Facing stagnant funding, ballooning costs of higher education and increased applications, the NCAA Degree-Completion Committee decided last month to restructure the way it distributes benefits to the award recipients it honors. Last month, in an effort to help more student-athletes and cope with limited resources available for the program, the committee members changed the scholarship parameters to include tuition and fees and a book allowance. Room and board will no longer be included.

Committee members believe the program will remain an effective way to assist student-athletes with exhausted athletics eligibility get their degrees, allowing student-athletes who might otherwise be forced to abandon a dream of an education to complete their studies.

Degree-Completion Committee Chair Leo Munson, associate vice chancellor for academic support at Texas Christian University, said the application process will remain exactly the same — only the amount of the grant awarded by the committee will change.

He said the changes are the result of a confluence of factors, including significant increases in both the tuition costs at member institutions and the number of former student-athletes applying for the award. When the program first started in the late 1980s, the committee was able to grant awards to about 67 percent of applicants. That has fallen to 44 percent recently. While both tuition and applications have been on the rise, funding for the program has been level. The program is allocated about $950,000 annually to distribute among qualified applicants.

"We had to figure out a way to reward student-athletes for pursuing their education. That’s the reason for restructuring the awards," Munson said. "The purpose is to advance the degree of as many student-athletes as we can."

Between 2001 and 2005 — the most recent year for which data are available, the average award distributed by the committee has increased from $7,218 to $10,321. Meanwhile, the number of scholarships the committee has awarded has decreased from an all-time high of 139 in 2001 to just 97 in 2005, the lowest since 1995. In 1989, the first full year of the program, the average award amount was $5,620. Since its inception, the program has awarded 2,064 scholarships, totaling nearly $13.5 million disbursed to help former student-athletes complete their degrees.

In a 2004 NCAA News story, Munson indicated that the rising cost of tuition and other fees had negatively influenced the number of awards the committee could distribute.

Accompanying the committee’s recent changes is a proposal making its way through the Division I legislative process that would allow institutions to supplement any degree-completion award from the NCAA with financial aid from the campus. Officials hope that institutions will help former student-athletes pay for the costs no longer covered by the degree-completion awards.

The proposal, which the Division I Management Council will consider in January, was supported by the Academics/Eligibility/Compliance Cabinet after extensive discussion at the group’s September meeting. Some members initially believed that the proposal could create a recruiting advantage for high-resource institutions that would be able to fund a matching grant. However, AEC members eventually decided that using the degree-completion program award as a recruiting tool would be ineffective when the goal is to graduate within the five-year clock.

Munson is encouraged by the concept outlined in the legislation, but he noted that some institutions are under financial strain and some be unlikely to offer the matching grants.

"For athletics departments to make a request to central administration to say, ‘We want to give more money to athletes who can’t participate anymore,’ I think they’re going to have a hard time convincing institutions," he said. "I’m not sure how much participation there will be."

The degree-completion program began with money from the first television contract between CBS and the NCAA in 1982. Officials set up an endowment managed by the now-defunct NCAA Foundation and in 1989 officially established the program to give student-athletes who could not complete their education during their five-year eligibility period an opportunity to graduate.

The program is designed for former student-athletes who are within 30 hours of graduation. The application review process has a point system based on factors such as previous academic success, involvement in activities outside of athletics and financial need. The committee members also consider applicants’ personal statements, so a subjective element is involved in the decision. The committee meets twice a year to determine awards for the two terms — fall/winter and spring/summer.

While the typical program participant has been a "sixth-year" student who needs only a few hours to finish, more and more nontraditional students are beginning to hear about and take advantage of the program. Robert "Spider" Gaines, a former track and field and football student-athlete at the University of Washington, is one of the nontraditional students who received the degree completion award recently. Gaines left Washington in the 1970s and returned to graduate earlier this year with assistance provided by the degree completion program (see story on page 13).

The new Academic Performance Program also awards athletics teams with a "bonus" retention point in a team’s Academic Progress Rate for former student-athletes who return to an institution and graduate successfully. That incentive is encouraging institutions to seek former student-athletes who were close to graduating when they left campus. The degree-completion program has no requirement regarding how long ago a student-athlete competed or left an institution.

Committee members hope the recently approved changes will ultimately allow more students of all types to complete their degrees instead of being stopped just short of the goal line.