The controversies in the NCAA over the past decade have called into question whether the hyphen in “student-athlete” represents more a division than the intended union. The task now for the organization and individual universities, including Northwestern, is figuring out where and how to place the emphasis moving forward.
The NCAA is attempting to shift the focus back to academics with a slate of new reforms passed in late October which include raising the GPA required for college play, offering multi-year scholarships and tightening restrictions intended to abolish over-signing of players. But a financial reform measure passed in the same package suggests the student-athlete balance remains precarious: The NCAA acted against the suggestion of the Knight Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics, long-considered the academic conscience of college sports, when it approved an option for colleges to extend a $2,000 stipend to full-scholarship athletes. The money, which would be issued next year, is intended to defray the additional costs incurred by student athletes and account for the “full cost of attendance.”
“I can’t say here at NU we had student athletes lining up outside my door saying ‘there was this disproportionate funding going on,'” Northwestern Athletics Director Jim Phillips said. “There was none of that. But at the end of the day we do whatever we can to support our student-athletes. I think this probably falls under that.”
The implementation of the stipend will now be at the discretion of individual conferences. The Big Ten is expected to adopt it. NU, according to Phillips and University President Morton Schapiro, will follow suit – but not without hesitation.
‘It Just Adds to the Red Ink’
Former Northwestern President and Knight Commission member Henry Bienen and other members of academia say the stipend represents a growing chasm between student-athletes and non-student athletes.
“I know a lot of athletes don’t have the time on top their varsity sports and training to hold down jobs during the year,” Bienen said. “But on the other hand athletes have training tables, they have full tuition, a lot of them get room and board … so I just think this (stipend) serves to further the financial gap between athletes and non-athletes.”
The budgetary concerns attached to the stipend are substantial – NU’s endowment accounts for just 11 percent of its athletic scholarships, including both need- and non-need based aid, according to University Vice President for Budget and Planning Jim Hurley. Compare that to a school like Stanford, where the athletic scholarships are completely endowed and the preliminary $350,000 cost to foot the proposed stipend at NU is especially steep.
“The easiest way to fund these things would be increasing the endowed scholarships, of course,” said Steve Green, deputy director of athletics and internal affairs at NU. “But the difficulty there is the current economy and that endowing a scholarship at NU can take more than a million dollars. It’s expensive.”
University officials stressed discussions about implementing the stipend remain in the preliminary stage. Administrators, members of athletics department and financial aid office will begin meeting this week to discuss funding more specifically.
Though sizable contracts with the conference and the Big Ten Channel offset costs, Bienen, as well as University and athletic budget officials, said athletics at NU don’t turn a profit. The stipend,Bienen said, won’t improve the bottom line.
“Athletics at NU does not make money,” Bienen said. “You can count Big Ten Channel, ABC, ESPN and you can count the gate receipts and you can counting you anything you like athletics at NU is still losing money. You know the $2,000, it just adds to the red ink.”
Although Schapiro, a noted economist, said the stipend will “cost a lot,” his concerns are more ethical in nature – particularly that the money will be disproportionately awarded to male athletes who hold more full-scholarships than female athletes, and that it will not be allotted on a need-based system.
“It isn’t clear to me this been thought-through to really make this the answer,” Schapiro said.
Culture of Corruption, Change
If the changes seemed swift to Schapiro, it’s because they were.
When Mark Emmert became president of the NCAA a little more than a year ago, he inherited an organization battered by recent scandals: From football players selling team paraphernalia at Ohio State to the improper benefits allegedly extended to Reggie Bush’s family while he played for USC, the reputation of college athletics was on the ropes.
Though likely not the only impetus, concerns about increasingly publicized violations may have in part spurred Emmert to quickly announce the changes in late October, Northwestern Athletics Director Jim Phillips said.
“We’d be a little naive to think some of these changes haven’t been preempted by recent events,” Phillips said. “But I give (President Emmert) a tremendous amount of respect. He’s trying to get his hands around some of these national issues, which really do need some answers.”
Emmert told The Associated Press after the Oct. 26 NCAA meeting that he knew some of the changes might need to be adjusted down the road, but he wanted to begin testing solutions sooner rather than later.
