Students Save Intercollegiate Sports : Education: They vote to increase their fees $80 a year at Chico State to keep athletic programs.

Threatened with extinction because of the deepening budget crisis in California public higher education, intercollegiate athletics at Chico State University have been saved by the student body.

In results announced last week, students voted by an almost 2-1 margin to increase fees by $80 a year to finance a dozen men’s and women’s teams.

Chico State President Robin Wilson, who had said the university could not afford the $1-million intercollegiate athletic budget, said he was delighted by the result, especially “by the size of the turnout and the margin of victory.”

Nearly 40% of Chico State’s 16,000 students voted--more than twice as many as participated in student government elections this spring.

By a 63% to 37% margin, students voted to increase the instructional-related activities fee from $17 to $57 per semester, providing about $1 million for intercollegiate and intramural athletic programs.

A boosters club and other local organizations have promised to raise another $100,000 and Wilson said the university will provide enough money to restore the $1.4-million sports budget for 1992-93.

Chico State is the second of the 20 California State University campuses to approve a fee to support athletics--students at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo did this year--but probably will not be the last as state financial support for public higher education continues to decline.

The favorable vote saved the jobs of coaches in a dozen intercollegiate sports programs--football, baseball, men’s and women’s basketball, men’s and women’s soccer, women’s softball and volleyball and men’s and women’s track and field and cross-country.

Chico State, which plays in Division 2 of the National Collegiate Athletic Assn. and offers no athletic scholarships, is not a household name in any of these sports.

However, the Wildcats have won the Northern California Athletic Conference basketball championship the last two years, defeated UC Davis in football last fall for the first time in 18 years and have fielded consistent winners in soccer and other sports.

Before the vote, Wilson said, he had seen no alternative to including intercollegiate athletics among $4.5 million in cuts he is planning for next year.

“We had a choice between educating these kids in the arts, letters and sciences or redirecting money into athletics,” he said. “The choice was between laying off regular faculty and laying off coaches. That’s a pretty easy choice.”

Although the 1992-93 state budget is being debated in Sacramento, Wilson and his top aides built a campus budget on the belief that there will be a 5% reduction in state support and that general student fees will be raised by 25%, not the 40% the Cal State Board of Trustees has requested.

At that, Chico State administrators may have been too optimistic, because it appears that state support for public higher education may be cut by 10% or more.

The president agreed to the vote on April 21 and a brief but intense campaign began.

The Chico State student body, 82% white, is one of the most affluent in the Cal State system.

Many students are from prosperous parts of the Bay Area, Los Angeles and San Diego and have come to this attractive, small-city campus at the northern end of the Sacramento Valley to escape some of the problems of urban schools.

For many Chico students an additional $80 assessment for athletics is not much of a strain, but for others, facing an increase in CSU general fees of up to $372 next year, another $80 is a lot.

Margaret Olivas, 40, the daughter of migrant farm workers, said single mothers and others on tight budgets cannot afford to pay for intercollegiate sports that they neither play nor have time to watch.

But a heavy favorable vote among freshmen and fraternity and sorority members put the fee increase over the top.