A question regarding the financial value of scholarships and impact

[Harry]

I came across this list of women basketball players and the dollar value of their scholarships with various schools.....

Here's the link: http://www.dfwelitebasketball.com/page/show/417061-dfw-elite-alumni

Clearly - the dollar value of the scholarship increases greatly when you compare public versus private schools.

So here is my question - what keeps the private schools from dominating the recruiting ranks?

For instance, if you are a parent -- wouldn't you encourage your kid to take the private school scholarship since it would represent more money in terms of dollar value?

I think the answer might lie in that some kids don't necessarily "fit in" to a school with higher tuition or perhaps the private schools aren't where their friends attend - perhaps even the private school does not offer the exact program of study. It could be that the academic requirements are too high (Rice?) although every school in FBS is required to meet the same criteria of test scores and GPA.

But in an age where there seems to be much debate over college athletes generating so much money for college presidents and yet not being fairly compensated for that - it does seem to me that the dollar value of an institution could play a major role in the decision of where an athlete goes to school. Thought?

[JesseMartin]

Aside from what you've already mentioned, there's also the fact that NCAA requirements are a minimum floor - the recruiting University can require incoming students to meet more stern criteria, they just can't accept less. And though this can be debated in terms of the philosophy of dollar value, as you've pointed out, the reality is that it often takes care of itself. Of the small percentage of students in the nation who obtain athletic scholarships, yes, they work hard enough at their studies to be eligible, but very few are disciplined enough to meet stricter standards of many private schools AND become elite athletes. This is especially evident in "money sports", though it is a bit more of a conundrum in sports like golf, swimming, etc.

As we've joked before, it would be great to have a team "full of Nick Bazalduas" but at the college level, there are still so many athletes in the mix that you can still get some RG3 types in private schools AND Bazalduas in public ones. Those are the outliers; you can see how Rice will get a lot of the athletes who can perform at the Division I level as well as meet tougher academic standards, whereas Alabama might get a lot of physically talented individuals but only require the NCAA minimum. A lot of it also has to do with the priorities of the student and their family.

So with all of these variables, you can see the sliding scale of combined performance in the classroom and on the field working out fairly well in terms of distribution. I'm pretty sure that if we had all the data you would probably see a double bell curve in terms of performance levels, overlapping by less than one standard deviation, with both curves being about the same shape. Of course, if somebody wanted to get funding to pay for such a study, we could find out for certain...