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News is circulating about between a few elite, well-endowed colleges and the rest of higher education. A Congressional investigation into , the fears of at state universities as the economy declines, and the new, expensive at have added fuel to the story and brought focus to a worrisome picture that has been developing for some time.

[slideshow] The widening wealth gap is also a stark reality in the world of college sports. Just as most of the higher education media attention traditionally has been given to elite colleges and their spending decisions, most of the interest in athletics spending is directed at a small number of big-time football and basketball programs and conferences.

Now the institutional spending gap is starting to get more notice. But there aren’t a lot of feasible solutions being offered to reverse the trend, mostly because there aren’t any easy ones (for example, using the endowment returns of elite colleges has yet to be picked up).

In the basketball world, however, there is an entity with spending power that can help control the gap: the NCAA. The NCAA has its own, significant revenue stream from to broadcast the final basketball tournament in March. And it has the power to distribute this revenue among NCAA schools as it sees fit.

Alcorn State: A “Have-Not” Basketball Team

Unfortunately, the sports media generally isn’t interested in covering the plight of struggling, low-budget programs. They want glitz and glamour, all of the of big-time programs. They want to show you that college athletes are being treated like royalty with facilities .

That’s why we at Higher Ed Watch were pleasantly surprised to find , a small HBCU in Mississippi. The basketball team competes in Division I as a member of the Southwestern Athletic Conference (SWAC), and the school is rarely ever mentioned in the national sports media (and likely only in passing as the alma mater of Steve McNair, the quarterback of the Baltimore Ravens).

Dana O’Neil of ESPN.com highlights the extremely poor, run-down state of athletic facilities at schools like Alcorn State, and the lack of resources that would seem like basic necessities at any big-time school:

Late checks, money crises, ice machines that don’t work, a student serving as athletic trainer without any formal training or CPR certificate, a basketball budget that wouldn’t cover the expenses of one athlete at a top-tier university, a staff made up of just two coaches, and road meals that include whatever’s on the local buffet restaurant menu — that is the choppy river that carries Alcorn.

She also notes that the wealth gap (and in turn, the competitive gap) did not used to be as wide, but that the commercialization of college sports has produced two extremes of haves and have-nots.

Alcorn State’s entire athletics program had an operating budget of a little more than $3 million in 2007, ranking it 337 out of 339 schools in Division I, . Its basketball team’s budget was only $306,885, and operating expenses per player were $919. Ohio State, the wealthiest and most extravagant athletics program, has an operating budget of $109 million overall, more than $4 million for basketball, and $125,602 per basketball player.

When one team can’t even afford a treadmill or a full-time trainer while a “players-only entrance, a lounge with six flat-screen TVs, three videogame systems and a juice bar,” it shouldn’t be hard for the NCAA to figure out where it should concentrate its in annual basketball revenue.

But right now, that money is not being sufficiently targeted to the schools that actually need it to sustain athletics programs. Instead, it’s having the adverse effect of contributing to the commercialization of big-time programs.

Next week we will write more on how the NCAA currently distributes its revenue, and how it could change its allocation formulas to help sports teams at places like Alcorn State stay alive and continue enhancing the educational experience of their athletes.

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