Sports has been the undoing of US education in schools [1] earlier and now it seems even in higher ed. The sooner they get rid of sports from educational institutes the better for them.
[1] http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2013/10/the-case...
Also, The Atlantic is not a reliable source. It prints garbage like this:
"Football at Premont cost about $1,300 a player. Math, by contrast, cost just $618 a student."
even though everyone at the school takes math, very few play football, and not everyone involved in football is a player.
Atlantic may or may not be a reliable source. What about this? A coach is given a whooping $7,004,000 salary.
Michigan head coach Jim Harbaugh is in his first year with the Wolverines and sits behind Saban with a $7,004,000 total pay. [1]
[1] http://www.si.com/college-football/2015/10/08/highest-paid-c...
On the wider scale, extracurriculars only affect[2] share-of-students rather than increase the total number of students[1], so such programs have a globally negative ROI. But each individual university is making a rational decision.
[1] I'm assuming there's a negligible percentage of students that would avoid college entirely if no or very few colleges had football programs. It's safe to ignore football scholarships, because you still have the option of giving the students free money, which is cheaper than giving them free money and also running a football program.
[2] I'm also assuming the football program itself doesn't generate enough revenue to offset its costs, and only affects enrollment. I honestly don't know if they make enough money in tickets and trinkets to offset the debt service for a stadium, salaries for coaches, free tuition for students, etc. If the ROI is positive(or even negative, but with a positive cap rate), then it might be rational economically to continue them.
How can this be true in the case of a mathematician who writes something that many/most of the others use?
Mathematicians who write software are no more likely to be "truly making the world better" than those who prove theorems and teach hundreds or thousands of students every year.
I'm not saying anything about Stein here. He's a rare mathematician: strong on theory and practice, a passionate advocate for his causes, and a respected teacher. But there is a danger of missing the real point here -- most good things don't get funded or recognized. This has gone on for centuries. The funding situation now in the US (for both theory and practice) is better than it has been almost everywhere for almost all time.