CSU's lesson in football 101.

• Author: Schley, Stewart
• Position: SPORTS biz

LIKE ALL ARTIST RENDITIONS OF BUILDINGS-TO-BE, a drawing of the 42,000-seat football stadium envisioned for Colorado State University is irresistibly grand: a picturesque Saturday, the sky drenched in sunlight, fans strolling toward a stadium nestled into the south end of the campus, stately mountains etched across the background. As a CSU alum, it gets my inner Ram all woozy.

The picture-within-the-picture is muddied though, by a dreary economic storyline:

* Colorado has gotten into the habit of dealing with state budget pressures by adopting an inventive approach to higher-education funding, which is to just let Reagan be Reagan. True, there is no legitimate link between that Republican cliche and state education policy, but conservatives seem to really like the expression, so I thought I'd try it out. It's neat to type, and it nicely obfuscates the fact that our state's leaders like to espouse the virtue of an educated workforce while denying financial support for it.

* Because Colorado ranks poorly among states in perstudent funding for higher ed, we leave huge revenue chasms for school administrators to fill. There aren't many solutions out there, though. Bake sales still can't overcome the whole freshness stigma (who can forget the University of Miami croissant scandal of 2007?) and it's increasingly deficit for schools to sneak that $9,500 per semester "student activities fee" past parents.

* That leaves one choice: Convince out-of-state kids that attending college in Colorado is a Special Experience. This is what I like to think of as the Lawrence Kimble strategy. Lawrence was (and is) a good friend from Minnesota who fell in love with Colorado during a family vacation. He and I met at CSU, where we both enrolled in the journalism program. We had a nearly identical class schedule, ate the same meals at our residence hall and used infrastructure resources (paper towels in restrooms, air conditioning at the library, the on-campus Frisbee golf course) with what I suspect were similar patterns. His tuition, though, was way higher than mine, because his Experience, as an Out of State Student, was Extra Special, while mine was merely Special, but in an in-state sort of way.

* The answer: football. A prominent football program, advocates say, will keep CSU's recruitment brochure at the top of the pile every spring...