I reported today on fears of an arms race of financial aid within the Ivy League and on Athletic Director Steve Bilsky’s proposed solution — athletic scholarships.
What’s your reaction? Is a ‘great divide’ of haves and have-nots inevitable? How much would this hurt recruiting at schools like Penn? And what of Bilsky’s near-endorsement of a limited scholarship system for the Ivy League?
Please also leave any questions you have about this issue. In the coming days I hope to speak with more Ivy League coaches about it, so stay tuned. I will be publishing more reaction to the aid initiatives and answering reader comments.
Tags: financial aid, harvard
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February 14th, 2008 at 8:04 pm
I am all for athletic scholarships in the Ivy League. I don’t really see the difference between Ivy schools and schools such as Duke and Stanford (amongst a host of other schools) that manage to value academics, have standards, and yet allow athletic scholarships. If those schools can have strong athletic programs that compete on a national level, why can’t Penn and the rest of the Ivy League?
February 15th, 2008 at 11:08 am
What do you think about the propriety of the Ivy League’s “Academic Index” - which allows some schools (including Penn) to recruit more athletes with modest academic achievements than Harvard, Yale or Princeton are allowed to do?
February 15th, 2008 at 12:48 pm
Well given that a number of Harvard’s recruits for next year were also looking at Penn, it doesn’t really seem to matter. Moreover, given that a number of those recruits are not yet AI-eligible, it doesn’t seem like much of a hindrance to Amaker so far. Finally, no one should describe the academic achievements of any Ivy athlete at any school as “modest.” They are all outstanding students, and we’re talking about minor differences in achievement.
The bigger question here is whether a league can be based on “principles” that three members of the league (and no surprise which three they are) are able to change at will. In addition to the academic guidelines that have been refined over the years, an original tenet of the agreement was that students should not have to make decisions about where to matriculate based on finances. That, along with other less altruistic reasons, was one rationale behind the fin aid meetings that ultimately led to the collusion case.
Harvard is essentially giving scholarships (and Yale and Princeton, as soon as they can think of a PR line that makes it look like they thought of it themselves, will do so too). Good for them. Anything that makes higher education affordable to all is a good thing.
However, it is easier to be generous when the finances amount to a rounding error in your quarterly statement. The five schools with the smaller endowments simply can’t match that level of generosity, and so now there is one conference in college athletics where some schools are able to give more money to athletes than their conference mates.
So as to avoid making about my alma mater, let’s use Dartmouth as an example. Ivy schools have always been able to match the fin aid packages offered by other Ivy schools (a process that can no longer happen under the Harvard plan, by the way). What happens if Dartmouth decides its prospective athletes could get package X at Harvard, so they are going to preemptively match it, even if the athlete isn’t considering Harvard? No doubt HYP will harrumph about Ivy ideals and treating athletes like every other student (which is an absolute crock at every Ivy school) and ignore that it was their unilateral actions that made Dartmouth’s reaction necessary.
It’s time to add some common sense and intellectual honesty to the process and, at the same time, improve the academics of the athletes the Ivies recruit. Give full grants-in-aid and concurrently raise the AI. You’ll end up with better athletes AND better students on Ivy teams. Each year Ivies recruit athletes who are better students who chose to go elsewhere (Stanford, Duke, Virginia, Vanderbilt, etc; as well as decent but less-well-known schools like St. Joe’s, Holy Cross, Bucknell) simply because of finances. Take the financial issue out of the mix and the Ivies could increase the academic achievement of their incoming recruits overnight.
Put in safeguards. Put limits on the number of grants-in-aid a school can offer in any one sport, just the way the NCAA does on scholarships. If a school takes a flier on a kid and s/he flunks out or leaves the team to concentrate on academics or transfers, the school doesn’t get to use that kid’s grant-in-aid allocation until his/her class has graduated.
Basing your league rules on a 1954 world is as bright as structuring US national defense strategy to repel a Soviet attack from Hungary and Czechoslovakia. The college athletic, academic and financial world has changed over the past 54 years. Admit it, and develop a structure that makes sense for 2008 that enables Ivy schools to compete on a national level athletically at the same time they improve the academics of their student-athletes.
It’s not that hard. It just requires taking one’s head out of the sand (or an obvious body part). And to make it more palatable to the league office we can all agree in public that H, Y or P came up with the idea.
February 16th, 2008 at 1:07 pm
Bilko is a pompous ass