Faculty members at Metropolitan State University of Denver are reviewing several marketing courses in the business school that require students to sell tickets to professional sports games for a portion of their grade. The students’ ticket sales, which have taken place since 2003, generate thousands of dollars in revenue for the business school.
The requirement has angered some professors who worry that students are being exploited.
The review of the courses, begun by the Faculty Senate’s executive committee last week, came at the request of Juan M. Dempere, a professor of finance who was elected a faculty trustee on the university’s board last May.
The university acknowledges that three marketing courses in the School of Business require students to sell tickets to Colorado Avalanche hockey games and Denver Nuggets basketball games. The selling assignment determines 15 percent of each student’s grade in the courses.
Selling more tickets translates into a better grade, with “additional rewards” available to students who achieve “exceptional sales volume,” according to the spring 2013 syllabus for one of the courses, “Personal Selling,” offered by Scott G. Sherwood, a sales professional in residence in the department of marketing. Students are given 10 tickets for each of two games; each ticket accounts for 10 percent of the ticket-sales grade.
Mr. Sherwood declined to comment.
About half of the revenue from the students’ sales goes to the university foundation, which uses the money for a scholarship fund and for faculty and professional development in the marketing department, said Catherine B. Lucas, a university spokeswoman. The rest of the money goes to Kroenke Sports and Entertainment, the group that owns both the Avalanche and the Nuggets, and gives the university reduced-price tickets for students to sell.
Ms. Lucas, who said that having students sell tickets is an important experiential component of the school’s marketing program, estimated than an average ticket costs $40. An associate dean of the business school, Clayton L. Daughtrey, said the ticket-sales assignment had brought in $14,166 in the 2012-13 fiscal year.
Burden on Needy Students
Critics of the practice, including Mr. Dempere, worry that it hurts low-income students, whose families and friends often cannot afford to buy tickets. Affluent students, he suggested, can more easily raise their grades by selling tickets to well-off friends and relatives.
“The School of Business seems desperate to raise money by whatever means,” Mr. Dempere said.
He also criticized the university for not paying taxes on this income.
But the university’s financial officers have determined that the ticket sales are “part of classwork” and not subject to taxes, said Loretta P. Martinez, the university’s general counsel. Funds generated for the university, she added, are “at most an incidental benefit” of the ticket-sales program.
An early indication of the Faculty Senate’s views on the ticket-selling practice will come next week, when the group is scheduled to vote on proposals by the marketing department to establish a minor in sales and a certificate in sales as part of a new center for professional selling. The three marketing courses that ask students to sell tickets would be required courses for the programs.
Mr. Dempere, who warned that the programs would expand the university’s student “sales force,” said he planned to ask that consideration of the proposals be delayed until the professors’ full review is completed.
