I doubt executive salaries make up a significant portion of any school's budget. Overpaid non-executive administrators are a much larger cost in aggregate, because there are so many of them.
"compensation of a single person like Zimmer now approaches the reported inflation-adjusted $3 million annual operating deficit that ended a community resource benefiting both medical students and trauma patients."
UChicago spent $446M on academic salaries, $889M on staff salaries and $338M on benefits (not broken out into academic vs non-academic) in the the 2011-2012 fiscal year that Zimmer's compensation temporarily spiked to $3M. It is safe to say that over $1B was spent on non-academic salary and benefits (administration), which dwarfs both Zimmer's compensation and the $3M operating deficit.
Research is typically a profit center for the university. The standard cut (known as "overhead" in the biz) is 30% of research grants. Capital equipment (typically defined as stuff costing more than X dollars) is taxed at a lower rate (usually 10%). Research assistantships are also charged 30%. Also, any modification to lab facilities (electrical or carpentry for example) is usually required to be performed by university staff at a cost (to the grant) of around 2 to 3 times union rates.
In the private university I work for (in research) the University keeps all patent revenue, keeps a portion of all grants, and requires the lab to pay for space- I was really surprised to find out how much went towards that. There's also a lot of really annoying charges, like costing $180 to reactivate ethernet jacks that they deactivate when a device hasn't been plugged into a port for three months.
For everyone else... I'm pretty sure sports COSTS money.
That said... keeping a few young ladies running track can't possibly be the cause of the imbalance people are talking about. I'm pretty sure the money is sucked up by administrative and non instructional staff. But without the spreadsheets it is difficult to say anything with certainty.
Not usually. Most colleges don't have popular enough teams to turn a profit. And at the ones that do most of the profit ends up being spent on the sports teams (popular teams need big, modern, expensive stadiums). Almost no money flows from sports to education. At best there's an argument that sports helps drive enrollment and helps drive alumni donations. Though even then because of the cost of most sports programs it's questionable whether or not they break even on average.
