to report their annual revenue, expenses and debt to the NCAA. This is more detailed and would quite frankly, suit my needs much better as it gives a clearer economic picture. The issue is the reports are not publicly available and require freedom of information requests for the public schools. I doubt I would get them from the private schools (Northwestern and USC).
Why Does it Matter?
College athletics is going through a period of change unlike anything in its history. Conference realignment, a revised College Football Playoff structure, and the move towards direct revenue sharing with athletes are all reshaping the financial landscape of the sport. In that context, having a consistent, publicly available baseline that lets us track how programmes are spending, growing, and distributing resources across genders feels more relevant than ever.
The EADA isn’t a perfect document. But it’s the closest thing college sports has to a set of public accounts.
Next Steps
Once I have the 2025 data, I will be looking to see what it tells me about the Big Ten. More to come on that soon.
