I saw the usual "we have the best facilities and advantages" posts after the loss, and I still contend that regardless of how nice your clubhouse is, you can't beat offering playing time and money in the form of scholarships (and this isn't a criticism or defense of Childress, and I'm actually hoping to hear from some people that know or were involved in the recruiting process).

Someone said that TCU had the advantage of being a private school, and thus can offer more in the form of financial aid. But here is an article from a few years ago where a TCU blog is complaining that because of the high costs of tuition at TCU (apparently it costs more to go there for one year than 4 at A&M), the extra they can offer doesn't make up that much of the difference.

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"Private schools are at a distinct disadvantage in baseball (and other equivalency sports) because of the large difference in cost between a private and state school," said Jim Schlossnagle. "TCU, next year, will cost roughly $48,000, and continued success is greatly dependent on your ability to find other means to get kid's more scholarship."

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...take out loans (student, parent or both) to pay for what the baseball scholarship does not, or choose another school. Every school that recruited him has offered a .25 athletic scholarship.
At Texas, the cost is 1/4th that of TCU, the family could swing it.
At Baylor, he would receive enough academic aid and financial aid to cover 90% of his yearly costs, he can swing it.
At Ole Miss, he would receive enough academic aid and financial aid to cover 100% of his yearly costs without costing the baseball team anything in scholarship money, a free player to the university.
This player loves TCU and Fort Worth... But, at the end of the day, he is a Rebel, because money talks... "Free" is a powerful word.

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So the TCU group is saying Ole Miss and more affordable Baylor are at an advantage. Yet here's another article from Baseball America:

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Those inequalities stem largely from "lottery scholarships" widespread across the south. Whether higher education funding actually comes from lottery revenues depends on the stateGeorgia's HOPE Program and South Carolina's LIFE Scholarship are lottery-funded, but Louisiana's TOPS is notbut the programs tend to be lumped together under that moniker. And they do share a number of characteristics: publicly funded, available primarily to residents of each state and with academic standards low enough to make them accessible to a large portion of students. They also apply to both public and private universities, despite being state programs.

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The Louisiana Office of Student Financial Assistance places the value of an Opportunity award for the past year at LSU at $6,464, while the university estimated total in-state tuition and fees for that year to be $8,758.

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"Ten years ago, if I awarded you 75 percent (of a scholarship) you owed about $4,000," Smith said. "Today, if I give you 75 percent, you owe about $15,000. So my situation, scholarship-wise, has been blown apart by Baylor's increase in cost."

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This article mentions Mississippi schools listed as being at a disadvantage, as like Texas, they don't have those programs. Then we have the Georgia coach saying those programs don't benefit him much anyway. Apparently Florida and Kentucky also have similar programs.

So how much does a school like LSU benefit from this kind of stuff? Are are private schools like Vanderbilt, TCU and Rice really able to make up that much of a discrepancy in the cost of tuition?

Going from memory here, but I think what Vandy was accused of doing was giving academic full-rides to kids out of some endowment slush fund to kids that normally wouldn't be awarded an academic scholarship based on their high school grades. Some how this was easier to accomplish at a private school. This frees up athletic scholarship money for others.

A private school can do all sorts of creative accounting to get a good ball player enough to make up the scholarship difference.

They are not subject to the same sort of open records requests as public schools. They can decide who gets academic aid and how much, and are not accountable to anybody. It depends on how badly they want to play ball with the baseball program (or really any program with partial scholarships).

As long as there are partial scholarships, and they do not have to account for how they award out other aid, private schools are not at a disadvantage. Not even close.

I've heard if you can get into Rice then they have plenty of academic scholarship money. Rice has huge endowment for very small enrollment.

LSU TOPPS program covers tuition, so that's more money they can spread around. But that's one thing on the state chopping block to save money.

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I've heard if you can get into Rice then they have plenty of academic scholarship money. Rice has huge endowment for very small enrollment.

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Yeah, this is the same for Vandy. Huge endowment also.

My understanding is that the funds for Louisiana and other states will award all in state students what amounts to a high percentage, but partial, scholarship. Something in the 70+ percent range. Perhaps it is need based. Anyway, for all in state LSU and other state schools' baseball players, a .3 or even less scholarship is in effect a full one. Thus, they can give out of state kids full scholarships, something that isn't common in a sport that only allows 11.7 total. I don't know if that is complete or not.

