(01-17-2015 10:33 PM)ken d Wrote: In a way, I can understand this. I believe BC has more scholarship athletes than any school in the ACC, and one the most in the NCAA. This is going to cost them a pile of money.
Here's a question I haven't heard addressed. If schools are going to pay cash for costs above room, board, etc., are they going to pay the same amount to athletes on partial scholarship as the ones getting a full ride? The same question would apply to the amounts schools are about to pay for the use of an athlete's image. How can you prorate that? If you have one baseball player on full scholarship and another on a partial scholarship, and they both play in the same game on TV, how do you justify paying one of them more than the other? How about the scholarship football player who sits on the bench the entire season? Or the walk-on who actually plays? Or the field hockey player or volleyball player whose team is never on TV?
This is going to get complicated.
I'm going to ignore the part of your post that is essentially asking "how do you decide which athletes should have a scholarship and how much should they get?"
In regards to the question of "will this apply to partial scholarships?", I'm going to speculate (pull a guess out of my you know what).
Think of it like this: at the end of the day, every student athlete has an bill due to the school that must be paid every semester, quarter, whatever. That bill covers: 1) tuition and fees that every student must pay, 2) meal plan, if they choose to have one*, 3) room, if they choose to live in university owned/operated housing, 4) misc. costs that can be charged to a student account (this is most likely things like parking/bus pass and book store charges, which aren't necessarily limited to books**)
* - in regards to food, the NCAA recently made it so that schools can spend an unlimited amount of money on as much food as they want to provide for players. At very large programs, it may be that there is a private dining hall just for athletes which will provide every ounce of food. Or perhaps all food for athlete will be special catered. At smaller schools, this may mean that the school will pay for every athlete to have an unlimited pass to the school's dining hall(s). Or maybe a combination.
But the point is that it makes me wonder if food is going to be treated separately from scholarships. In other words, if they're just going to say that a school is responsible for providing every athlete on every roster with the amount of food and in the way that each school deems best and so feed will no longer count as part of a scholarship anymore.
** - take note that most school book stores pretty much allow you to charge anything in the store to a student account, rather than paying in cash or credit on the spot. So while books are universally understood to be "required" (though that's even debatable these days), are things like an iPod or a school hoodie required expenses?
So that said, the student (or his parents/guardians) have to pay that bill, one way or another.
Let's say that bill is $10k for a particular semester.
The previous understanding is that an athlete on "full scholarship" would get $10k while an athlete on "half scholarship" would get $5k, which pays for all or half of the semester bill, respectively.
Now however, the athlete on "full scholarship" would get $10k PLUS let's say $2.5k on top of that for "COL expenses". But the athlete on "half scholarship" would still only get $5k. Because that pays for half of the bill he owes to the school.
Why would that be true? Because, think about it. What's the actual difference between an athlete with a "half scholarship" ($5k) who receives no COL expenses and an athlete with a "quarter scholarship" ($2.5k) who then receives $2.5k COL expenses on top of his scholarship? They both owed $10k and they both received $5k in money as basically an athletic grant.
So the COL expenses money on top of a scholarship is really only relevant to an athlete whose scholarship is already taking care of his entire semester bill.
You could say that if the athlete on half had then received the COL expenses it would be as if he was really on a 3/4th scholarship. That's true, but my point is - why call that extra $2.5k "for COL expenses"? Why not just put him on actual 3/4th scholarship?
If that ends up being correct at the end of the day, then the school will in fact not be on the hook to provide the COL on top of every scholarship for every athlete on every roster.
They just have to be careful to balance the dollars between men and women!