There is a disconnect here. Tiger Fan is saying financial aid decisions apply
equally to athletes and non-athletes. P38 seems to be saying that is not so.
I think the issue may be that there is an “admissions” difference- a talented point guard
has an edge over the equally brilliant kid who has no athletic ability- but if both get
in, the only factor in their financial aid award is family income.
My belief is all Ivies give athletes some admission preference; an NIL collective
at one school might mean athletes there got a financial aid preference as well.
I am not sure why the Ivies are blocking that, but it does seem like uniformity
either way makes sense if we want competitive balance.
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Financial aid is different at each school. Within that school the packages don’t differ for an athlete vs a non athlete. Also, we all know that NIL already exists in the league. No revenue sharing but kids are getting paid. The “collectives” aren’t public like those that support P4 schools but they exist loosely. Nobody wants to publicly go against the Ivy League’s wishes but it’s being done.
Well, the disconnect started long ago, when the Ivies decided Penn was getting too good at basketball, having won 8 or 10 championships and finishing 2nd the other 2 so they imposed an academic metric to Ivy admissions clearly aimed at Penn, even though Penn did not have a single player who flunked out during that period. That essentially ended Penn’s recruitment from urban public schools. It’s not that the other schools didn’t reach into that pool–I believe Brian Taylor from Perth Amboy would be unlikely to have been admitted once the AI was adopted. But it was aimed at Penn. So the League ensured that Penn would not have an advantage in admissions but allowed H-Y-Pr, the 3 schools with larger endowments than Penn and smaller student bodies to use financial aid as an end-around the ban on athletic scholarships. Curiously, the League allowed other teams to match financial aid offers, even if it went beyond institutional policy (although this has been largely unworkable). So the result is, in light of court decisions, that each institution will surreptitiously find income for their students. I say let’s finally do things in the open and join the settlement. But I don’t think the current Ivy system is fair to the larger schools at all.
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I agree with you about joining the settlement. The Ivies, both as institutions and through
their alums, have the resources to compete inn the new world, and I would be happy to see them try.
I am not sure I get your AI grievance. Even if you are right that it was aimed at Penn’s
success (I have no idea either way), I don’t think you are saying it is unequally applied.
Indeed, as I understand it (which is admittedly imperfect), I believe the index is tied
to each school’s overall student body, so the more selective (smaller) schools are
like to have a higher admit hurdle. (Back in the day, I heard that a lot about Cornell’s
lax and hockey players) Is your understanding different?
It clearly had an effect, but those schools (except Princeton) were not recruiting at the margins anyway in those days. I’m just saying it was aimed at what was perceived as a Penn advantage in basketball (and Cornell hockey to a much lesser extent). I’ve long gotten over the grievance since Dunphy was able to win under AI restrictions. But I don’t understand the unwillingness to either sign on to the agreement or allow athletic scholarships in light of the financial aid advantages of H-Y-Pr.
I beliege the Ivy League adopted the Academic Index (AI but that term has different commonly understood meaning these days) in the mid-1980s. That was a massive benefit to Penn compared to Yale. Carm Cozza noted that Penn could admit an entire football team of players he could no longer recruit. Not sure if that was completely accurate but the introduction of the AI system certainly coincided with Yale’s decline from a dominant Ivy football program to a middling one and Penn’s rise from a doormat to a power.
But then Penn made the institutional mistake of becoming almost as hard to get admitted as Yale. So much for the big advantage.
The flip side to this argument is that smaller schools have a smaller alumni base from which to seek financial support. And also one might expect that a college with a (prominent) business school would have an advantage in fund raising over the primarily liberal arts schools that do not.
But I doubt many people anticipated the constriction in admission percentage and its effects.
Penn is making money hand over fist in medical/vaccination technology and private equity–the school itself is doing very well. The money is not directed to sports, however, and there really isn’t the alumni base oozing with team spirit . They’ll happily build buildings with their names on them but endow, say, a hockey team for a rink with no varsity team? It’s 48 years now without anyone stepping up.
Except to the extent there are conditions on the donations, this a choice of the school.
And to the extent there are such conditions, it’s a choice of the alums. So I (speaking completely objectively of course 
) would be more inclined to place any disparity at the foot of fellow alums. Stated a little differently, presumably one wouldn’t complain about an “unfair” advantage in recruiting HS bio engineers arising from a shiny new lab that another school built with directed alumni contributions.
this was true in all sports seemingly through the 90s.
yale recruited me harder than penn, for example, as did princeton. but, Dunphy got involved and i was told i had a spot in the wharton school before I got into yale or princeton formally which was on regular admission dates.
i suppose you could argue penn was doing the proverbial “likely letter” before yale and princeton. But i was informed on my visit in Feb in a sit down with the dean of the wharton school. i was informed at yale and princeton in april of my senior year.
also worth noting I filled out a questionaire and handed it to the penn staff with my gpa and sat. this is something i did for SEC and ACC schools that were on/off recruiting me but saw me as a possible academic scholarship guy also who could increase their own AI.
i formally applied to yale and princeton (just not early admission). i wasnt a financial aid candidate so cant speak to that process as we all know it has evolved for all students as has tuition inflation.
when considering i had scholarship offers this put Penn at parity with those schools and their cycle timing and ahead of yale and princeton.
lastly, it is but one example and perhaps more stark given I was top priority at yale and maybe not at princeton considering they had goodrich already committed.
obviously this evolved into the 2000s and yale started doing “likely letters”
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i also would note that our median SAT in my recruiting class at Yale was in line with the school’s.
Princetons also would have been close as i knew those guys through high school games and recruiting trips.
This wasnt true at Penn. not close.
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I believe Matt Eastwick from the great teams of the late 80s/early 90s Princeton era had a perfect 1600 SAT score, prompting the infamous Carril snark during practice one day “Eastie, Didja get somebody to take the SAT for you?”
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Classic!