Men and women continue to participate in college sports at greater levels over all every year, but rapid growth in spending on high-profile sports like basketball and football, not the federal gender-equity law known as Title IX, have contributed to a decline in participation in some other sports, according a report released today by the Women’s Sports Foundation, a group that promotes gender equity in athletics.

The report, “Who’s Playing College Sports: Money, Race, and Gender,” includes an analysis of 15 years of data on athletics participation and budgets collected by the U.S. Department of Education and the National Collegiate Athletic Association. Written by John Cheslock, a professor at the University of Arizona’s Center for the Study of Higher Education, it is a follow-up to a similar study released in June 2007 by the New York-based advocacy group.

The report aims to refute claims by critics of Title IX that the law best known for its impact on the growth of girls’ and women’s participation in high school and college athletics has expanded opportunities for women’s sports at the expense of men’s sports.

In fact, the report states, men’s participation in college sports from 1995-96 to 2004-5 increased by 6 percent, while women’s participation grew 20 percent. As growth has slowed in women’s sports, the gap has narrowed, the report states. From 2001-2 to 2004-5, participation in women’s sports grew by only 1.5 percent.

But recent years have also marked significant increases in spending on many athletics programs, the report says. Spending in Division I football and men’s basketball programs grew at an “unsustainable” rate of 7 percent a year from 1995-96 to 2004-5, leaving fewer resources for lower-profile sports like wrestling, gymnastics, and tennis, the sports often cited as casualties of Title IX, the report says. —Libby Sander