Colleges Shift Academics to Support Sports Industry Boom

With the sports and entertainment sector expected to add nearly 100,000 jobs annually through 2034, colleges and universities are rethinking their program offerings to capitalize on the industry’s growth.

At least 10 colleges and universities plan to launch programs related to sports business and management this fall, including American University, Indiana University Indianapolis, Washington University in St. Louis and the University of Wisconsin–Stevens Point. They follow the dozens of sports business programs that have launched over the past several years, including at Georgetown University, Vanderbilt University, Chatham University and Cleveland State University.

Experts say the slew of new programs will prepare students for a variety of careers in the sports industry. They argue that sports education programs housed within business schools offer a wider range of career opportunities and align with the increasing professionalization of the sector, compared to sports management programs housed in schools of kinesiology or colleges of education that prepare students for more administrative roles.

Matthew Bakowicz, program director of the sports business management track at American University, said a degree in sports management doesn’t necessarily show what a student is capable of, whereas a degree in finance with a sports management specialization says, “‘I understand financial concepts, I understand economic concepts, accounting analytics, NIL, salary cap management.’ It makes them much more attractive to an organization who’s specifically looking to fill a need.”

American University’s sports management specialization within the Kogod School of Business is a 15-credit track in its business and entertainment major, enrolling 25 to 30 students per year. Students also have the opportunity to shadow the university’s athletic staff and leadership to work on sporting events and have easy access to internship opportunities with local sports teams.

Out of the seven professional teams in Washington, D.C., “every single one of them has an American University student working in the front office or as an intern, as of right now,” Bakowicz said.

Other universities are offering a range of sports business programs, including specializations, minors, majors and graduate degrees.

Indiana University Indianapolis, for example, plans to launch a business of sports co-major next month, where students will have a primary major in the business school and take additional sports-related classes. The co-major is the second program of its kind, following IU’s real estate co-major, which allows students to gain hands-on experience in the industry through internships, according to Mark Mayer, the undergraduate faculty chair of the university’s Kelley School of Business.

“When you’re a business school, you also look at your strategy and you look at what you can deliver well,” Mayer said. “We don’t want to do things just for the sake of doing them—we want to do things that are going to do great things for our students and for our stakeholder community, and that’s why we identified this program.”

Joining the Trend

Kwame Agyemang, the George and Betty Blanda Endowed Professor in Sport Leadership and director of the Future of Sport Institute at the University of Kentucky, said it’s one thing to see the boom of the sports industry and to want to be a part of it. (The global sports economy is expected to reach $3.7 trillion in 2030.) But it’s also important for institutions to have the infrastructure to create such programs.

He said colleges and universities can start off by reaching out to their alumni to identify graduates working in the sports industry, particularly in senior roles, who can play an advisory role prior to the program’s launch.

College leaders should say to them, “‘This is what we’re wanting to do. What are your thoughts on this? Who are some other people we should reach out to?’” Agyemang said. “And then going from there, maybe starting with a course or two, a certificate, and then building toward the major instead of

starting big and then try to backtrack thereafter.”

The colleges that are most successful in offering such programs, he said, are those that bring together the entire university, because “when you think about sports, it’s not just about business … it’s about communication, it’s about analytics, data science.”

Many larger schools, such as those in the Big Ten, are also realizing the value of offering students studying sports business the opportunity to work in their multimillion-dollar athletics departments, said Karen Weaver, an adjunct assistant professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Graduate School of Education.

“There’s an understanding that these students are there to learn,” Weaver said, “and that creates a perfect environment for allowing for internships or even just part-time jobs or other kinds of experiences that you simply couldn’t get on a smaller campus that didn’t have a robust financial athletic program.”

Additional Benefits

Introducing sports business programs could also help institutions attract students, especially as they seek to increase enrollment amid rising tuition and fee costs, according to experts.

“Many schools are looking for an enrollment boost, something to get students to apply to their schools, to their universities, and sport is one of those kind of ‘sexy’ majors people want to talk about all the time,” Agyemang noted.

Bakowicz said officials took into consideration that offering attractive majors is “great” for enrollment when they created American University’s sports business program. But he said the move was also about meeting industry needs.

“It’s us doing our educational obligation of meeting industry trends and needs in the working world so that students are adequately employed,” Bakowicz said.