This is a portion from NCAA.org. The part you are probably most interested in is the last paragraph. This could turn into a gigantic mess. I will give you the 30-second description of equivalency and then tell you why.
Equivalency was designed so teams couldn’t give more money to student-athletes that didn’t deserve it after they ran out of scholarship money. If a given institution with a baseball team only offers 5 scholarships they can award institutional aid to additional deserving players up to 11.7.
If the team is maxed out on scholarships and already has allocated 11.7 to team members, it makes giving additional aid to players extremely difficult (or impossible). This can sometimes make recruiting a bit tricky. Federal aid and loans don’t count; it’s only institutional money. To encourage schools to recruit academically bright students, the NCAA said if anyone meets ONE of the following guidelines, any money you give them doesn’t count towards the team. The guidelines are as follows.
Rank in the top 10% of your high school class
Achieve a core GPA of 3.5 (on a 4.0 scale) in HS
A minimum SAT score of 1200
A minimum ACT score of 105
So if you recruit a player with one of these, you can award them institutional money that doesn’t count against the team’s scholarship limit. It’s not the coach that decides who gets money but the financial aid department.
This seemed like a really big issue but what I learned when I recently interviewed the assistant director of financial aid at a D1 institution is that equivalency isn’t really an issue. The reason is that any student (regardless of whether they are an athlete or not) isn’t going to receive any academic aid from the institution unless they are academically strong and meet at least one of those 4 criteria. So there was never a situation where a sub-standard athlete was getting institutional aid and putting the team over the equivalency limit. An athlete was either exempt because of good academics or didn’t get money. This institution said that athletes are not put into separate pools when dispersing aid, and the most deserving academic students are the one’s awarded institutional money.
It looks like the NCAA has opened the flood gates for any school that has tons of money and wants to win really badly because they can now give an unlimited amount of aid to any player and you could possible see an emphasis on recruiting players from poor families regardless of their academic scores simply because the coach/school can now give them an unlimited amount of aid that doesn’t affect the scholarship money already allocated, unless they have some system designed to stop this? In this day and age almost everyone has need-based aid based on their income and the price of college, so I am not sure how this is going to play out.
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Financial aid deregulation - source NCAA News Online 4/25/05
"Council members also approved two key financial aid proposals that enhance student-athlete well-being. One, Proposal No. 02-82, allows football and basketball student-athletes who receive only non-athletically related institutional aid to compete without counting in the institution's financial aid limits. The Division I Student-Athlete Advisory Committee has been emphatic in its support of this measure for two years, claiming that recruited student-athletes in football and basketball who do not receive athletically related aid should be treated the same as such student-athletes in other sports (by not counting toward team aid limits).
Opponents of the proposal have worried that it could lead to institutions with higher institutional-aid resources "stockpiling" student-athletes in basketball and football. Others, though, feel the opportunity to provide student-athletes with more flexibility regarding financial aid outweighs whatever unintended consequences might be created.
The Council took three separate votes on the measure -- one for Division I-A, one for Division I-AA and a third for Division I inclusive (for basketball). The measure failed initially in Division I-AA (6-6 deadlock) but was approved upon reconsideration. The overall Division I vote was 26.5 in favor and 20 against.
The Council supported another financial aid proposal (No. 03-23-A) that permits student-athletes in equivalency sports to receive institutional academic-based and need-based aid without it counting toward team limits. That prevents student-athletes who are offered both athletics-based and non-athletically related aid from having to turn down the latter to avoid hurting the team. The Division I SAAC has been a strong proponent of this proposal as well.
