It's not like I could pick and choose which costs were important to me and which ones weren't. Maybe I would've been fine eating slop for having a lower meal plan cost, but slop wasn't an option, having a quality dining experience was just part of the Virginia Tech package. Things that I paid for that I never used or cared about didn't affect me directly, but they did affect someone else's experience, and the student community as a whole was enhanced because of this. There's no way I would feel the same affinity for Virginia Tech if I had lived a much more atomized life there, where the only thing I have in common with someone else is geographic proximity to them. People on this board have argued for years that athletics is inseparable from the success of the university as a whole, that the university would be smaller, lower enrollment, less prestigious, etc., if not for the prowess of sports and especially football in the 90s and 00s. If this is true, if it's to be believed, there's no way around it, it's either part of the Virginia Tech experience, or it's not. Babcock's greater point to the BOV is that the landscape is shifting such that it's forcibly shunting everyone who is only half-committed to athletics into the "not part of the experience" group, the group where sports are so insignificant that they provide no meaningful benefit to the university or its community. And that's the worst spot to be in really, it costs the most money and produces the least results. If the the board doesn't care about the results, great, let's just scrap sports entirely, they'll save at least $100,000,000 per year that they spend on academics instead. I mean look, if you're a prospective student, the only time to decide which factors are important to you and which aren't is at that selection time. If you want an engineering degree but you don't care at all about sports, there's 21 schools in the state that are ABET-accredited in at least 1 program, like a half dozen of those schools have multiple accredited programs. At the undergrad level, you will get as good of an education at any of these programs, you will come away just as smart if you went to VT or UVA or JMU or CNU. It might make a difference in terms of networking effects later which particular school you went to, but, what's a big factor in the strength of that alumni network? The affinity and camaraderie that was developed by having a strong student community, where there was something for everyone, even if it meant that you were helping subsidize someone else's experience.