thoughts on HRCs free college tuition/loan plan

[Belsnickel]

(08-17-2016, 01:37 PM)Rotobeast Wrote: Much respect to you, Matt.

I'm still in the information gathering stage. I want to find out all about the awarding calculations before I come out being angry about something there is no need to be. Talking with some of my colleagues in the department that does those. But from some of the research I have already done, I don't think this is something I need to be quite as mad about. I still am not happy about it, but here is what I have discovered.

Athletic scholarships are calculated in the award eligibility and they cannot exceed the Cost of Attendance (CoA), like I mentioned earlier. This includes their entire award package. So if CoA is 10,000 then the amount they receive in total for financial aid cannot go over that. They find ways around this for athletes all the time, but that's a different issue. Anyway, the actual scholarship amount for the athletes set forth by the NCAA used to only be able to pay for tuition, fees, room, board, and books. While those charges make up the bulk of the CoA, they are not all of it. So that gap between what athletics pays (officially) through the student's account and what the CoA is, is what is covered by things like Pell if the student is eligible. What bugs me about this is that the student is already getting a full ride, that money could go to students that aren't so lucky. That difference is about $4k a year here, could be more elsewhere, and that can really help a student not able to attend.

Now, onto the news on this front. Some of you, being this is a sports forum after all, may know about the new NCAA rules regarding CoA payments. You may have heard about it and known that schools, if they choose to use them, will be paying their student athletes more money. This different I am talking about here is what is now allowed to be covered under NCAA rules. Our school is paying it for a couple of sports, but not all. What I like about this idea is that it makes athletic departments responsible for paying this money rather than it being taken away from students that are here for the academics and are getting told there is no more aid available to them or they have to take out loans to cover. The amount of Pell for our school I mentioned earlier is enough to make it so that a student would not have to sake out an unsubsidized loan for the year, which can really mean a lot for a student.

Anyway, off my little soapbox. I handle the accounting for the actual money so this has prompted me to learn more about the calculations used for awarding funds and what not. Kind of interesting.