KU links: KU offering multiyear athletic scholarships; Topeka college-choice blogger accepted to Yale
At the end of a busy week, here’s your weekly-or-so roundup of KU news, notes and mentions from around the Internet.
• KU is leading the way among Big 12 universities in offering multiyear scholarships to athletes, according to this report from the Chronicle of Higher Education (It’s behind a subscriber paywall). However, only 16 of KU’s 354 scholarship athletes for 2012-13 have multiyear awards.
That’s more or less in line with what the Chronicle found at other universities. It surveyed the public universities in the six biggest athletic conferences, and nearly all offered either a fairly small number of multiyear scholarships or none at all.
A new NCAA policy effective in August 2012 allows programs to offer multiyear scholarships to athletes for the first time. The change was made after the previous policy requiring renewable one-year awards drew some criticism. Critics — including a Florida State University sports management instructor quoted by the Chronicle — say the one-year deals could allow coaches to push athletes out of their scholarships because of athletic performance. A number of athletic administrators quoted defended the practice, saying the one-year scholarships provide an incentive for athletes to get good grades and stay out of legal trouble.
The Big 12 conference opposed the new NCAA rule, the Chronicle reports, and KU was the only Big 12 university that reported it awarded more than two multiyear scholarships this year (though the report didn’t get counts from Baylor or TCU, both private universities, and the University of Oklahoma didn’t report how many it awarded).
The University of Illinois embraced multiyear scholarships to a much higher degree than any other school in the study: This year, 192 of its 370 scholarship athletes have multiyear awards.
• We’ve got another dispatch from Leobardo Espinoza Jr., the Topeka high-schooler and New York Times blogger who’s been offered a full-ride scholarship to KU. The big news is that he’s been accepted to Yale University and placed on a wait list at Stanford, both of which he writes about with his usual candor. He says he’s now pondering four options that he says will all cost him “little or no money,” while also waiting to hear from Stanford: KU, Yale and two New England liberal arts colleges, Amherst and Bowdoin. He doesn’t indicate if he’s leaning one way or the other.
• Across the pond, The Guardian has an interview with Chip Taylor, director of KU’s Monarch Watch, on his concerns about the future of the monarch butterfly population.
• Some research from Promothesh Chatterjee, an assistant professor of marketing in the KU School of Business, got some attention from the NYT as well as AOL’s DailyFinance site. He collaborated with some researchers from the University of Utah on a study that found that a person with a single savings account is likely to save more and spend less than a person with multiple accounts. Chatterjee suggests consolidating your multiple savings accounts if you have them, or at least using a service that will provide an aggregated view of your different accounts.
If you’ve been SAVING up some KU news tips, now’s the time to send them to merickson@ljworld.com! Ho ho. (As I said, it’s been a long week.)