If you take a minute to survey the students around you, chances are you will spot more than a few who proudly sport green or black jackets embroidered with their respective sport team’s name. If you do not notice the jackets, maybe you spotted students wearing green Nike shoes or black Nike backpacks with their jersey numbers stitched on the back pocket.
With over 1,000 varsity athletes out of an undergraduate population of approximately 4,000, it is likely either you are an athlete or you encounter one, or even several, in your daily routine. This group of students that represents the College on various fields and arenas also represents the school’s diversity in terms of socioeconomic status.
Harry Sheehy, director of athletics and recreation, said the relationship between socioeconomic status and varsity athletes varies by sport. He noted that “country club sports” such as tennis or golf consist of students from different backgrounds than others.
“They all bleed into one another, but there are definitely cohorts of socioeconomic status that fills teams in different ways,” Sheehy said.
Men’s basketball head coach Paul Cormier said that his team is composed of members from a variety of socioeconomic backgrounds. He noted that NCAA regulations, which restrict the number of players who receive any form of financial aid on a basketball team to 13 individuals, is unfair. The NCAA sets limits on the number of players per team who can receive athletic scholarships known as “counters.” He noted that he would have to cut a student who receives financial aid before a student from a higher socioeconomic class if there were already 13 players on financial aid, “even though the first student might be better athletically.”“I can only have 13 team counters, so that is a big factor when we go through the process of recruiting,” Cormier said. “And I don’t care what the Ivy League says, that’s discrimination.”
Men’s cross country head coachBarry Harwick ’77 said athletes on the team range from those paying the full price of attendance and athletes who receive full need-based financial aid.
He said that he would assume those of higher socioeconomic backgrounds had an easier time applying and gaining admission to Dartmouth due to better academic preparation before college.
Men’s lightweight rower Christopher Tinsman ’18 said he would assume based on his interactions that his teammates probably come from the upper middle class and above.
Women’s volleyball player Julia Lau ’17 echoed similar statements about her teammates.
Tinsman noted that he does not see any evidence of tension created by class differences between teammates or sports teams. He said that certain athletes are considered “basic” or “dumb.”
“I do think athletes are associated with stereotypes, but that has nothing to do with socioeconomic classes,” Tinsman said.
While many high school athletes dream of competing at the collegiate level, the increasing cost of tuition nationally has resulted in an increase in the demand for athletic scholarships. The College’s undergraduate first-year cost of attendance is $67,434 and with the annual tuition increase — 2.9 percent for this upcoming school year — the cost to attend does not show any signs of decreasing.
According to Dartmouth’s annual Facts and Figures release, 53 percent of undergraduate students received some form of financial aid during the 2013-2014 school year. During this same school year, 1,026 or 24.7 percent of the student body were varsity athletes. Because all financial aid at Dartmouth is need blind, deputy director of athletics Bob Ceplikas ’78 said the athletics department does not keep track of whether a varsity athlete receives financial aid.
Unlike the power conferences, which include the ACC, Big 12, Big Ten, Pac-12 and SEC, that can now pass their own scholarship rules and dish out millions of dollars in financial scholarships based on athletic talent, the members of the Ivy League must follow strict regulations.
In 1945, representatives of the eight Ivy League institutions signed the “Ivy Group Agreement,” which established the conference’s pledge to not offer athletic scholarships but instead to provide need-based financial aid. At first, the agreement applied only to football, but in February 1954, the agreement’s bylaws expanded to affect all intercollegiate sports.
Currently, families earning below $65,000 annually are not expected to make a financial contribution towards their student’s tuition costs and those earning between $65,000 to $180,000 pay a percentage of full tuition on a sliding scale basis.
“The monopoly power of the Ivy League protects schools from getting into an arms race to buy more and more talent,” economics professor Bruce Sacerdote said. “We are playing competitive Division I sports, but the athletes are students first.”
Despite the lack of athletic scholarships, many student-athletes choose to attend an Ivy League school because of their reputation for academic excellence and generous financial aid package offerings, Ivy League executive director Robin Harris said.
She added that the conference has a natural advantage in attracting student-athletes because she believes the eight institutions offer the best combination of academics and athletics in the country. In many instances students could receive financial packages that are equal to or greater than athletic scholarships offered elsewhere, she said.
Lau said she received scholarships from Temple, Seattle, Emory and Pepperdine Universities, but she chose Dartmouth for academic reasons and receives $10,000 annually from the College in financial aid.
“I don’t necessarily identify myself as just an athlete in any sense,” Lau said. “That’s the point of Dartmouth. You’re a student and an athlete.”
