My daughter spends 2-3 hours a week throwing her ball against a wall. Doesn’t count against the 20 hours. She also spends a good deal of time finding the perfect hair style for games. Also doesn’t count.
From my kids’ experiences, 20 hours/week is about right.
The following is from National Labor Relations Board ruling on the northwestern case:
Section D. Football Players’ Time Commitment to Their Sport:
For the purposes of the Northwestern case the NLRB regional director appears to be counting all the time spent at the team hotel on Friday nights as part of the 40 hours per week , including sleeping. The regional director also includes attendance at the “training table”, which is basically time spent eating breakfast lunch and dinner, as part of the 40 hours as well.
The following is from the NCAA D1 manual:
This rule is pretty cut and dried. Any college athlete who participates in athletic activity beyond the required 20 hours per week must be initiated and requested by the student athlete and cannot be required by the coach. This activity cannot be recorded or observed by the coach and no penalty can result if the athlete does not participate in the activity.
Swim – you really need to read the whole NW decision. You simply cannot come away from that with the concept that the time commitment for major D1 football is not huge and way beyond 20 hours per week.
You really think that Nick Saban or Urban Meyer are completely indifferent whether his players show up for the “optional” weight lifting or film study? Do you think the players that blow those things off keep their scholarships or ever get playing time? Seriously Swim? Please note that most football schollies are only for one year and renewable at the coach’s discretion (although that excreble practice is finally changing).
Here’s the schedule for a typical Tuesday in season. Looks to me like at least an 8 hour day (despite the NCAA limits of 4 hours) including mandatory attendance at lunch and also including the optional/mandatory workouts that don’t count under NCAA rules. Call it 7 hours if you want instead to exclude lunch hour.
“Injured players must report to the athletic training room before practice to continue to receive medical treatment. Practice in pads from 7:50 a.m. until 11:50 a.m. Then training table where attendance is taken. Coaches are not permitted to compel the players to practice again later in the day. But the players, however, regularly hold 7-on-7 drills (which involve throwing the football without the participation of the team’s offensive and defensive linemen) outside the presence of their coaches. To avoid violating the NCAA’s CARA limitations, these drills are scheduled by the quarterback and held in the football team’s indoor facility in the evening. In the same way, around 8:00 p.m., the players will go to their coaches’ offices to watch film on their own for up to a couple of hours.”
“the percentage of scholarships given at Alabama is still well under the academic scholarships they are awarding.”
Yeah…but the academic full rides are going to 4.1/34 kids, who are overwhelmingly white and middle class or higher. Those scholarships are laughably out of reach for disadvantaged kids of color (like many scholarship athletes). The message to these kids is that their only shot at college is through sports.
If Alabama or other flagships have programs offering full rides to low-income valedictorians at underperforming schools, I’d love to hear about it, because I’m excited to write them a check. In the meantime, my donations go to the Posse Foundation, which operates overwhelmingly at private schools.
Not a full ride, but it’s my understanding Alabama gives automatic full tuition scholarships to students with a 3.5 GPA + a 30 ACT (32 out of state). They also offer NMSs tuition, board, annual expense stipend, research allowance, iPads, etc.
Machen Florida Opportunity Scholarships (UF)
Machen Florida Opportunity Scholarships (MFOS) are designed to ensure that those who meet eligibility requirements will not have to work or borrow to attend UF, but rather will have their need fully met with grants and scholarships.
Hold that check though, you’ll need the money for the stable boarding fee once you get that pony. 
Get your check book out, because all low-income CA kids go to state universities for free. No need to be a valedictorian or an athlete. The theory that the only message to “these kids that their only shot at colleges is through sports” doesn’t apply to the largest state in the country.
Love it! I wish Illinois had anything remotely resembling the Florida program.
“Alabama gives automatic full tuition scholarships to students with a 3.5 GPA + a 30 ACT”
All these programs are great, but note how the required ACT is rarer than the GPA. A score of 30 is two standard deviations above Alabama’s mean (20.4, within half a point of the national mean). Only 5% of test-takers nationally break 30, so it’s probably a little under 5% for Alabama. On the other hand, I’m confident that a lot more than 5% of college-bound seniors in Alabama have a 3.5 weighted or above. We can’t know the school’s motivation, but it’s a fact that when you put more weight on test score than on GPA or class rank, the kids who qualify will be whiter and richer than if you weight the criteria the other way around. The Alabama average ACT for African-Americans of all income levels is 17. This scholarship program isn’t designed to serve poor black kids.
