The NCAA announced last week plans to begin allotting $10 million annually to reward Division I members whose student-athletes are in good academic standing.
"[This is] the first time that we have looked at providing specific monetary incentives for good performance," NCAA spokesperson Erik Christianson said. "At the same time we're also looking at providing funds for institutions where they've been struggling academically."
Christianson added the program marks the first instance of the NCAA shifting to a positive reinforcement approach to improve academic standing among its student-athletes. Most past approaches have been deterrent rather than incentive-based.
"Now we're working on the incentives side of the academic reform," he said. "We're serious about academic reform, and we're not just serious in terms of providing disincentives."
David McDonald, special assistant to University of Wisconsin Chancellor John Wiley regarding athletics, said he was pleased to hear the NCAA will begin fiscally rewarding schools meeting their standards.
"Several institutions, us included, had hoped the NCAA would start paying attention to this," McDonald said. "It's good to see the NCAA putting their money where their mouth is, trying to create some material incentives to honor the mission that we're supposed to honor."
The NCAA will garner funding for the merit-based awards, Christianson said, from roughly $40 million the association takes in on a yearly basis from its television contract with CBS.
"[Ten million dollars], of course, is a significant amount of funding," he noted. "[But] we're willing to devote 25 percent of that … to rewarding academic performance."
Although Christianson said the actual amount of money each school will receive is not yet determined, it will reportedly be in the range of $100,000 for each qualified program.
If UW's trend continues, McDonald said, the school should be in line to see that money.
"We've been performing ahead of the curve for quite a while now," McDonald said. "Student-athletes, the last couple of years, have performed at the same level as, or even better than, their non-athletic peers."
According to Christianson, the association's commitment to tough academic standards began several years ago under the direction of the college presidents and chancellors.
The first step of the NCAA's reforms was concerned with strengthening academics for individual student-athletes and included measures such as ensuring student-athletes are on track to graduate in five years or less, Christianson said. The new policy is part of the second step, which aims to set up more specific academic standards for the sports teams, he added.
Under step two regulations, Christianson said a team "could be subject to a loss of one or more scholarships" if its academic measurement score — defined by factors such as the number of student-athletes with good academic standing and graduation rates — drops below a certain level.
These measures do not necessarily indicate inadequate academic performance, however, as Christianson backed McDonald's account of UW student-athletes by emphasizing their overall academic proficiency.
"There is a perception among some that student-athletes don't do well in school and that most of them leave early to go play professional sports, and actually both of those are wrong," he said. "Student-athletes in general graduate at a rate higher than the overall student body and almost all of them do not become professional athletes."