“I fully expect that when you’re making as big of changes as we are, that you’ll need some fine-tuning and adjustments,” Emmert told The Associated Press. “But in the past, not getting the fine-tuning right has slowed down the process, and I and the board are committed to moving things along aggressively. “
The NU Arena
NU athletics is something of a poster child for clean programs in the NCAA, but the academic rigor of the school presents its own set of challenges for student athletes.
When it comes to reflecting on the student-athlete role at NU, Weinberg senior Maggie Mocchi has a unique vantage point.
Mocchi came to play basketball at NU with her twin sister Ali as part of a package deal, but left the team after the 2009-10 season for personal reasons. She now supports her sister and the team as often as possible from the stands. In the classroom, her performance has improved significantly, Mocchi said.
“I just have so much more time to focus on academics like other students who aren’t athletes,” Mocchi said. “It’s really demanding to keep up, that’s true here.”
Mocchi said though she did not necessarily incur any additional expenses as an athlete, the rigor of academics at NU might especially rob athletes of the ability to hold down a job.
“I can’t imagine holding down a job, playing a Division I sport and trying to study for class,” Mocchi said. “It’s just impossible.”
Phillips said the concern about lost opportunity is something the athletics department has become increasingly sensitive to with the intensity of both athletics and academics at NU.
“It’s our job to pay attention the culture of sports as it grows,” Phillips said. “Things can always change, but we need to stay true to our values.”
The Knight Factor
College athletics at large has transformed into an entirely different animal since the NCAA was founded in 1906 to protect players from the physical brutality of sports. The question today – which has yielded few definitive answers, but plenty of opinions – is how to tame it.
The Atlantic writer Taylor Branch proposed a popular theory in early October in his essay “The Shame of College Sports,” when he suggested the only way to change the culture is to change the system: “The tragedy at the heart of college sports is not that some college athletes are getting paid, but tha
t more of them are not.”
Less than three weeks after the essay’s publication, Emmert attended a previously planned meeting in Washington, DC with members of the Knight Commission, which aims to “ensure that intercollegiate athletics programs operate within the educational mission of their colleges and universities.”
In its 2010 report on transparency in athletics spending, the authors from the Knight Commission, including Bienen, warned about pouring more money into a flawed system.
“It is time for colleges and universities to resist the never-ending pressure to increase spending on intercollegiate athletics,” the report concluded.
At the most recent October meeting, the Commission, comprised of former presidents, athletes and scholars, recommended to Emmert a slew of reforms consistent with its focus on academics. Most of those reforms were passed less than a week later at the NCAA’s Board of Directors Meeting.
There was one reform the commission advised against but was unable to stop: the $2,000 stipend.
Though Bienen said the stipend does not necessarily represent a gesture toward the pay-for-play model suggested in Branch’s article, The Sports Economist blog contributor Brian Goff and Western Kentucky University economics professor said in an email “it does seem to provide at least a crack in the door for the pay-for-play argument.”
Bienen said he hopes NU would opt out any potential pay-for-play system presented in the future.
“A paid athlete is just such a diversion from what higher education is all about,” Bienen said. “”I love sports, I care about sports. But if we ever got to that point, I hope the University would stepback.”
Numbers Game
Among the 476 total athletes at NU, athletics internal director Steve Green said the University offers about 265 financial grants to NU athletes – a figure ESPN also reported this summer in a preview of what pay-for-play system would look like in college athletics. That number includes a combination of full and partial funding, and Green said NU offers the maximum number of scholarships permitted by the NCAA in football and basketball.
Concerns about how the stipend could disproportionately serve the male athletes will be part of NU’s discussions this week, Green said.
Goff said while he anticipates the system will eventually adjust for this gender inequity, the NCAA is less likely to address Schapiro’s other complaint: the need-blind nature of the stipend. Players, regardless of their financial background do generate revenue for the University.
“For players in conferences like the Big Ten, in football and basketball, the $2,000 increase is still a tiny fraction of average player value,” Goff said. “Even when benefits to players are valued at the full price of tuition, room, food, universities retain 85 to 95 percent of the revenue attributable to players.”
Still, Schapiro said he will propose changes to other Big Ten University Presidents before the NCAA rolls out another round of changes in early January.
“It might be you don’t want the perfect to be the enemy of the good as they say, but you also don’t want to take something that’s bad and make it worse,” Schapiro said. “We’ll have to see how this plays out.”
