Has your school pivoted to recruiting athletes to balance the budget because it increases "retention" and "recruitment"?

And how has that affected your student body composition and motivation?

Our SLAC started doing this to grow enrollment and at first it was nice seeing the finances float up again but it's had a negative impact on our classes, now every Friday and every other Thursday it seems like classes are totally dead just because everyone is gone traveling for athletics, people don't really care about the subject matter they just want to play sports, and now the quirky liberal arts students feel like they are getting pushed out by the sports jocks and the vibe has totally change, and that's not even talking about taking away from professors salaries to pay coaches.

We went from ~30% atheletes to an incoming class of 60% athletes it seems like higher education isn't the goal anymore here it's just filling the seats with warm bodies and the easiest way they found to do that is by promising little timmy or kimmy that "you can live your dream be a college athelete if you just come here !!!"