May 13, 2010 8:46:30 AM

A report marking the completion of the 2009-10 cycle and the fifth year of the Division III Financial Aid Reporting Program is revealing some lingering confusion about how institutions comply with the division's financial aid bylaw.

Since the program was adopted at the 2004 Convention and implemented a year later, Division III has seen three major infractions cases and dozens of secondary violations involving one-tenth of the division's membership.

The most important lesson learned from those cases might be this: The devil may be in the details of how students are awarded aid.

Most cases referred to the NCAA enforcement staff by the Division III Financial Aid Committee since the program's creation stemmed from either:

(1) Continuing uncertainty about Division III rules that explicitly prohibit awarding financial aid for any reason related to athletics, including considering whether a student-athlete played high school sports or served as a team captain; or

(2) The use of institutional policies for awarding aid that have nothing specifically to do with athletics and are meant to benefit any student or help attract targeted groups to campus but result in student-athletes receiving a disproportionate amount of aid.

Jeff Ankrom, chair of the financial aid committee and the faculty athletics representative at Wittenberg, said the reporting program continues to uncover cases where institutions are including athletics among criteria considered in awarding leadership grants or scholarships to newly enrolled student-athletes – either by rating participation or leadership in sports in formulas for determining the amount of aid to be awarded, or explicitly listing such criteria among others for awarding a scholarship.

"We continue to see cases where schools are unaware why giving a point for having played athletics or showing leadership is a problem," Ankrom said. "Many schools believe that as long as the award is available to all students, then having athletics participation as among activities being considered is allowed, even though the bylaw specifically states that athletics cannot be considered."

Such violations typically have been treated through the program's early years as secondary violations, resulting in penalties designed to educate the institution while ending the practice.

However, the financial aid committee is concerned that it continues to see about five such cases annually, despite ongoing efforts to educate the membership about Division III Bylaw 15.4.1. The bylaw, among other requirements, states that "a member institution shall not consider athletics leadership, ability, participation or performance as a criterion in the formulation of the financial aid package."

Yet, the committee regularly is referring to the enforcement staff cases in which institutions do exactly that – including six of the nine cases discovered in the 2009-10 cohort.

Such cases have not yet resulted in a major infractions case, although failure to modify criteria to eliminate consideration of athletics increasingly may subject schools to punitive actions, as Division III continues to shift from an emphasis on educating institutions about financial aid rules.

‘Well-intentioned policies'

The major infractions cases have been more complicated, and demonstrate how details of aid-awarding policies can produce violations of financial aid rules.

One of the cases involved a school's efforts to attract international students to campus – a legitimate goal given the institution's proximity to the border, but an effort that resulted in major infractions when most of the grants awarded over multiple years for that purpose were received by incoming student-athletes.

Another case involved an appeals process available to students seeking to demonstrate eligibility for more aid than initially awarded by a school. Student-athletes in one of the school's sports regularly were urged by coaches to seek additional aid, and their success in appealing award decisions resulted in the student-athletes in that sport receiving disproportionately more financial aid than students in general.

The program at the first school and the procedure at the second were intended for use by any student. Because of that, the schools apparently did not anticipate that they might need to monitor which students made use of the policies, to ensure that student-athletes did not benefit disproportionately.

Division III's financial aid reporting program is designed to detect instances where student-athletes collectively are receiving more aid than the general student-body. Over time, a program or a policy that provides what financial aid committee members call a "systematic advantage" to student-athletes in awarding of aid will result in disproportionate aid, which in turn will be measurable in the reporting program.

That was the result in the major infractions cases, and that outcome should heighten Division III institutions' awareness of how their own, seemingly well-intended, policies may affect awarding of aid to student-athletes.

"If an institution's policies have the potential to create a systematic advantage, they should take notice, because systematic violations eventually will be caught in the net," Ankrom said.

Although 46 (about 10 percent) of Division III's member institutions were found to have violated financial aid legislation through the first five years of the reporting program, more than one-third of the division's schools have received some level of review by the financial aid committee as a result of data submitted to the NCAA through the reporting program's history.

About one quarter of member schools have received a "Level II review," in which the committee looks closely at an institution's policies and procedures for awarding aid, as well as the impact of those factors on aid received by student-athletes. The committee then referred for further investigation by the enforcement staff those cases that it decided had resulted in disproportionate aid to student-athletes.

"There has been significant interaction between the financial aid committee and schools," Ankrom said. "We have interacted with more than one-third of the Division III membership and have done so in a consistent, fair and just fashion."

Ankrom noted that from the beginning, the reporting program has sought not only to hold member schools accountable to compliance with financial aid legislation but to help all Division III members better understand the impact of their policies and procedures on the objective of awarding proportionate aid to student-athletes.

"The committee is continuing to reach out to a variety of campus personnel who play a role in creating and administering such policies, including key contacts such as admissions and financial aid officers, and enrollment managers," Ankrom said. "The division's financial aid bylaw is fairly straight-forward, and it's important that all campus constituencies understand how it should be applied."

Violations identified