RE: COA differences could be a recruiting advantage
(03-01-2015 09:09 PM)10thMountain Wrote: I guess I'm used to COLA at different posts.
When I was in D.C. COLA was huge. While I was at Drum it was small.
And yet at both posts I was able to buy pretty much the exact same living accoutrements. Similar apartments, food, etc. I just had a lot more choice in D.C.
The army calculates it to be that way so that you're not REALLY getting more or less money.
But will an 18 year old see it that way? I'm sure ASU wouldn't feel bad about telling a recruit they can offer him more money than UAZ can (even if it's not really more purchasing power)
Not a chance. The sad fact is that we're shuffling a bunch of dumbasses right through high school or we're doing a piss poor job of educating them. It's probably a combination of both and "revenue" athletes represent a disproportionately high % of these kids that shouldn't be graduating.
Quote:When the Civil War was fought: On the multiple choice test given by Common Core, less than half of high schoolers knew when the Civil War was fought. They didn’t even need to know exact dates, just that it was sometime between 1850 and 1900..
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Even though the rhyme has been drilled into students’ heads since elementary school, the New York Times reported that Common Core found that one in four high schoolers think Columbus discovered the New World after 1750, which would be after Plymouth Rock, Jamestown and other early American developments.
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If the U.S. government got rid of the Bill of Rights, a third of high schoolers wouldn’t even know what rights — freedom of speech and religion — would be abolished.
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When Oklahoma high school students were given the same citizenship test that immigrants are given, they fared way worse. In fact, three-fourths of students couldn’t name the first President of the United States.
RE: COA differences could be a recruiting advantage
(03-02-2015 10:38 AM)MplsBison Wrote:
(03-02-2015 10:14 AM)ken d Wrote: I think you are missing two key points from my posts. First, it doesn't matter how expensive it is to fly into any given airport. It costs what it costs. And every penny of what it costs is paid by the school. So every athlete pays the same thing for travel - zero.
When you take travel costs out of the FCOA at every school, you are left with somewhere in the ballpark of $2000 per year. The only thing that matters to the athlete is how much cash he will receive. I know there are differences in cost of living. The biggest differences are in housing costs, which are already covered before FCOA. That's why I said the differences would be relatively trivial. If the total cash to every athlete is @2K a year, then your players at Cal and Stanford can't be getting $2K more than anybody else. At most, the difference in costs to the athlete other than travel, food and housing are not going to amount to more than a couple of hundred dollars a year.
Again, the FCoA amounts are based on the school's admissions department giving the federal government a ceiling number for use in limiting the amount of money that students can barrow for that school.
I have to believe that the federal guidelines most certainly do not provide for air travel being included in the calculation.
It's for stuff beyond the basic expenses of tuition/fees, books, room and meal plan, but not extraneous expenses like restaurants, alcohol, parties, airplane tickets.
Besides that point, even if the schools directly pay for one or two air trips per year (which seems reasonable to me) - that's still a tangible benefit beyond basic costs.
What's to stop a coach from telling a recruit "the school will pay for a plane ticket to Cancun for spring break"? That might actually be true at some schools, and not at others.
I agree that food and housing are outside the "extra" money that scholarships will include to be considered "FCoA scholarships".
But the COL does still apply.
To me, that means if MS St. players are getting an extra $2k a year, then Stanford players need to be getting $4k a year to have the same purchasing power.
And then, how is that not a recruiting advantage for Stanford?
Let me be sure I understand you. Are you saying that if a movie ticket costs $10 in Mississippi, it costs $20 at Stanford? If a pizza costs $15 in Starkville, it costs $30 in Palo Alto? I've done a fair amount of traveling, and I've been responsible for approving the reimbursement of travel and entertainment expenses for a sales force spread throughout the country. In my experience, that kind of disparity in cost of living - when you exclude the cost of housing - just doesn't exist. Not for the incidental expenses a college student incurs.
RE: COA differences could be a recruiting advantage
(03-02-2015 10:55 AM)blunderbuss Wrote:
(03-01-2015 09:09 PM)10thMountain Wrote: I guess I'm used to COLA at different posts.
When I was in D.C. COLA was huge. While I was at Drum it was small.
And yet at both posts I was able to buy pretty much the exact same living accoutrements. Similar apartments, food, etc. I just had a lot more choice in D.C.
The army calculates it to be that way so that you're not REALLY getting more or less money.
But will an 18 year old see it that way? I'm sure ASU wouldn't feel bad about telling a recruit they can offer him more money than UAZ can (even if it's not really more purchasing power)
Not a chance. The sad fact is that we're shuffling a bunch of dumbasses right through high school or we're doing a piss poor job of educating them. It's probably a combination of both and "revenue" athletes represent a disproportionately high % of these kids that shouldn't be graduating.
