Agreed. And if that happens practically speaking nothing will happen because each school will announce their individual decision to not offer merit awards, of which athletic scholarships are one type. No way those schools back off need based aid only, and I don’t know how courts could require any college to offer athletic scholarships/merit.
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You may be right. But, with the expiration of the 568 exemption, I wouldn’t bet against at least one Ivy getting into the “merit” based scholarship game. It would be far easier to attract that in-demand flute player, bulk up on engineering students, maintain a robust classical studies department, etc. by offering merit scholarships to those that would otherwise have partial/full pay/loan students. Even for those that would otherwise receive 100% no-loan need based aid (not all Ivies do that), don’t discount the emotional value a merit scholarship would provide to endear a student to a school [think back to all those threads where athletes/parents claimed to get a scholarship from an Ivy, while we all know it had to be need based aid]. And, if offering a few merit scholarships also helps to keep antitrust concerns to a minimum, win-win.
You are kidding, right? These schools do not need any incentive to attract in-demand flute players, engineering students or underwater basket weavers. They don’t need to offer merit to get the students they want. As it is, they turn away thousands of outstanding applicants every year. Vis a vis athletes at the Ivies - they should be grateful for the significant admissions boost they get. Our school regularly sends athletes to the Ivies and often these students would have zero chance of admission at these schools if it were not for their sport (one admit to Brown had a sub 1200 SAT and a 3.5 W gpa). I don’t begrudge Ivy athletes their admission but it seems ridiculous that they should expect a financial incentive on top of the huge leg up they already get (and if they are financially needy the Ivies are among the most generous schools). If they want an athletic scholarship there are many, many schools where that is a possibility. The Ivies are up front about their lack of athletic scholarships - it is a choice to apply there, not a necessity.
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Alternatively, offering athletic grants in sports with high numbers of URM’s could boost that student number post an unfavorable SCOTUS ruling.
Below are the varsity sports at Brown. Which sports fit your criteria?
Men’s Sports
- Baseball
- Basketball
- Crew
- Cross Country
- Football
- Ice Hockey
- Lacrosse
- Sailing (Coed)
- Soccer
- Swimming & Diving
- Tennis
- Track & Field
- Water Polo
- Wrestling
Women’s Sports
I don’t really view this as a matter of ungrateful Ivy athletes demanding scholarships. I’m guessing this could all be resolved if the conference stopped agreeing to limit aid on the basis of merit.
It’s not as if this came out of the blue. People were warning about it years ago:
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I think the Ivy League should be run as a sports league and make rules about sports and not so much about academics. If Yale wants to give out 200 scholarships, it should be allowed to do so. If Yale wants to require all athletes to have a 4.0/1600, it should be allowed to, or to accept a much lower gpa/scores combo. The rest of the stuff - no merit aid, no pre-reads for anything (not just sports) before July 1, all decisions released at the same time on the same day- smells like a monopoly to me. What is the point of THOSE rules? The league could still release sports acceptances and likely letters on the same day.
I was watching a game today and as a woman scored, the announcer said she was a transfer from Harvard so the Ivy league, a sports league, is losing players to other schools. It may have been for money or it may have been because the player wanted a more competitive team, or didn’t like the coach at Harvard, etc., but the movement between schools is pretty active.
The Ivies aren’t the only schools that don’t offer any merit/athletic scholarships, and more schools are increasingly shifting dollars from merit to need based aid too (rather than make that move all at once). Pitt and Tulane are two examples of schools that are decreasing academic merit aid (not sure if and when they will get to $0 merit aid tho, and of course they would still be giving out athletic scholarships). The Ivy schools also have different formulas for their need based aid (which they make clear now, so as not to be colluding). I do agree the league level agreement prohibiting merit/athletic aid may be at risk, but again see a very small chance that any Ivy decides to offer merit aid…it is just against their ethos.
Probably wanted to get in their extra eligibility years due to covid…that’s another thing the league banned as one (disallowing student-athletes to stay and complete their extra years of eligibility), basically forcing athletes to move to get in all their eligibility (even tho most of the ivy league school offer master’s degrees.