I don't like the system, but to me, the rub is the 11.7 number, not the states that are trying to get around it. I would get rid of that first.

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Going from memory here, but I think what Vandy was accused of doing was giving academic full-rides to kids out of some endowment slush fund to kids that normally wouldn't be awarded an academic scholarship based on their high school grades. Some how this was easier to accomplish at a private school. This frees up athletic scholarship money for others.

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I don't know if they did or did not do that, but if they did, its completely against the rules.

Any scholarship that athletes have access to, or are evaluated for under different standards, must count as an athletic scholarship. You can't lower standards for athletes, evaluate them differently, or otherwise skirt around NCAA scholarship limits.

The NCAA rules are very clear about that.

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They are not subject to the same sort of open records requests as public schools. They can decide who gets academic aid and how much, and are not accountable to anybody. It depends on how badly they want to play ball with the baseball program (or really any program with partial scholarships).

As long as there are partial scholarships, and they do not have to account for how they award out other aid, private schools are not at a disadvantage. Not even close.

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Each NCAA division has a financial aid committee that schools answer to and must account to.

Obviously, if a school is making fraudulent representations to said committee, its one thing, but they're "answering" to somebody, for sure.

Yeah, like I said it was from memory SEC message board fodder. No way to corroborate unless you are inside.

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I've heard if you can get into Rice then they have plenty of academic scholarship money. Rice has huge endowment for very small enrollment.

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Yeah, this is the same for Vandy. Huge endowment also.

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Cost of attendance at both schools is over $60,000 a year while most scholarships don't go higher than $20-24,000 a year.

So, its still over $30,000 and well over half of your cost of attendance that many students are left with to cover out of pocket or with need-based scholarships and grants.

I don't think public schools should have much of a beef with it, as we give you a half scholarship and your bill will be $10,000 or less already.

And look, to folks at TCU or some public school complaining, if kids are good students and get nifty scholarships and whatever, good for them. It might result in some inequity but I think fans need to take a step back when complaining that such and such a kid got a wonderful academic scholarship from a university.

And when a state has it set up to make education affordable for students, then great, too.


Again, if a school is lying or otherwise breaking the rules, that's another thing.

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My understanding is that the funds for Louisiana and other states will award all in state students what amounts to a high percentage, but partial, scholarship. Something in the 70+ percent range. Perhaps it is need based. Anyway, for all in state LSU and other state schools' baseball players, a .3 or even less scholarship is in effect a full one. Thus, they can give out of state kids full scholarships, something that isn't common in a sport that only allows 11.7 total. I don't know if that is complete or not.

I don't like the system, but to me, the rub is the 11.7 number, not the states that are trying to get around it. I would get rid of that first.

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The states are not trying to get around this. These are really expensive programs designed with academics in mind and NOT athletics. It just happens to benefit the athletic programs in these non-equivalency sports.

But I would like to see more baseball scholarships.

My experience, and watching my cousin go through it, is it depends on the coach/program and how they handle scholarships. Public schools tend to be at an advantage from a dollars perspective (i.e. partial scholarship goes further). My cousin's experience is that if you are a blue chip player, public school programs likely see you as dime a dozen since they can typically get multiple blue chips whereas private schools value you more. So a blue chip is more likely to give a full ride to blue chip while public school will give a partial. That said, it forces a private school to ask the non-blue chip players to pony up more money. If daddy has deep pockets, kid makes the team. If daddy doesn't, sorry non-blue chip. Public school will offer blue chip larger portion, but still partial, than they would to non-blue chip. The rest is hoped to be covered through academics or need based scholarships. Private schools will do that too, but often have higher academic thresholds (however more flexible sometimes with exceptions). We also have to remember, baseball players tend to have better GPAs than some of the other major sports, so my personal opinion is it's typically easier to get a baseball player on academic scholarship than some other male sport athletes.

Frog fan and former player here - just wanted to chime in and correct some misunderstandings regarding TCU having an advantage because it's private. While certain schools like Vandy, Stanford, and Rice do have a decided advantage in baseball because of the gigantic endowments relative to size of student body, Tcu is not in that class. In order to be permissible, the school can only offer aid to players on the same basis that it is offered to the entire student body. Otherwise, it would be cheating.

