Hidden Student Fees Diverted to Athletics

Or you do what they do in NCAA Division III...no scholarships....my alma mater does it and you have to keep a good GPA to stay on the team..

North Carolina Wesleyan College |

 

Make no mistake, DIII schools give scholarships to athletes, they just get creative in how they hand out scholarship dollars. A student may not get an "athletic" scholarship, but the do get scholarships for "extracurricular" activities. The Ivy League is the same way, there are no athletic scholarships there, but somehow that kid (who happens to run faster than average) with a 3.4 high school GPA, whose family has a household income of $300k a year, somehow manages to get $30k in scholarship dollars.

 

I agree. They mask it. It is just not so up front.

 

It's true that Ivy League or Division III schools can offer particularly generous financial aid packages to applicants who are identified as strong athletes.

But if such a student subsequently fails to make the team, or has an injury, or decides to drop sports to concentrate on their studies ... then they still keep the money. The school can't take it back, because the aid can't be offered contingent on athletic performance (as an athletic scholarship can be). So it's not the same thing.

Also, note that the Ivy League plays in NCAA Division I, where athletic scholarships are perfectly legal and normal. The Ivies have no need to circumvent NCAA restrictions on athletic scholarships -- because the NCAA hasn't imposed any such restrictions on them. The Ivies don't offer athletic scholarships because they have voluntarily agreed not to; in other words, the restriction is self-imposed.

 

I don't object to college sports teams that are self-supporting. However, I sometimes think that colleges might be fudging their statistics to keep the teams well-funded. I never understood what all this sports-madness has to do with the academic enterprise.I live in Arkansas, where impoverished illiterates with no teeth are devoted to the University of Arkansas football with an intensity that can only be described as religious. I guess the university sports madness is something we inheirited from the British.