Marquette To End Athletic Scholarship Aid For Tennis and Track & Field
“On Tuesday morning, to go along with their physical copy publishing schedule, the Marquette Wire published a news story on their website reporting that Marquette University is ending athletic scholarship aid to athletes on the men’s and women’s tennis teams as well as the men’s and women’s track and field teams by the start of the 2025-26 school year.”
Wait….Colleges Can Just Cut Athletic Scholarship Aid?
The short answer? Yes. While this decision was not made overnight, NCAA DI and DII institutions have no requirement to provide athletic scholarships to their athletes, so long as the amount of scholarship aid offered is equal for men and women thanks to Title IX legislation. The Ivy League famously doesn’t offer any athletic aid despite being an NCAA DI conference, and other schools have the option to do the same with some or all of their sports. We think about athletic aid as a “baked-in” cost for schools, but after the pandemic some athletic departments have been reevaluating where and how they spend their money.
Why Does This Matter?
In short, it’s yet another arrow in the quiver to show students and parents that anything can happen in college athletics. While this is a rare occurrence, coaches reducing or removing athletic aid from older athletes is certainly a more common occurrence and can be financially damaging to a family that picked a school based purely on the vanity or reliance of an athletic scholarship.
