How exactly do scholarships work??

How do athletic scholarships work at the college level? Is there a certain dollar amount for each sport?

• The reason I ask is for hockey of course. If a university added CCHA program would the scholarship for hockey take away from other sports? (i.e. football) How are scholarships distributed generally within an athletics program at a Division I school? How many scholarships could hockey commandeer at a Division I school?

• Answer:

  NCAA rules limit the number of hockey scholarships to 16 a year per team (all divisions). A team can offer anywhere from 0 (Harvard, Princeton, Brown, Yale, Cornell, and Dartmouth) to the full 16 (Minnesota, Michigan, Wisconsin). Under NCAA rules, scholarships are permitted to pay tuition, books and room and board ONLY. No extra money for food allowances, incidentals, is permitted. Since the cost of tuition, books and room and board varies from school to school (and within schools depending on whether student is in-state, out of state, out of cuntry, etc) there is no set dollar amount. Schools generally only add programs when there is enough money to pay for them. In your example, the major television networks pay enough money to the NCAA for football coverage to keep their endowment funds full, and a football scholarship will never be displaced by a hockey scholarship (not even at Minnesota). Theoretically, at any one time, a Division I school can have 64 players under a hockey scholarship (252 for football, 44 for basketball, etc). Some things to consider - most Hockey East/ECAC schools require you to meet academic requirements prior to being offered an athletic scholarship - Ivy League universities don't offer athletic scholarships, they do offer academic scholarships to brainy athletes (the average entering marks and SAT scores are 21% higher at Ivy League schools than other Div 1 schools for hockey....47% higher for football) - the University of Minnesota ONLY offers hockey scholarships to Minnesota residents, and only allows try-outs to American citizens (the last Canadian to play for the University of Minnesota hockey team was in 1963 - I can't confirm this, but that is what the school claimed in some recent literature) - competition for hockey scholarships is fierce, it is the only NCAA team sport in Division I that has an average GPA over 3.00. Over the last 15 years, the average entering GPA for hockey players (scholarship and non-scholarship) has varied between 3.28 (1996) and 3.61 (2002). Over the same time period, the highest average entering GPA in football has been 2.89 and in basketball 2.85