Simple answer for next year: Reduce the student allotment to the average student attendance this year. Sell the remaining tix in the balcony starting with the top row of seats.
Or, don't make them part of the student package. Sell the BB student tix separately: $100.00 (that's about $6 per ticket).
It's great basketball folks. What are you doing at 3:00 PM on a Saturday in Jan/Feb?
You're making a "simple" solution on something that isn't simple at all.
Jamie has already sold the seats multiple times so he's sitting on $175 for each of those seats + the student fee associated with it. When he has to justify the student fee it isn't going to help his cause for asking for an increase if he says, "Yeah, we cut basketball tickets down by 1,000." The AD makes about $2.8 million dollars in student fees (2012's was $80/student roughly). Keeping the fee the same instead of being able to increase it even 1% would cost him $28,000.
Assuming you only sell 1,500 tickets (rough average attendance) to students you're leaving 2,000 tickets on the table at $125 each and you're going to have the same problem next year because the 1,500 students aren't all going to show up every game.
$28,000 + (2,000 x 125) = $278,000.
With 1,000 tickets leftover of the student allotment, you have to sell them at $250 each to break even not including a student fee issue.
This also doesn't account for the fact that basically no freshman would be able to get them. Alienating your future donors isn't a good business plan.
The people who want tickets are the cheap people who just want a seat in the building. There isn't much money to be made there at this point in time. Now if the balcony corners were garnering $250 for season tickets it'd be different but at $150 there's no good business reason to remove student seats. If anything, I imagine they'll actually oversell even more and lottery the big games (which comes with an even bigger set of issues).