At Dartmouth, some athletes even take on part-time jobs in addition to being full-time students. On behalf of the College’s Student Employment Office, peer counselor Alex Sclafani ’18 wrote in an email that 3,527 students worked in 2014 , with 1,580 students holding jobs in the fall term. Of 1,152 first-year students, 225, or 19.5 percent, of the class worked in an hourly-paid position during the fall.
Men’s cross-country and track and field athlete Kyle Dotterrer ’18 said that he started working at the Hopkins Center in the fall and that his family pays full tuition. Dotterrer said that he would have decided to work with or without an athletic scholarship.
“I’d be lying of I didn’t say it’s difficult to balance athletics with academics and working,” Dotterrer said.
In some ways, the inability to provide athletic scholarships limits the athletic competitiveness of the conference. Since the conference formed in 1957, the Ivy League has won 46 NCAA team championships and 197 NCAA individual championships. Of those totals, Dartmouth won three in the team category and 38 in the individual category.
While the College has the most NCAA individual champions of all the Ivies, the conference’s totals cannot compare against those of wealthier conferences. The Pac-12 Conference alone claims the top three spots for the most NCAA Division I team championships. The University of California at Los Angeles places first with 111, Stanford University comes second with 105 and the University of Southern California rounds out the top three with 100 championships.
Princeton University boasts the highest number of team championships with just 12 since 1957.
Sheehy said Dartmouth differs from colleges in other conferences such as the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor because the College’s athletic department is not self-supporting.
The College does generate revenues from its athletic teams, but Sheehy said it is not comparable to self-supporting athletic departments like that of Michigan’s. According to Dartmouth’s 2013-2014 Equity in Athletics Disclosure Act report, the College makes a profit of $13,631,924 from its athletic program based on the difference between the program’s revenue and expenses. In comparison, Pennsylvania State University, the school that profits the most in the Big Ten Conference, one of the most valuable conferences, makes $50,427,645 on their football program alone.
The salary gap for the College’s coaching staff compared to those of the other Ivies, however, presents a problem specific to Dartmouth. Dartmouth salaries for coaches are the lowest in the Ivy League and, like all the other Ivies, has a gender wage gap. The Department of Education reported the average salary last school year for a men’s team head coach at Dartmouth was $101,893 while a women’s team head coach made on average of $73,339.
At Harvard University, male team head coaches receive $117,504 annually and women’s team head coaches receive $74,104. A men’s team head coach at Yale University boasts a salary of $125,851 and women’s team head coach receives $90,916.
In response to this salary gap, Sheehy said he submitted a proposal to the administration on how to positively impact coaches’ salaries.
“It’s been a historical problem here,” Sheehy said. “We’re a resource-based business so if we want to hire and retain good coaches, we’re going to need to fix that.”
In addition to these difficulties, recruiting athletes to attend and compete for Ivy League schools has been complicated further by the NCAA Autonomy rulings, which give top Division I schools more power. This past January, representatives from five NCAA power conferences responded to the inflating costs of college and voted to increase the amount of scholarship money Division I schools can provide to its student-athletes by at least $50 million a year.
In addition, this year’s March Madness tournament and the newly reformed FCS Championship have stirred up debate about whether or not student-athletes should be paid.
Those in favor of this change argue that athletes should receive a fair cut of the multi-million dollar revenues. For the NCAA, the debate has been a concern since 1972, the last year college athletes were permitted a small monthly stipend known as “laundry money.”
Those opposed to paying student athletes argue that not paying athletes keeps the competition at an amateur level rather than a professional one, with smaller schools pointing to a lack of available funding to pay their athletes.
Sheehy said paying athletes goes against the Ivy League model and does not believe institutions should pay athletes despite the extreme demands placed on them.
“I would like to see them get at some level of full cost of attendance because we do require some things from them that we don’t of the student body,” Sheehy said. “But part of this is you come here for a great education, and you’re going to make up everything as you go on for the rest of your life.”
Sacerdote echoed similar comments about how the Ivy League’s policy is intentional and successful in focusing on need-based financial aid.
“The benefits of attending Dartmouth or another peer institution probably vastly exceeds any stipend we might offer,” Sacerdote said.
Some universities, however, have started offering stipends to student-athletes. This upcoming fall, the University of Nebraska at Lincoln will give a $3,600 stipend to full-time scholarship students participating in football and both men and women’s basketball and volleyball teams.
This decision is monumental considering that in 2011 the NCAA announced it would not enforce a $2,000 stipend rule for college athletes due to the number of opposing institutions.
The Ivy League may not be able to compete at the same financial level as more powerful and wealthy conferences because of the regulation requiring only need-based aid, but Sheehy said that it still produces “talented students capable of shaping the world.”
“We still know that our eight schools make a vast difference in people’s lives,” Sheehy said. “As long as we maintain that and continue to make leaders in education, economics, medicine and law, then we will maintain enough cache to keep ourselves in the mix.”
