In July 2000, the Division I Financial Aid Subcommittee began the process of formulating deregulation recommendations and exploring ways for student-athletes to obtain additional benefits consistent with the existing NCAA strategic plan. Through that process, undertaken in response to a charge from the Division I Board of Directors, a package of five proposals was introduced in September 2002 to essentially "re-regulate" financial aid by shifting from athletically driven competitive-equity/amateurism factors to an educationally based student-athlete welfare focus.

At the heart of this package is Proposal No. 02-83-A, which increases opportunities for student-athletes to receive financial aid up to the cost of attendance through a combination of permissible sources of financial aid, similar to the financial aid limit available to students generally. These forms of aid may include the National Merit Scholarship, institutional academic awards, or other types of outside educational grants or aid for which athletics is not a major criterion.

Some may question why a shift is even necessary. We would respond that current NCAA regulations on financial aid are inconsistent with and lag behind the mission of the Association as a whole. They are contrary to current reform efforts to enhance student-athlete welfare, and they create a conflict between perception and reality during the recruitment of student-athletes.

Current NCAA legislation limits an individual student-athlete's financial package to a full grant-in-aid. The notion of "full grant-in-aid" is an athletics term -- not a financial aid term -- that traces its roots to when financial aid was part of the former Committee on Financial Aid and Amateurism. The premise is that student-athletes should not be paid to play; therefore, once a student-athlete received any athletics dollars beyond tuition, fees, room, board and books, every other penny -- whether the aid was connected to athletics performance or not -- became "tainted" and therefore countable. This leads to the all-too-frequent scenario in which two students -- both on full scholarships attending the same institution, both studying the same discipline (for example, art), both recipients of a hometown grant based on their non-athletics ability (artistic talent) -- do not have the same access to fund their education if one is a student-athlete and the other is not. The student-athlete cannot accept the hometown grant to purchase the additional supplies or supplemental course materials, for example, and due to athletics time commitments, the student-athlete may not be able to make up the difference through employment.

Student-athletes who are recruited with the promise of a "full ride" have the perception that their grant-in-aid will cover all their expenses, only to wake up to a cold-pizza reality that it is difficult to make ends meet once they are on campus. For some student-athletes, there isn't any "pizza money." The newly created Student-Athlete Opportunity Fund can help close, but not eliminate, this gap.

Why not permit student-athletes to have access to financial aid opportunities that are unrelated to being an athlete?

At last year's NCAA Convention, the Division I Student-Athlete Advisory Committee urged the Management Council and Board of Directors to support proposals to provide greater opportunity for student-athletes to receive financial aid from various sources, including both from the institution and from outside the institution -- without compromising competitive equity.

Proposal No. 02-83-A is an important first step in this process. It attempts to mitigate the cost impact of the proposed changes on athletics department budgets by not changing how the full grant-in-aid is calculated and limiting the monies that a student-athlete may receive up to the cost of attendance to financial aid for which the individual does not have to be a student-athlete to receive the award. Existing legislation would continue to regulate booster donations. It also is important to recall that under restructuring, the Committee on Financial Aid and Amateurism became two separate subcommittees and the Agents and Amateurism Subcommittee was formed. Financial aid legislation no longer needs to be included or focused on the pay-for-play debate since those issues are more appropriately addressed by the Agents and Amateurism Subcommittee.

As we approach the January 2004 NCAA Convention, now is the time for the Division I Management Council to support Proposal No. 02-83-A and align the student-athletes' financial opportunities with that of the general student body. Now is the time for common sense to prevail and allow student-athletes to earn, receive and accept academic and other non-athletics aid and scholarship money up to the institution's cost of attendance. Now is the time to bring consistency among mission, regulation, rhetoric and reality.

We should expect student-athletes to be students first, but we must provide them with the opportunity to be first-class students.

Carol Iwaoka is an associate commissioner of the Big Ten Conference and chair of the Division I Financial Aid Subcommittee. Dylan Malagrino is a former swimmer at Syracuse University and chair of the Division I Student-Athlete Advisory Committee.