electronic now in large part. I'm using my freshman daughter at Clemson for that data point, but I suspect ND is the same. She didn't have a single physical book freshman year. In most cases, she didn't pay to have an electronic copy either -- although she likely was supposed to. As an aside, you also can't sell or buy used books anymore either because of this -- which is a negative to some extent and of course if you prefer paper you have to print.

Food is the hard cost ND has per body they let go free. Even there, they cook more food per day than people eat -- allowing for some margin per meal. Thus, you could argue that short of adding 100's of extra students, even food is not really a true incremental cost.

The infrastructure, doorms, electriity, etc. is all a constant whether those extra 18 hypothetical people do or don't exist.

Now, to invent a sport and a roster that never existed before out of thin air there are other costs outside of the student cost -- coaches, travel, etc. Those are incremental costs. However, this thread seems to be debating the mythical cost of a scholarship to a college. The reality is the education, room and board part is essentially zero for scholarship athletes. That same money was being spent with or without them.

ND sets a number of undergraduate students it wants (and has room for). Any scholarship athlete taking the spot of a regular student is an opportunity cost. Namely, that another student would be paying $70,000 a year for that spot. If you add 18 more available spots, none of that changes.

(The fact that most students get financial aid is irrelevant entirely because those funds come from a completely different source and are discretionary...ND can give or not give need-based scholarships as it sees fit).

So scholarship "slots" actually DO cost the university $70k per year in tuition, room & board it would've had from someone else had that athletic scholarship not existed.

1. That Notre Dame is 100% full at all times, that there is not room for any more students in classes.

2. That Notre Dame can predict to the last student how many of the people Admissions accepts will enroll rather than working with a range of the number of accepted students who will enroll. Therefore there is not an empty bed or room on campus.

But there is room for a few more students in almost every class. The marginal cost of adding the 26th student to a 25 person class is the cost of the textbook.

The percentage of accepted students who choose ND over other schools that have accepted them varies every year... varies within a tight range, but varies nonetheless. 2,000 might accept one year and 2,400 might accept the next year (example numbers, not data from Admissions). The admissions model leaves some room for an unusually high acceptance rate, so there are empty beds almost every year. Unless every bed on campus is full, the marginal cost of room and board is the cost of filling an otherwise empty bed, not zero but not the fully loaded cost of room and board.

I remember a couple of years in the 1970s that were so full that upperclassmen were forced off campus, but a lot of dorm capacity has been built since then.

look, I’m not being hostile or mean, but your arguments just are not accurate.

It is always possible to make room for one more student at ND. It is by definition never physically full. It is only logically full -- an artificial number where they decide to not allow others in, but not tied to physical space. They can by definition always make a senior move off campus, so it never is full. But, it virtually never comes to that because there is always attrition during a year, rooms opening up, and my freshman year they used every single study lounge in Grace Hall to hold 6 per floor, 11 floors -- for example.

There's a much higher percentage of students living off campus now than before too -- upwards of 10% now versus 1-3% circa 1989. The point being it is even easier now than before to shift people off campus if needed.

to play women's hockey.

Also, dorms are at capacity ... and with the mandatory 3 years of on campus living going on line this fall, dorms will have much less flexibility.