@dstark, until last year, a D1 full athletic scholarship covered tuition, room, board, certain fees and an allowance for books. What was not covered was out of pocket expenses. In a rational world, this would not be a terrible deal, excepting that full scholarship athletes, to the extent that they even have the time, are capped in the amount of money they can earn in a given year and there are rules involving where you can work, how the earnings are monitored, etc. This is better than it was (when I played you could not work at all if on a full scholarship) but it is still difficult if not impossible for most Div 1 football and basketball players (and women’s volleyball too I would assume) to work. So, given that a lot of kids with the skill, drive and attitude necessary to succeed as big time football players do not come from families with large amounts of disposable income, you have kids walking around campus with everything paid for, but they can’t afford a pizza or a plane ticket home. It is crazy. The kind way of looking at full cost of attendance scholarships is to say that now these kids will be on an equal footing, more or less, with the baseline student at the school and if they want to buy a t shirt in the bookstore, or go see a movie they can.
And I hope your mom doesn’t use your computer - LOL
@ohiodad51, My mom loves football. Die hard 49er fan. M y mom is the one who told me she weighed as much as some NFL offensive linemen. I knew she was heavy but she is only 5’1" tall.
@LBad96, your commlents re the SEC are completely OT, so I’m not going to spend a lot of time responding, but your definition of “fact” is silly. UNCW (a regional university) doesn’t even offer engineering, so how exactly is it “academically superior” to Auburn or Alabama or Mississippi State?
It sounds like what you’re really trying to say is that SEC students on average (except those at the four you’ve singled out) aren’t as smart as those at UNCW, where you’re headed. (Alabama, Auburn, and Tennessee are all ranked higher by US News than University of South Carolina, BTW, which for some reason you have put on par with Vanderbilt, Florida, and Georgia).
If believing that helps you sleep better at night, more power to you. As to the quality of individual SEC schools, I think most people on CC are smart enough to trust happy parents and students who attend these schools and sources like the Fiske Guide to determine the quality of their academic offerings.
@dstark, yeah the world is imperfect and a poor kid from LA who decides to play football at Ohio State still will be likely limited in trips home from campus during his five years there. I do think that COA covers the average cost of one or two trips home, so maybe that will help with that. The real concern with COA scholarships is that schools with money will inflate the cost of attendance number to gain a recruiting advantage. So all of a sudden, the COA number at Ohio State becomes 10k a year. No way that schools in the bottom half of the Big Ten, who already have trouble recruiting against the Buckeyes, will be able to compete against the OSU brand when Urban Meyer is handing the kid 10k a year. Same problem with schools like Mississippi State in the SEC. Doubtful that the Bulldogs will hold recruits when Nick Saban says hey, come to Alabama, and by the way, our cost of attendance is 10k. Here is 5k for your first semester.
To my understanding,that is really where the IRS issues come in. How much of the cost of attendance, which I believe will be set by the schools, is taxable?
@LucieTheLakie you know, just because a school doesn’t offer engineering, doesn’t mean that it’s academically weaker than a school that does. To say otherwise IS silly. Also, just because a school is ranked higher, doesn’t mean it’s better. If you look at the South regional rankings, schools like Stetson, Samford, Belmont, App State etc, all of which have lower retention AND graduation rates than UNCW, are ranked ahead of it. Schools such as Hofstra, East Carolina, Kentucky, and UNC Charlotte, which also have lower retention and graduation rates, are considered “national universities”. Do you seriously believe that that, or the fact that they have engineering, makes them better than UNCW, when UNCW is clearly FAR better than all of those schools??
I didn’t say that South Carolina was on par with Vanderbilt, Florida or Georgia. Rather, USC and UNCW are academic equals, hence why both schools share a lot of applicants. We are also a peer institution of FSU, UCF, USF, UMass Amherst, TCNJ, Stevens Institute of Technology, and Rutgers.
Whatever, @LBad96. We get it, you love your school. Not sure why you feel the need to put down other schools to prove that it’s superior. Nobody really cares and it’s completely OT.
@LucieTheLakie No, the cost of attendance stipend is supposed to be dollar for dollar the cost of attendance number published by the school. For this reason, and assuming the published cost of attendance number is rationally related to the actual cost of attending the school, most people believe that the COA stipend will not have huge tax consequences. However, some people are concerned that the big programs (Ohio State, Alabama, Florida, Oregon, etc) will inflate their overall cost of attendance number in order to give more money to football and basketball players (and the female equivalencies). The argument runs that no one actually is billed for cost of attendance, so normal students wouldn’t care as much whether the listed cost of attendance is 3.5k or 10k. Some people argue that whatever recruiting advantage is gained for the football team by goosing the cost of attendance number would be more than off set by the number of applications the school may lose because the total cost of the school goes up. Not sure which end of te argument is better, but the lawyer in me can see a situation where COA is not let us say a featured part of the financial aid website, and that every time it is mentioned it will be with an asterisk or something to the effect that this is an estimate, and you should not take it as a hard number, blah, blah. To avoid some of this, the P5 conferences are talking about putting together a conference cost of attendance number for athletes. Something like the average of all the published costs of attendance at each school.