Quote:When the Civil War was fought: On the multiple choice test given by Common Core, less than half of high schoolers knew when the Civil War was fought. They didn’t even need to know exact dates, just that it was sometime between 1850 and 1900..
-----
Even though the rhyme has been drilled into students’ heads since elementary school, the New York Times reported that Common Core found that one in four high schoolers think Columbus discovered the New World after 1750, which would be after Plymouth Rock, Jamestown and other early American developments.
-----
If the U.S. government got rid of the Bill of Rights, a third of high schoolers wouldn’t even know what rights — freedom of speech and religion — would be abolished.
-----
When Oklahoma high school students were given the same citizenship test that immigrants are given, they fared way worse. In fact, three-fourths of students couldn’t name the first President of the United States.
RE: COA differences could be a recruiting advantage
(03-02-2015 11:32 AM)ken d Wrote: Let me be sure I understand you. Are you saying that if a movie ticket costs $10 in Mississippi, it costs $20 at Stanford? If a pizza costs $15 in Starkville, it costs $30 in Palo Alto? I've done a fair amount of traveling, and I've been responsible for approving the reimbursement of travel and entertainment expenses for a sales force spread throughout the country. In my experience, that kind of disparity in cost of living - when you exclude the cost of housing - just doesn't exist. Not for the incidental expenses a college student incurs.
I don't doubt your experience.
There certainly is some factor which multiplies all goods, based on the area. Maybe it's not 2x ... but I used that more to illustrate the point than to state it matter of fact.
So what is your take on the OP, where Penn State's admissions office is telling the feds that it takes $5700/year above basic costs to attend PSU while Purdue's office is telling the feds $1900/year for the same??
Clearly they aren't using the same algorithm to come to the end number.
RE: COA differences could be a recruiting advantage
(03-02-2015 03:32 PM)MplsBison Wrote:
(03-02-2015 11:32 AM)ken d Wrote: Let me be sure I understand you. Are you saying that if a movie ticket costs $10 in Mississippi, it costs $20 at Stanford? If a pizza costs $15 in Starkville, it costs $30 in Palo Alto? I've done a fair amount of traveling, and I've been responsible for approving the reimbursement of travel and entertainment expenses for a sales force spread throughout the country. In my experience, that kind of disparity in cost of living - when you exclude the cost of housing - just doesn't exist. Not for the incidental expenses a college student incurs.
I don't doubt your experience.
There certainly is some factor which multiplies all goods, based on the area. Maybe it's not 2x ... but I used that more to illustrate the point than to state it matter of fact.
So what is your take on the OP, where Penn State's admissions office is telling the feds that it takes $5700/year above basic costs to attend PSU while Purdue's office is telling the feds $1900/year for the same??
Clearly they aren't using the same algorithm to come to the end number.
They absolutely are not. I may be cynical here, but if there is a disparity between what schools have been reporting to the Feds and what they want to include for athletes, it's the Fed numbers that will change, not the other way around. I believe at some point there will be a summit to decide exactly which items should be included in that basket of goods and services for the athletes. And I'm sure trips to Cancun or anywhere else for spring break are not going to be included.
BTW, I don't have access to either PSU's or Purdue's reports to the feds, so I don't know if either of the numbers you cite match their public website. But I will bet the ranch that they don't include the same items. $5,700 a year buys a lot of movies and pizza.
RE: COA differences could be a recruiting advantage
(03-02-2015 03:52 PM)ken d Wrote: They absolutely are not. I may be cynical here, but if there is a disparity between what schools have been reporting to the Feds and what they want to include for athletes, it's the Fed numbers that will change, not the other way around. I believe at some point there will be a summit to decide exactly which items should be included in that basket of goods and services for the athletes. And I'm sure trips to Cancun or anywhere else for spring break are not going to be included.
BTW, I don't have access to either PSU's or Purdue's reports to the feds, so I don't know if either of the numbers you cite match their public website. But I will bet the ranch that they don't include the same items. $5,700 a year buys a lot of movies and pizza.
The Purdue website isn't particularly helpful and seems to give a vague result. The Penn St website is very good and seems to give an honest estimate of FCoA.
It would be interesting if there ends up being some kind of "P5 chargemaster" (ala health care) that sets the cost of specific items and then how they decide which items will be included in a typical FCoA basket.
Seems like a lot of accounting work just to say they aren't paying them ...
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COA differences could be a recruiting advantage