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Last year 86% of recruited athletes at Harvard were white. I’d be surprised if it was much different at any of the other Ivies.
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Absolutely serious. If you compare the now expired 568 antitrust exemption to the Overlap Group consent decree, which 568 replaced, it isn’t hard to argue that the Ivies (not the students) benefit by agreeing to not compete with each other through merit scholarships. That a biologist, playwright or mathematician has other school options isn’t relevant to the question of whether the schools’ activity is illegal or not.
I’m not making a legal argument. I’m just responding to the idea of “merit” scholarships at the Ivy League which seems entirely unnecessary in terms of attracting the students they want. They certainly don’t need it to attract plenty of accomplished students in any realm - in fact they have too much of a good thing. In our current college system “merit” (or tuition discounting) is typically used to attract high performing students to a college who might not otherwise attend - the Ivy League doesn’t have that issue. Ivy League yield rates are typically nearly double that of other competitive schools.
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Exactly. Ivy League administrators say every admitted student is meritorious (obviously that is true), hence no merit to anyone…no reason to spend the time and resources to develop a merit rubric and decide who gets merit. Can you imagine that lawsuit? 
Yes, I agree with your points. Seems like the league level agreement is the issue but I don’t really see these schools moving to athletic scholarships even absent that agreement. Still, if there’s a sentence in the agreement that’s a relic of an anti-competitive past I’m fine just going ahead and deleting it.
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I cannot imagine the lawsuits. As it is, the Ivies have so, so many wonderful students that are rejected I can’t imagine why they’d give out merit when they can use that $$ to assist kids with actual financial need.
Each Ivy already has a process (formula) to make merit worthiness decisions, and the result is a non-athlete likely letter.
As Harvard’s dean of admissions and financial aid said … “Our feeling is we don’t do merit scholarships, and we don’t have those kinds of incentives, where we see somebody like that we can send the likely as a signal.”
Where this case breaks down for me is that the League rule not to offer athletic scholarships is not price fixing. It is impossible that all of the athletes on all Ivy athletic teams are full pays. Thus, the “price” of tuition paid by different athletes will be quite different – a consequence that argues against price fixing. If the League rule said that that all athletes are ineligible for any type of financial aid, I concur that might be problematic. I suspect that is the reason that the complaint alleges both a per se and rule of reason approach.
If a rule of reason is applied, I think it is a tough road. Not offering athletic scholarships has pro-competitive benefits that aligns with the students that the schools are competing for. The There are many more top academic students that want to go to Yale than that can be admitted. Thus, Yale does not need to compete for these students with merit based aid. These schools do want top academic students with low family income. Thus they should (and good for Justice for the consent K) compete for those students with needs based aid.
How does the mere act of offering athletic scholarships increase competition for these students? The most likely consequence of giving athletic scholarships is that it would reduce the amount of dollars available for needs based FA. I am not sure the antitrust laws were intended to reorient the objectives of private colleges and universities. Not only that, it is pretty ridiculous to enforce. Do all athletes have to receive an athletic scholarship? That doesn’t happen at D1 schools that do offer scholarships.
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While Ivy League schools don’t offer merit scholarships, I think it isn’t exactly true that they don’t compete for students with grant money. If a family receives a higher need based package at another selective school, some colleges including Ivy League schools (at least the ones that we dealt with) will take a second look at their calculations and find that perhaps your kid has a greater need than they originally thought. So in our experience there is some jockeying for kids through need based aid, they just won’t consider merit scholarships when they recalculate so this kind of negotiation only works for FA families --but that can be more than half their student body. YMMV
ask Brown, they have the data.
https://www.cnn.com/2020/06/11/us/brown-university-reinstates-athletic-programs-trnd/index.html
The Plaintiffs’ complaint anticipated these issues and addressed each one. If they don’t settle this early, it will be fascinating to watch the back and forth of, what I suspect will be, the brightest minds in antitrust jurisprudence.