Not to get too far off topic, but a bigger issue with COA scholarships is on the women’s side. Remember that Title IX requires essentially equal spending for scholarships on the men’s and women’s side. So, for Alabama to offer cost of attendance to 85 football players and 13 men’s basketball players, they will have to offer the same amount on the woman’s side. But there are not 98 headcount scholarships on the women’s side. So if you assume full COA for the 15 women’s basketball players, 8 tennis players and 12 volleyball players (the women’s headcount sports) you are still 63 cost of attendance stipends short. What happens to those other 63? Do you have to make a separate award for a percentage of COA to each athlete on scholarship? Or does that money just go in the general pool, and you effectively just get more scholarships for the equivalency sports?
A lot is going to have to get worked out over the next couple years as the P5 conferences push farther and farther away from the traditional NCAA model.
@Ohiodad51, The personal exemption and standard deduction add up to about $10,000.
Allowing athletes to receive cash gifts of say $2,000 in total, should easily cover any tax from taxable scholarships for poor athletes.
The cash gifts go in an escrow account. Any amount that exceeds an athlete’s tax, the athlete can have. I am pretty sure alumni networks can raise the gift money.
“To my understanding,that is really where the IRS issues come in. How much of the cost of attendance, which I believe will be set by the schools, is taxable?”
In the pre-COA scholarship regime, the portion of the scholarship relating to food/lodging is already taxable. Tuition, books, fees, etc. is not taxable. Because full COA scholarships didn’t exist, the existing IRS rules don’t address that portion.
Now that athletic scholarships are changing to full COA, the existing rules will have to be interpreted and/or revised. The extra benes probably get taxed. Not a big deal so long as the tuition is still tax free.
Athletic scholarships are one of many tax rules in higher ed since all kinds of people get all kinds of benefits, discounts, stipends and scholarships relating to college costs. Grad students who get paid to teach; children of professors who get free tuition, etc. etc. etc.
That’s all very interesting. Certainly at Bama all the full-pay non-athletes are billed for the full cost of attendance (I see their parents kvetching online all the time!), but I always thought that was to offset the cost of all those academic scholarships, both in and out of state. I never thought about how that would benefit the football team, but it makes sense.
I don’t think they’ve built a whole lot of padding in here (aside from parking fees). The price quoted for housing is for the nicer “super suite"apartments,” which I’m guessing football players are supposed to live in: http://www.ua.edu/quickfacts/cost.html
@dstark, remember that you are talking about $400,000 a year in additional funds to raise $2,000 for each COA recipient (assuming it is limited to football, men’s basketball and female equivalents). Sure, Michigan could do it. But Indiana? Illinois? The P5 conferences contain schools not nearly as successful athletically as Alabama and FSU. You think Wake Forest and Syracuse are happy about spending an additional million a year on cost of attendance?
I don’t think it’s the fairest thing in the world for sports, but you are arguing that the integrity of recruiting of college athletes, most of which will need their academics more than athletics, should be kept up in the face of problems with the day to day lives of the athletes that are the center of a billion dollar industry? I just don’t agree with that.
Even if it will be that “unfair” competitively. I mean, even in pro sports having money buys you better players. Why should college be any different if we’re going to treat them like a pro sports organization? Still though, I suspect they could get this to be a lot fairer, as they already have a bit with the new stipend rules, which is a good step in the right direction.
@Ohiodad51, yes. It can be done. The schools don’t have to provide the gifts. Alumni will provide gifts. Those who attend games can provide gifts. Have a meet and greet autograph session where people give gifts.
Last time I went to the Metropolitan Museum of Art there was a big gift jar before you enter.
I don’t think this gift idea is hard to enact if there is a will. There are many ways to do this.
There are already people giving illegal gifts. Right?
I do not believe any school has set what they will actually offer as cost of attendance when it starts next year yet.
As I said, a lot of schools are pushing for conference wide figures for cost of attendance.
I think most football players at Alabama still live in Bryant Hall. No idea what the cost of that dorm is.
@pengsphils, if your post is referring to me, I advocate providing stipends to football and basketball players. I think the kids that are generating the millions in revenue should get to keep some of it.
COA is turning into an interesting problem. Already folks at Bama are complaining about Auburn’s higher COA, which would allow them to offer more $ to recruits…
However, COA impacts far more than student athletes. The number, which is determined by each university’s financial aid officers, is often used to help determine how much aid students can receive to attend school.
I don’t think the real issue is that Auburn can offer more to an athletic than Alabama; I think it’s that some schools have been using unrealistic low COA’s and that’s impacting all students. Why is the COA (personal expenses portion of COA) so low at Boston College ($1,400), USC ($1,580) and Syracuse ($1,632) compared to other schools? Now these low COA’s are coming back to bite them. If they attempt to raise the COA, they have to justify it to the Feds…
Anyone know if those new P5 full COA bumps are being provided to all scholarship athletes or only those who are on full athletics scholarships?
If it is the latter, then the bumps are pretty much only going to go to football, m/w hoops and a few other kids. Schollies in most other college sports are typically partials. So the net financial impact on the AD budget is a lot less than if you had to slightly bump the value of all the 25% and 50% schollies floating around.
