When the NCAA announced its plans in October to reward financially colleges and universities that meet academic expectations for sports teams and athletes, the responses were generally favorable. However, some scholars who research college athletics and diversity question whether financially challenged schools and those that admit disadvantaged students will be left out of the bounty.
The Oct. 27, 2016, announcement stated that the new policy, set to go into effect in 2019-20, came as a result of an eight-year, $8.8 billion extension of its multimedia rights agreement with CBS Sports and Turner for the Division I Men’s Basketball Championship. Under the new revenue distribution system, academic units will be awarded to schools that earn:
“Rewarding academic progress is definitely a start, but it doesn’t address the systemic issues of inequality in our society,” Dr. Joseph N. Cooper, an assistant professor in the sport management pro-gram at the University of Connecticut, tells Diverse. “I would like to see them reward schools that are creating and implementing effective support services to help students across all sports.”
Cooper, whose research focuses on “the nexus between sport, education, race and culture,” adds that the new NCAA policy may have “an unintentional consequence of rewarding schools with selective admissions and penalizing schools that enroll talented students from disadvantaged backgrounds.”
Cooper is co-editor of the 2015 book The Athletic Experience at Historically Black Colleges and Universities: Past, Present, and Persistence, along with Dr. Billy Hawkins, a professor in the Department of Health and Human Performance at the University of Houston.
Hawkins agrees that the policy should be more inclusive. “There should be some exceptions,” Hawkins says. “There should be some type of layering of this policy with the understanding that you can’t expect a policy to fit all the institutions that are part of the NCAA, because there is diversity in institutional arrangements … for example, HBCUs have a different mission than some of the other institutions.”
In its announcement, the NCAA explained how the policy would be instituted. For the first six years of the new distribution that starts in the 2019-20 academic year, 75 percent of the annual increase in the broadcast rights contract will be used to create an academic distribution unit, similar to the units now associated with the Division I Men’s Basketball Championship.
