NEW ORLEANS – UL still has not decided how it will fund new NCAA-approved cost-of-attendance stipends beyond usual scholarship money received by student-athletes, Ragin’ Cajuns athletic director Scott Farmer said this week.
But the solution could wind up involving the integration of two plans the Cajuns have been considering: phasing in the paying of full cost of attendance on a two- to three-year basis, and an across-the-board reduction of 5 to 8 percent in budgets for individual athletic department programs including football, basketball, baseball and softball.
“It probably will be a combination of those,” Farmer said during the Sun Belt Conference’s football Media Day on Monday here.
UL was the first Sun Belt school to commit to paying its student-athletes the cost-of-attendance stipend, which amounts to extra cash for incidentals including, but not limited to, travel to home, laundry and personal entertainment.
Some Sun Belt schools including Texas State, Arkansas State, Arkansas-Little Rock and Troy plan to pay cost-of-attendance to some or all of its student-athletes; some are not, and some remain uncommitted.
Farmer previously has said that paying full cost of attendance could cost UL up to about $1.248 million in the 2015-16 school year, which — using tuition-and-fees figures from last school year — amounts to an extra $5,888 per student-athlete per year on top of a scholarship valued at roughly $18,000 to in-state students and $26,000-plus for out-of-staters.
Farmer said precise tuition/fee amounts for the upcoming academic semester were just finalized last week.
“We have some hard numbers we’re trying to figure out now,” he said.
Even if it does not pay the full amount in 2015-16, Farmer suggested that UL remains committed to paying the stipend in some form to its student-athletes starting with the upcoming semester.
“We’re still working on it,” he said Monday. “We’re gonna do something this year, absolutely. … We want to give it to our kids this fall.”
Via – Tim Buckley, The Advertiser