What Will 'Full Cost of Attendance' Mean to College Hockey?

It's An Ongoing Question, as North Dakota Announces Stipends For All Sports

by Adam Wodon/Managing Editor

So today, the University of North Dakota announced that it would start adding "full cost of attendance" to all scholarships, in all sports. The school had previously announced it would be doing so in men's and women's hockey.

The new arms race has begun, and it could get ugly. But ugly for who?

The arms race in college sports has been going on for quite a long time. This has taken on many forms: higher paid coaches, adding scholarships, and better and better facilities, among other things. We are used to this paradigm. Everyone has to keep up with the Jonses if it wants to compete. Programs wax and wane, some can't keep up, but by and large, things go on.

The latest phase in this game began last year, when the NCAA, under enormous pressure from many directions, essentially allowed the "Power 5" conferences to create its own set of rules, within certain boundaries. One of these was to start allowing schools to give student-athletes "full cost of attendance" in its scholarship packages. This includes things like meal plans, transportation, room and board, and other fees, that weren't previously included in what the NCAA considered a "scholarship." This amounts to a stipend worth upwards of $6,000/year.

For hockey, the "Power 5" schools include everyone in the Big Ten, and Boston College and Notre Dame, immediately putting those schools at a little bit more of an advantage than they were before.

Now, recall that the NCHC was created because those member schools — North Dakota being a major ringleader — believed they needed to "keep up with the Big Ten," which had split off to form a new conference, and didn't want to saddled with the leftover bottom-rung chaff in the old WCHA.

Suddenly, that plan was thwarted by the creation of these "Power 5" rules.

But the NCAA allowed for any other school to match the Power 5 if it wanted to. So far, North Dakota and fellow NCHC school Miami have announced they would give "full cost of attendance" scholarships. Others will probably follow in due time.

“This is a necessary step that empowers our coaches to continue recruiting high-caliber student-athletes," UND athletic director (and chair of the Men's Ice Hockey Committee) Brian Faison said. "It puts our coaches on equal financial footing when competing against regional peer institutions for the best recruits."

The problem is, no one knows where this is headed, and several questions are outstanding.

Most notably, we'd all like to know where everyone is going to get the funding from.

More and more schools are going to feel the pressure to do this in order to keep up with everyone else. As with other efforts to "keep up," that funding has to come from somewhere. But it's most likely not enough to just do this for hockey. Schools will be pressured to do this across the board, in all of their sports. These schools may find that they've finally reached the limit of their funding capacity (and, perhaps, moral capacity) for athletics.

Some schools will inevitably attempt to make this move, only to find after a short while that they've overtaxed themselves financially. Will this happen to North Dakota? It remains to be seen. But it will probably happen to someone.

And we haven't even gotten into the potential fishiness when it comes to determining what the full cost of attendance is.

The end result could be a major stratification in resource levels, and thus competition levels, across college hockey. Stratification has always existed, but it could become more severe.

Growing television contracts for major schools had already created a lot of stratification in the past, but college hockey seemed to survive that and the creation of the Big Ten, and moved on rather well. The last three NCAA champions are all first-timers: Yale, Union and Providence.

But will stipends — not to mention all of the other reform talk floating out there: unions, payments, other lawsuits and pressures — finally be the tipping point? I don't know. I've always been optimistic when it comes to changes in college hockey. But the road ahead is starting to look dark.