With its members scrambling to stay on the vanguard of financial-aid generosity, the Ivy League may do one of two things. It could keep its current model of need-based aid, or it could - theoretically - form a new one.
Penn athletic director Steve Bilsky said the current model will result in a competitive imbalance.
"The other possibility is to come up with some type of model that is legal, and would create some type of balance," he said. "The only one that I can think of . is to look at the sports in the Ivy League where the financial-aid impact is the greatest and go to an athletic grants-in-aid model.
"This would be perceived as very radical, but I think it's worth looking at."
Dartmouth deputy athletic director Robert Ceplikas agreed that such a proposal would be a "radical departure" from the norm, and Bilsky acknowledged that his proposal flies in the face of the principle at the heart of the Ivy League's creation in 1954.
Much of the resistance to a system of athletic aid - essentially a program of paying for the costs of education for athletes - is rooted in a fear of worsening academic standards, Bilsky said.
"Our schools have committed to awarding financial aid based on need, not athletic status," Columbia athletic director Dianne Murphy said in a statement.
"And [they] have developed a formula to ensure that incoming student-athletes are representative of their incoming classes."
But Bilsky said his proposal would actually improve the profile and diversity of the athletic ranks.
"Qualified students right now might choose a Stanford or a Vanderbilt or a Duke for financial reasons, but would really love to go to the Ivy League," he said. "So now you'd be able to compete scholastically for those kind of students.
"The fear that people sometimes have when you talk about athletic scholarships is that they think it means that the academic pool would get lower. The truth of the matter is that the opposite would happen. It would get stronger, because the number of candidates would increase."
To modify an athletic grants-in-aid system for the Ivy League, Bilsky suggested that the number of scholarships per team be limited to whatever number the conference sees fit.
"That's not a collusion," Bilsky said. "That's an agreement as a league, and if you did that, every school in the league would be operating on the same financial-aid model, and that would take away this tension.
"I don't know if you could do it for all 30-some-odd sports," he added. "But you could take half a dozen sports that you think history shows most of the students that are playing are receiving some type of aid, and say: let's do a pilot program."
The Ivy League, often thought of as an elite club, is primarily an athletic organization; while the universities rarely work together on other issues, the conference legislates on athletics.
That would make league-wide action possible, even as each school moves in its own direction toward greater affordability.
"We don't know really what this is going to lead to," Bilsky said. "I'm saying that some real thought has to go into this. I think that the thought should be accompanied with [the attitude of] nothing that's off the table, because I think that the model that I'm suggesting is a much fairer, better model than the have and have-not situation that might develop.
"When it comes to money," Bilsky said, "there's no equalizer."
Except, of course, athletic scholarships.
