olldflame wrote:lynchburgwildcats wrote:$6K seems pretty high. Lynchburg isn't THAT expensive of a place.
I don´t think the local cost of living plays a big factor. Most of that stuff is covered in the scholarship anyway. A big factor is travel costs, and since LU recruits nationally, we have more players coming from a distance than even some P5 schools, who stock their roster by signing all the best players in their home state. Probert, the kicker we signed who sited FCOA as a factor in his decision, is from Minnesota. I do agree that $6000 seems a bit high even at that.
But cost of attendance is an estimate that us supposed to be an estimate that covers ALL students, not just "student"-athletes. So why LU's COA is so much higher than other private institutions that don't just recruit locally or regionally is baffling.
Likely the closest in relation for national recruiting landscape, as far as I know - Notre Dame is only $1950, BYU $4500***. Perhaps some of the others below recruit on as large of a national scale as Liberty does, but I don't exactly pay that much attention to a school's recruiting landscape outside of athletics.
Duke $2206
Baylor $3882
TCU $4700
Miami (FL) $2780
Vanderbilt $2780
Boston College $1400
Wake Forest $2400
Northwestern $2492
Syracuse $1632
Stanford $2625
And this article from insidehighered goes into it and how the FCOA calculation inflation is becoming rampantly suspicious (and also points out the cost of living factor).
Of course it was blatantly inevitable the the FCOA calculations would be exploited for recruiting purposes when the NCAA left it all up to the school's to determine how much they would offer.
https://www.insidehighered.com/news/201 ... s-athletes
“It’s suspicious,” said Ellen Frishberg, a former college financial aid director and president of Executive Function, a higher education consulting firm. “Since you have to present the cost of attendance as the same to everyone, increasing it inflates the budgets for the entire population. That creates more financial need, which creates more loan eligibility, which could mean more debt for students, which is a very negative thing. They’re creating a huge amount of unmet need and funding it for some people and not for others.”
What colleges list as full cost of attendance is important, as it defines the limits of a student's available financial aid and figures significantly into determinations of how much aid a Pell Grant recipient is due and how much in federal loans a student is able to borrow.
The federal government provides guidance and tracks these figures, but allows college financial aid officers to determine what an appropriate estimate is for their institution, though colleges must justify those amounts in some way. The large variance among institutions -- owing to factors such as cost of living being different from one city or state to the next, for example -- has been mostly uncontroversial. That's changed now that cost of attendance has become part of the intercollegiate athletics arms race.
So now you have even more to blame on the NCAA - increased tax burden, increased student debt. All in the name of exploiting student-athletes!
***Hat tip to Saturday Down South for all the FCOA figures other than BYU, which I did a Google search for
http://www.saturdaydownsouth.com/sec-fo ... explained/