Meanwhile, in the Southeast Conference, once the NCAA passed this provision Alabama determined that their "full cost of attendance" for out-of-state students suddenly came to $5,386 -- or 34 percent more than they'd claimed the year before.
"You can't tell me," Connelly said, "that all of a sudden it became 34 percent more expensive to drive to Tuscaloosa."
But Alabama's figure wasn't even the highest. Auburn claimed a bigger jump to $5,586, while Tennessee calculated an additional $5,666 per term, the highest in the nation. Why it costs 136 percent more to travel to Knoxville than Ann Arbor is a mystery, especially when Michigan has far more students traveling from both coasts.
http://www.thepostgame.com/overtime-harbaugh-michigan-college-football-r...
So while this article focuses on Michigan I think there is a lot to learn from it.
Comments
Meh. First off, it's not just "travel expenses", but includes things like room and board, textbooks, fees outside of tuition, etc. Also, before the decision to allow the additional "cost of attendance stipend", it was in schools' best interest to minimize the "cost of attendance" figure for optics, since the primary use of the figure was telling prospective students "you should expect to have to spend X amount beyond tuition to live in our town and attend our school". Now that there's an incentive to have a larger figure, even if it's limited to athletics, it makes sense that schools that make athletics a huge priority are going to retool how they calculate their "cost of attendance" figure.
To me, this feels like Harbaugh is trying to manufacture controversy by calling these schools "cheaters" when there are far bigger offenses happening behind the scenes at almost every major football school.
Agree, but SEC schools already have huge recruiting advantages and now they have the highest COA stipends. This has a major impact on recruiting. There was already a huge gap between the upper tier of P5 schools and everyone else and a large gap between P5 and mid-major. The transfer portal and the COA will very quickly make it that much harder for the mid-major schools to compete and recruit. This might give more opportunity/compensation to the players, which is a good thing. But it is making that much harder for a lot of schools to be successful.
the COA figure affects every student who recieves financial aid. Basically it means more money can be included in a student loans or student grants. When this COA number gets artificially inflated it's nice in the short term for the students as they don't actually need that much money for COA, so they have extra spending money on hand. But then they're paying it back for 15 years at 5% interest.
I also find it a little sketchy that these inflated #'s are used to justify federal loans & grants that are supposed to be for eligible expenses only. In fact, I'd label it as fraud.
At many schools the financial aid office has the ethics to not over-inflate their COA numbers, but in the southeast there's a mentality throughout the local culture that college football is so important that it excuses a broad spectrum of immoral and illegal behavior.
Almost like this exact thing has been going on for about 20 years now and these colleges have gotten quite good at cooking the books to get more money. And as you said, in the end, its all of us who ends up on the short end, paying out our asses to cover ridiculous interests rates on bloated loans
Attached is a link to an article about a Clemson player that save over $15K during his time at school.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-most-frugal-player-in-the-nfl-draft-115...
Cost of living is higher in Tuscaloosa, AL than Boston?
Totally makes sense...they're definitely not cheating the system.
And Los Angeles, and San Jose, and every other major city in the nation...
UCLA is next to Beverly Hills...cheaper than Bama. Cheaper than USC (which is in Compton).
Yeah, this is clearly out of control.
There should be some actual data behind the cost of attendance figure that's normalized between schools. It doesn't cost twice as much to live in Tuscaloosa than cities in California or the East Coast.
Harbaugh is right on this one - the SEC schools are cheating. Again.
The Cost of Attendance subsidy should be comparable between schools. Having it be double at some schools is just bullshit.
I mean, $11k per year for room, board, books, and fees is not unreasonable, and that's what these SEC schools are claiming. I mean, when I was in Blacksburg about a decade ago, a 1-bedroom apartment was over $500, I expect I spent about $300/mo on food for myself but could have cut it to about $200 if I was pinching pennies, and if I had bought my books through the bookstore (which is arguably the way it should be calculated) I would have easily spent an average of $750 per semester. Just in rent and books, that would come out to $7,500 in a rural town, so $300/mo for food puts it over $11k, and I'm sure costs have only increased since then. Now that I live in an area influenced by the SF Bay Area, where rent starts at over $1,000 just for a studio, I don't see how SJSU and others can justify a cost of attendance of less than $6k per semester.
So, yes, I agree with you, the subsidy should be comparable between schools, but I think we need to combat it from the other direction by raising the "cost of attendance" at the rest of the schools to what it actually costs to live there, rather than deeming these SEC schools' calculations as "cheating".
Room & board expenses are seperate from the Cost-of-attendance figure. COA is an incidentals and travel amount on top of the scholarship amount which covers tution, room & board, books and student fees.
I could have sworn that I read somewhere about the "cost of attendance" calculation including things such as room and board, but I've been looking for the last 15 minutes and have yet to find a source of what is included (which is probably by design). I am having trouble understanding how every school said it would cost an additional "$2,000 to $5,000" to attend the school if the bulk of it was transportation costs. Even for someone living across the country, that's at least 3 round-trip flights at the low end, per year, and the vast majority of athletes attend schools much closer to home.
Room and board are provided free for student athletes on full scholarships.
NCAA has investigated and denied