Can need based scholarship be combined with athletic scholarship? I heard the athlete has to pick one or the other but can’t have both. Also, I was told there is an NCAA “bill” on the table that is addressing this very issue. It would allow partial athletic scholarship and need base scholarship to be given to the same athlete. I would like to read more about this Bill and find out it.
There are fairly complicated rules imposed by the NCAA on whether merit aid can be stacked on to athletic aid. In addition, certain conferences have additional rules about stacking. Very, very generally stacking aid is permissible if you meet certain gpa/standardized test thresholds and the academic merit aid is available to all students, not just atheletes, equally.
Does anyone know about the NCAA Bill that is under review right now that will allow “need based funds” to be stacked with athletic scholarship funds? I’m trying to find the Bill number so I can read more about it and where it stands on passing.
Many D1 athletic programs allow “stacking” of need or merit based financial aid on top of athletic aid. Some schools do not not stack. I am very familiar with one D1 athletic program that got rid of stacking 3 years ago and is transitioning away from it as those athletes graduate. All incoming athletes for the last couple of years are either athletic aid, or need/merit based aid, no combination of the two. At the same time the school increased funding of some program athletic scholarships - I don’t know if they are fulling funding all programs or not. But now they have a clear picture of the costs of athletic scholarships, instead of this hybrid/jumbled up picture.
I am not aware of pending NCAA legislation/rules about this but this is not any area of expertise for me. If you are talking to baseball coaches, just be open and ask them your questions.
Increasing the athletic funding only works if the program isn’t fully funded. If the NCAA allows 10 scholarships for the team, that’s it and once those are given out, that’s all the coach can do.
My daughter gets about half her tuition from merit and half from athletics. The coach wouldn’t have enough room in her budget to give each team member full tuition, as even if the team was fully funded there wouldn’t be enough room in the NCAA cap. It works much better for my daughter to get some of her funding from merit aid (which she would get if she wasn’t an athlete) and some from athletics. The coach loves to recruit good students as they get more merit money and she can spread the athletic money to more athletes.
I did find this:
I would not put a lot of faith in this becoming the new rule before you start college. It sometimes takes years to get one of these proposals through, and this would basically eliminate the number of scholarships in equivalency sports, and there was no indication who initiated this proposal (NCAA, a school, coaches). The proposal immediately following this one, a change to women’s lacrosse recruiting, has been pending for about 5 years with full support of the coaches, no financial cost to the NCAA, restricting recruiting not expanding it, and yet year after year it just sits on the ‘pending’ list.