so what?

Kyle provides some good real-world cautions about what we're trying to do here, and unfortunately this is the first chance I've had to revisit this, being home with the flu today. But I think there are some good wider research questions we can get to with the limited scholarship data we have, augmented by institutional data and potentially some finer analysis by conference and/or institutional type, to wit:

* are there systematic differences in the proportion of costs covered for male and female athletes, looking at the U-Wash example?

* are there such differences between the haves and have-nots? The answer may seem obvious, but if scholarships to MAC schools are systematically worth less (based on per-capita costs relative to cost of attendance) than those to Big Ten schools, it would be an interesting commentary on the MAC members' struggles to remain in Division I-A.

* Especially at the lower end of D-I and in D-II, how do per-capita scholarship allocations compare to other financial aid allocations, especially merit aid? (I think this is available through IPEDS.) If a college is awarding $2MM in athletic grants and $1MM in institution-based financial aid, that seems noteworthy to me.

Any of these would seem to be interesting and worthwhile questions to pursue, and I'm sure you guys can come up with others. A couple of technical details...comments aren't shown automatically, so it's probably best to add posts instead of comments. Second, does anyone know how to get RSS feeds for this? I keep getting error messages saying I don't have permission for same.

Cheers,

Welch