“all low-income CA kids go to state universities for free.”
This is an overstatement. The need-based aid at Berkeley doesn’t amount to a full ride, and I specifically asked about flagships. The net cost with a $0 EFC comes out to about $10k/year. That’s a great bargain from a bird’s-eye perspective, but a terrifying and possibly insurmountable debt for a $0-EFC family. And you have to get into Berkeley first, which is darn hard to do, and does not come automatically with any class rank.
Why limit the motivating college to flagships? That’s silly when there are numerous excellent public colleges and universities in CA, located within commuting distance of millions of residents. And the Berkeley shortfall you describe applies only if you live in the dorms.
Hanna – Texas does a pretty good job with its Top 10% rule. Auto admission, including to UT/Austin, if you graduate in the top 10% of your class. Top 10% of inner city high school counts the same as top 10% of wealthy suburban HS. Once you are admitted, the aid is quite good for the inner city kids.
An inner city kid can go to Harvard for free, but the rub is getting in. Top 10% from a bad school doesn’t get you admitted to Harvard. Maybe top 0.01% does.
“Once you are admitted, the aid is quite good for the inner city kids.”
Net price at UT Austin with $0 EFC is $14k+. Again, better than my state’s doing, but a real barrier for a lot of families.
“Why limit the motivating college to flagships?”
That’s the question I asked, because those are the most valuable degrees. If you want to focus on the fact that CSU-Fresno and Berkeley both get the job done, that’s fine, but I think there’s a world of difference. I’m certain that the athletes see a big difference, too.
“And the Berkeley shortfall you describe applies only if you live in the dorms.”
No one expects the athletes to commute from home, and that’s the comparator I’m looking at. (Never mind calculating what tiny fraction of low-income Californians live within a reasonable bus commute of Berkeley.)
Well I thought your point was that poor inner city kids see athletics as their only option for going to college. If that is how some see it, then the problem is ignorance (in the non-pejorative sense) not limited opportunity in CA. All of those kids can go to college for free here. They may not get to live in the dorms, but most college students don’t anyway.
Typical net prices for EFC = $0 in CA:
CSU commuter: $4000 to $6000
CSU resident: $12000 to $13000
UC: $8500 to $10000
Not a full ride unless merit is added, although more in reach than many other state universities for their in state students. (PA and IL are probably among the least affordable.)
Your earlier post mentioned “low income valedictorians”. Valedictorians tend to get much higher scores than the overall average. In at least one stats database, the vast majority of top class rank Alabama students had a 30+.
As others have mentioned, if you are a low income valedictorian, you may also have options for near full ride options among private schools via financial aid rather than merit aid.
“Valedictorians tend to get much higher scores than the overall average.”
Yep, higher than average, but not 30. Look at Texas. The reason they went to the top 10% rule was that they were forbidden to use affirmative action, and without it, poor kids, especially those of color, could not get the scores they needed to compete. The top whatever-percent had to get in automatically because so many high schools could not produce anyone at all with competitive scores.
All tuition and fees (and then some) are fully paid for in CA for low-income students. Yes, there are some costs not covered, but those are living expenses. The UC net cost calculator includes room and board and extras as standard cost estimates, and that is what you are listing. It does not mean those amounts will be any given student’s actual cost. But I know you know all of this. Of course people must eat and sleep somewhere. But they are going to have to do that whether they go to college or not.
You mentioned Texas, so I’ll use it as an example. Even with the top 10% rule biasing the application pool in favor of lower scoring students, the overwhelming majority of Parchment applicants to UT Austin with a top 2% class rank had a 30+ ACT. Obviously Parchment is a biased sample and such. The point is a large portion of valedictorians do meet the 3.5 GPA + 30 ACT cutoff, too large a portion to be ignored.
The study The Missing “One-Offs”: The Hidden Supply of High-Achieving, Low-Income Students found that among students with a top 10% test score, 17% were in the lowest quartile family income. It wasn’t 25%, as one would find in a random distribution, so test there is a correlation between test scores and income, but many low income students still managed to get high scores. The study concluded that the primary reason why few low income students attended selective colleges was not scores or cost – it was that the vast majority of high achieving low income students only applied to local, less selective colleges.