Editorial note: this essay originally appeared at The Giving Review.
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Last weekend, the Illinois Fighting Illini men’s basketball team soundly defeated the Iowa Hawkeyes to advance to the 2026 NCAA Final Four and have a shot at becoming national champions. While the Illini have competed in the Final Four six times since 1949, most recently in 2005, they have never captured the title.
The team from America’s heartland—which features what many have called the “Balkan Five,” including players from Croatia, Montenegro, and Serbia—reflects a broader transformation in college sports: its financialization. Since 2021, and with expansion of it since then, college sports’ “Name, Image, and Likeness” (NIL) method of compensating athletes allows colleges to offer what can be really good money and great public exposure from endorsements, sponsorships, and other uses of their personal brand. As well, it provides what can be a much-better pipeline to a professional career—in this case, in the NBA.
That’s a new value proposition, and like so many other universities, Illinois has leaned into it aggressively—and in its case, so far successfully, if measured by this year’s tournament’s on-court performance. Illinois’ is not the richest NIL program, but it is among the more adaptive and innovative in how it’s used NIL to build a roster. (Compare it to Northwestern’s.)
Essentially, NIL has introduced market dynamics into college sports by permitting athletes to be compensated—as professionals are and in some rare cases, at their level—while still competing in college. Its advent has brought a measure of chaos to higher education’s Departments of Athletics—but, more important, it has extended well beyond them, landing on the desks of officials in Admissions, Student Life, Development and Advancement, Legal Affairs, Academic Affairs, and ultimately, the Office of the President.
The heart of the matter is bigger than the efficient management of personnel, policies, and finances, however. It raises more-fundamental questions: What is the institution’s purpose? Its primary meaning and mission?
Traditionally, that mission has been to provide instruction and related opportunities that develop a mature understanding of what it means to be an educated citizen—someone able to contribute to the well-being of family, friends, and the civic health of the community in which they live.
We have seen that mission diminished, if even only gradually, by the attention paid—at the institutions’ own behest—to formulate and then manage its political, economic, and cultural postures in the public arena. Now, further attention is required on their part to respond to popular, policymaking, and philanthropic reactions against these postures and their effects.
In fact, just as college athletics is now operating more explicitly within a financialized, market-driven framework, philanthropy too has, in some contexts, evolved from an expression of civic trust into a more-strategic, metrics-driven, and at times transactional enterprise.
In the case of higher ed, NIL “calls the question” about purpose and mission and what’s happening to them, bringing attention to it from those who probably wouldn’t otherwise care so much. In the cases of both higher ed and philanthropy, the logic of the market—valuation, return, competition for scarce resources—may be beginning to shape decisions that were once guided more fully by educational or civic purposes. The question is not whether such forces can be managed, but whether they subtly reorder priorities over time.
Tax-incentivized philanthropic support from private foundations and donations from individuals play an important role in sustaining higher-ed teaching and research, student life, facilities, and athletics. According to the Council for Advancement and Support of Education, total philanthropic giving to colleges and universities reached $61.5 billion in fiscal-year 2024. Foundations contributed roughly one-third of that total, or about $20 billion.
Approximately 43.6% of foundation funding supported research, 28.1% supported academic divisions, and 12.8% supported athletics in FY2024. About 42.5% of foundation support originated from personal and family foundations. Donor-advised funds accounted for $6.5 billion in 2024 giving.
Over time, and with the development of common-sense solutions by those in positions of responsibility, it is possible that both higher ed and philanthropy will right themselves. For now, take NIL and its early returns as an opportunity for continued reflection. What begins as a set of pragmatic adjustments can, over time, become a redefinition of purpose, an alteration in underlying meaning and mission.
The question is not whether student-athletes should benefit from the value they create. It is whether universities can sustain a coherent educational mission while participating in systems increasingly governed by market logic. That question sits not only with athletic departments, but with the entire college or university of which they are a part. It also sits with those who support them, who should perhaps also ask it of their own giving institutions and mechanisms.
