From a student-athlete's perspective, a financial aid package can consist of cobbling together funding from various sources, including loans, partial athletics scholarship, academic or merit-based based awards or, for the select few, a full athletics scholarship. 

The annual budget of Division I Athletics Departments across the country unquestionably absorb a wide variety of costs. One of the biggest costs on the ledger is athletically related financial aid -- aka athletic scholarships. This athletics aid is parsed out in various amounts to student-athletes at the direction of the Head Coach of each sport a Division I institution sponsors (with the exception of a few sports and schools that do not offer athletics aid). Often the total bill for athletics aid costs many Division I universities millions of dollars.

Financial aid, as the NCAA defines it, involves funds provided to student-athletes from various sources to pay or assist in paying their cost of education at the institution. Per NCAA legislation, financial aid includes all institutional financial aid and other permissible, outside financial aid. 

Within the broader financial aid category, athletically related financial aid is defined by the NCAA as “…financial aid that is awarded on any basis that is related to athletics ability, participation or achievement. If an application process specifically requests athletics participation or achievements as criteria for consideration in determining whether an applicant receives financial aid, aid received pursuant to such a process is athletically related financial aid.” 

This parameter ensures that whether an institution offers a traditional athletics scholarship to a prospect directly from the Athletics Department or the university's business school offers freshman business school applicants who run a 40-yard dash in 4.6 seconds or less $10,000 in financial aid, those divergent sources of the funds would still be considered athletically related financial aid countable against NCAA limits.

The NCAA rules set the individual student-athlete’s financial aid limit at the “cost of attendance” threshold as calculated by the institution per its policies and procedures for calculating that cost for all students at that university. The hottest topics in college sports in 2020 revolve around economic opportunity for student-athletes -- specifically whether the NCAA’s cost of attendance threshold for an individual student-athlete should remain as the “financial cap;” whether student-athletes should be compensated with wages as traditional employees; and to what extent student-athletes could earn money off their name, image, likeness.

In addition to the individual cost-of-attendance limit per student-athlete, the NCAA also sets team athletic scholarship limits. Team scholarship limits in Division I help maintain a semblance of competitive equity between all Division I schools even though these limits don’t represent a dollar for dollar identical budget. For example, one regional public Division I school’s cost of attendance might amount to $27,000 per year while a private Division I institution’s cost of attendance might be north of $70,000 per year. Both of these Division I schools could offer a full athletic scholarships to respective prospects, even though the actual value in dollars differs greatly. We will delve into team scholarship limits and some of the key wrinkles of scholarships and aid another day.