That seems wrong on many levels, but let's look at numbers. What are your son's student fees? Looking at FIU, they claim
50k students in the fall of 2012, so let's use that number. Their
fees (per student per credit hour per semester) are as follows:
Athletic Fee $8.49
Women Title IX $.30
Athletic Football $7.31
Athletic Fee $10.00 (no idea why there's a second athletic fee, but there is but it's per semester)
Assuming all 50k students pay these fees, that's $16.10/credit hour x 12* credit hours x 50k students x 2 semesters = $19,320,000/year + $1,000,000/year for the second athletic fee (50k stu x $10/semester x 2 semesters) for a grand total of $20,320,000. I guess $18 million can easily be taken out of there to subsidize athletics, so I guess I'm wrong, but it seems seriously out of whack to me.
Per student, per credit hour, it's a small amount (at most 7% of a given student's tuition), so it may not even be noticed.
But I can assure you athletics had to battle to get these fees approved. When I was at one school, they wanted to build a new rec center. Everything had been approved and contracted and was about a year away from demolition on the old to build the new... but that pesky student fee increase was holding things up because the student orgs didn't approve it or wanted less than was being requested by rec sports. Ugh bureaucracy.
And to the point that scholarships are endowed... yes, this is true that *some* scholarships are endowed at many schools, but for the most part (unless you're Stanford where all athletic schollys are endowed), that's why athletic fundraising exists at universities.
* I guessed at an average of 12 credit hours per student, since the 50k isn't specified as full time or part time, nor a grad to ug ratio.