So Vanderbilt, rice, and Stanford all give need based financial aid to every student enrolled - you basically pay what you can afford. This allows them to draw from a pool of talent that tcu just can't. Tcu has to spread the 11.7 scholarships around and then find kids whose parents can afford to foot the rest of the bill. I only wish the school endowment was large enough to offer aid to the entire student body, but we aren't even close.

Frankly, if there were any reason Schloss would ever leave, it would be because he is at a decided competitive disadvantage to less expensive schools. It's tough making 11.7 work anywhere, but especially when yearly tuition is above $50k as it is now at TCU.

Enjoyed the series with you guys.

Thanks for the explanation. The article above kind of explained it, but I knew it had something to do with the size of the endowments. I wonder if this explains why Stanford is so good at the Olympic sports and does well in the Director's cup routinely.

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A private school can do all sorts of creative accounting to get a good ball player enough to make up the scholarship difference.

They are not subject to the same sort of open records requests as public schools. They can decide who gets academic aid and how much, and are not accountable to anybody. It depends on how badly they want to play ball with the baseball program (or really any program with partial scholarships).

As long as there are partial scholarships, and they do not have to account for how they award out other aid, private schools are not at a disadvantage. Not even close.

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it's very interesting as time goes by...what a tremendous advantage this is to private schools whether it be related to scholarships or scandals. We are seeing this come in very, very handy more and more for private schools

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Thanks for the explanation. The article above kind of explained it, but I knew it had something to do with the size of the endowments. I wonder if this explains why Stanford is so good at the Olympic sports and does well in the Director's cup routinely.

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The director's cup has more to do with how they structure that competition. Each school gets to score 10 male and female sports. If you don't have 10 sports per gender (We only have 9 males sports), you start out with a lower maximum total points possible because you get a 0 in that 10th spot. If you have more than 10 sports (like Stanford does), you get to take your best 10. So if we have a sport that has a down year and doesn't make the post season, we get 0 points in that spot while Stanford can substitute in another sport.

They have many good programs and would be in the running often even if they only had 10 sports each, but they win every year because they have so many more sports than everyone else.

Yes, but they might have more sports because they can entice kids to compete there on as needed schollies from their endowment. We don't have that option. That was my reasoning.

TCU Academic Scholarship Requirements for incoming Freshmen Fall of 2015 Class
http://www.admissions.tcu.edu/Freshman/Scholarship-And-Financial-Aid

Dean's Scholarship ($20,000/year) 3.85 GPA - 32.3 ACT or 2105 SAT - Top 4.31%
Faculty Scholarship ($15,000/year) 3.71 GPA - 29.8 ACT or 1956 SAT - Top 10%
TCU Scholarship ($12,000/year) 3.65 GPA - 28.5 ACT or 1908 SAT - Top 11.5%
Founder's Scholarship ($10,000/year) 3.66 GPA - 27.9 ACT or 1888 SAT - Top 13.99%

If coaches at Georgia are not using the built in scholarships to their advantage that is their fault and should be fired. All their players need to do is make good grades and it is free guaranteed money.

Good explanation PO Frog.

I have a Different Question on Scholarship Allocation:

Are there typical rules of thumb for how much scholarship money players get?
At A&M?
In the SEC?
Across the board?

What % does a HS recruit who projects as a weekend starter get?
What does a sophomore who won starting job halfway through fish year get during soph year?
What %does a Junior who gets drafted in the 10th round but comes back get?

Lots of factors involved with determining the amount a player gets. Right or wrong, The financial istuation of the player's family is a factor. Baseball coaches have to find players that can pay their portion of the bill and possibly take less allowing more money for other players. When coaches recruit players playing on select competitive travel teams, they often know that the family probably has the funds to help cover the additional costs. I know of players that struggled to get offers, not because of their playing ability by question marks on whether they need a full ride or not to attend.

When you only have 11.7 scholarships and must divide that money amongst the whole team, the amounts players get does not always follow strict guidelines and may not always appear fair.

I wonder what the art of the possible is for the P5 conferences moving to 23 scholarships is...the current rules feel out of date with the cost of attendance running nearly 25K at A&M and higher at other institutions. I presume even a partial scholarship creates the opportunity for receiving in-state tuition...

I get that, but surely the invisible hand has created some sort of "market rate."

For example, what scholarship % did we offer Brigham Hill? What % did other prominent programs offer?