16monday, April 23, 2012
Daily Nebraskan Daily Nebraskan
monday, aPril 23, 2012
viewpoint
Questions of equivalency Track and field struggles to allocate small number of scholarships
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he deck is stacked against Gary Pepin. Nebraska’s track and field coach manages a program that has to allocate a small number of scholarships among a large team, all while sharing scholarships with cross country, the only sport that fields an NCAA championship but doesn’t offer scholarships. NCAA rules regulate 18 scholarships for women’s track and field and 12 1/2 scholarships for men. The scholarships are based on a percentage of the student’s tuition. For a sport like football or basketball, where the number of scholarships far exceeds the number of positions, it isn’t difficult to offer the best players in the country full-ride
scholarships. Track, on the other hand, has to find athletes to compete in as many as 22 events on both the men’s and women’s side. Pepin, just like track coaches nationwide, gives out partial scholarships to numerous athletes, but the money only goes so far. Ultimately, many of NU’s track and field athletes wind up paying their own way through school. “We’re trying to get people to come to school here for zero and pay out of state tuition and/or come here for peanuts, for just practically nothing,” Pepin said. When Pepin started at Nebraska 32 years ago, NU had a policy in place allowing out-of-state students to gain instate tuition status by obtaining a Nebraska driver’s license
after living in-state for six months. Pepin said approximately 15 years ago, the university passed a measure removing the exemption from the books in an attempt to prevent graduate students from taking advantage of the rule. “When that policy was passed, it had an absolute disaster effect on (equivalency sports),” Pepin said. “That has really, really hurt us in recruiting.” If Pepin wanted to convince athletes to join Nebraska on a non-scholarship or partial-scholarship basis, the price would be higher and the chances would be lower. Some schools decided to keep similar policies to the one Nebraska got rid of. Other schools, like Arkansas, which consistently produces top-ranked track teams, formed reciprocal
Senior Bjorn Barrefors is one of 16 international students on the 111-member track and field squad. Under NCAA rules, the Huskers are allowed 12 1/2 scholarships for the men’s side.
Title IX deserves re-examining story by Chris Peters file photo by Morgan Spiehs agreements with other states. Sixteen states, stretching from Texas to Delaware, make up the Academic Common Market. The ACM is a program that allows students to attend universities in member states for discounted tuition rates, so long as the student is studying in one of 1,900 select degree programs in the 16 member states. Nebraska is a part of the Midwestern Higher Education Compact, along with seven other regional states, which limits nonresident tuition to 150 percent the cost of in-state tuition in select degree programs. While NU can offer out-of-state tuition relief, the discounts for Midwestern schools such as Nebraska aren’t as favorable as Southeastern schools like Arkansas. “We have brought in hundreds of students to the University of Nebraska, paying all the money they have to pay over there,” Pepin said. “We would even bring more of them in and more great students in if there was ever a chance to get an in-state waiver. “We can go down the line with the majority of these schools. We can whoop these schools on the opportunities for track and field here versus there. We can’t beat them when it comes to the cost of going to school there.” One school Pepin does have a leg up on, though, is fellow-Big Ten school Michigan. The average cost of out-of-state tuition at Michigan is $37,782, nearly twice the amount of Nebraska’s. “We’re not getting the number of outof-state kids coming in on minimal or no scholarships that we did 10 years ago, and that’s due to the cost of education,” said Mike McGuire, the Michigan women’s cross country coach. “They don’t even incur debt because they don’t take it on in the first place, and honestly I don’t blame them.” Just like other students, track athletes are eligible for academic scholarships and need-based scholarships, which help lighten the burden. Still, those accommodations are made at nearly every school, and it’s the schools with the highest tuition and the least amount of tuition waivers that ultimately suffer. “For us, our cost of attendance for out-ofstate is an inherent disadvantage,” McGuire said. “Nebraska is a much more affordable school for out-of-state than Michigan is. That’s just reality.” And it shows on the track. Between
track: see page 47
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sean whalen
here are very few taboo subjects in America today. Was Abraham Lincoln attracted to men? Is our national anthem really the best we can do? Should Title IX be changed? It is the latter subject that currently needs examining, despite many feminists considering it base misogyny to even consider changes in the 40-year-old law. To start, keep in mind that Title IX was never intended to be an athletics bill. Part of the Educational Amendments of 1972, the 37-word law was originally intended to promote the hiring of women at federally funded universities, as part of a bill introducing Pell grants. The Department of Human Education and Welfare interpreted Title IX for college sports in 1979 and, 40 years later, college is a completely different landscape. There are now many more women undergraduates than men, and what used to be a 5.5-to-1 male to female athlete ratio has become 1.3-to1. Women are making more gains this decade, as they now have much more disposable income than 40 years ago, and many more women’s athletics programs to support with that money. They don’t — attendance at women’s sporting events at the professional and collegiate level lags far behind men’s programs, even if football is not taken into account. Let’s just say it’s no wonder it isn’t easy to find the attendance numbers for the Nebraska women’s tennis team. In fact, the women’s tennis team is a great lens to view Title IX flaws through. Mary Weatherholt is the only American on the team, playing alongside five Germans, a Slovakian and a Finn. According to findthedata.org, the women’s tennis team had a larger budget than the men’s tennis team (by $100,000) and lost $613,631. What exactly does the state of Nebraska gain from that money? NU can educate 40 women for that kind of money but instead, they educate eight. There is a disconnect between Title IX’s laudable ideal of women athletes rising to an equal level as male athletes in college and the reality of the situation: men are not willing to support women’s athletics, and it seems women are not either. I brought that disconnect up to a professor I respect, who considers herself a feminist, and she said the reason is because of our patriarchal society’s social engineering of women’s athletics as trivial. I brought the disconnect up to a colleague’s girlfriend, and she suggested women’s sports, especially basketball, are just dull to watch compared to their male offerings. I suppose the answer is somewhere in the middle.
There’s definitely misogyny in how men view women’s sports — Maria Sharapova was the top-earning female athlete in the world (at around $15 million) for the seventh straight year, despite winning one major in the last three years. Much of her money comes from endorsements, which are more about her beauty than her career Grand Slams. Other truly famous female athletes, from Danica Patrick and Anna Kournikova to Mia Hamm and Lindsey Vonn, are invariably beautiful and can make more from marketing their beauty than from earnings on the field or track. No matter how good Brittney Griner is, she won’t be featured in too many Gatorade commercials. That’s a shame, as there is an incredible world of women’s sports out there, in the high school, college and professional levels. Personally, watching Abby Wambach do her thing on the pitch at last summer’s World Cup was one of my favorite sports moments of the summer. Maybe one of NU’s current soccer players will have the same opportunity one day, but Title IX isn’t the reason why she would. If you believe the rhetoric, there is no middle ground to this argument: only misogynist pigs on one side and bra-burning femi-Nazis on the other. Repealing Title IX, despite the warnings of many feminists, will not destroy women’s athletics as we know them. John Cook, Rhonda Revelle, John Walker and Connie Yori have enough support to keep their programs going without government mandates, and Tom Osborne, a former politician, would never cut all women’s sports. There would be changes, of course. Maybe the golf team doesn’t play a tournament in Puerto Rico anymore. Maybe Yori isn’t off to Scandanavia in the summer and maybe Cook says no to an invitation from Hawaii next time. The teams and educational opportunities would still be there for women and men, so long as the college community in which they reside wants them to be. Politics enters this discussion as well. Many Title IX proponents are also women’s rights supporters. Those groups are currently under attack from all sides, from personhood bills and anti-family planning advocacy to repeals of equal pay laws. To many of them, Title IX must feel like another front in a war that seeks to take back all the progress they have earned over the past 50 years. It is an understandable thought. Many Americans have priorities of a different sort: They want an end to unnecessary government regulation and to make sure that each taxpayer dollar is well spent. While Nebraska’s athletics budget isn’t technically taxpayer money (it’s complicated), eventually Nebraskans will see these budget numbers and wonder if there isn’t a better use of $613,631 than fielding a tennis team that may have no Americans on it next year. And there is. Of course, I may be naive: that “better use” could turn out to be a high-definition television set inside every locker of the football complex. It could be that employment opportunities for women in college athletics shrink even further and that recruiting budgets, per diems and medical care for female athletes suffer. National Organization for Women might get a nice “told-you-so” moment. The solution is not to repeal or destroy Title IX but instead to shift its enforcement. Instead of putting the emphasis on quantity of sports and athletes, it should
There is a disconnect between Title IX’s laudable ideal of women athletes rising to an equal level as male athletes in college.
whalen: see page 50
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