By Will Vandervort.

This spring and summer, the coaches from the Atlantic Coast Conference will get together to discuss several topics. Included in those discussions will be the Cost of Attendance (COA) and in particular can they get it changed.

The reality of it, it’s not likely.

Last month, when speaking to the media that cover the ACC, Clemson head football coach Dabo Swinney expressed his concerns about the COA, in particular the added pressure it might place on potential recruits.

The COA, which was passed in January by the Power 5 Conferences after they were given autonomy by the NCAA last fall, allows schools the ability to give student-athletes money on top of their scholarship to help with everyday living expenses.

Clemson has reported it will give student athletes from its head-count sports—football, men’s and women’s basketball, women’s tennis and volleyball—roughly $3,800, about $2,000 less than what Auburn will reportedly give their student-athletes.

Swinney doesn’t like the fact the COA might have players and their parents choosing a school based solely on monetary reasons.

The Power Five Conferences agreed the COA will be set by each individual school. It is based on federal financial aid formulas and the total amount will be unique to each school.

“The cost of attendance is made up of six items, tuition, fees, room, board, books and miscellaneous expense,” Clemson athletic director Dan Radakovich said. “If you are a Presidential Scholar at Clemson then you are able to get all six of those pieces. If you are an athlete, up until January, you were able to get five because the NCAA did not allow miscellaneous expenses to be a part of your scholarship.

“So what the Power Five did was say, ‘Okay, we are going to allow this to come in.’”

Swinney, who represents the ACC on this issue, has called the COA a “nightmare” and he hopes to get it changed.

“There has to be a better solution somewhere down the road. I think eventually we will get there,” Swinney said.

But they might not. The COA isn’t something a school or conference can just go and change whenever it wants to. The Federal Government is involved and there are anti-trust laws that must be obeyed. In other words, a conference just can’t get together and set its own parameters and tell its member institutions they have to all pay the same amount.

“The methodologies that are used at individual campuses are a little different, but they are all subject to federal oversight because these numbers are also used for government grants,” Radakovich said. “Now the schools come back and they start to uncover what all these numbers have been.

“I can only tell you from what I understood at my previous institution (Georgia Tech), is that number had been kept low because they were doing a lot of research. That is kind of what they did. They do a lot of research so they kept those numbers low so more of those dollars would be able to go to the research rather than people. There were ways schools would look at that.

“At Clemson, when mom and dad would look at it and saw that bottom line number for all six, they wanted it to be affordable so people would still be able to come to school and not check Clemson off the list because all of a sudden they were too expensive.”

Radakovich confirmed there really isn’t anything Clemson, the ACC or any of the Power 5 Conferences can do about the amount of money individual institutions give student athletes as long as it is in line with what the university sets for all students. In other words, if a school such as Auburn is obeying the federal oversight committee’s guidelines, then there is nothing anyone can do about how much money they are handing out.

“It isn’t an athletic centric decision. We have now shined our 1,000 watt light bulb on this issue and you still have to make sure your methodology, as to how you have done this in the past, continues to be consistent,” the Clemson athletic director said. “A lot of schools, and I think we are included, do a bi-annual survey of students. How many times do you go back-and-forth to home? What is your cost? What is your cost for getting haircuts, bedding and occasional meals? Those are all things that kind of pull together into that miscellaneous expense. Those numbers will be looked at, at least every couple of years, here. Some schools may do it annually and some may do it every five years. I have seen miscellaneous-expense numbers stay the same for a decade.

“You have the freedom (to change it). You just have to be able to justify it. (Saying it’s for athletic scholarships) probably would not be a good answer. It would also impact the Physics department, the English Department and science.”

A few years ago, a lot of the Power 5 Conferences sought to give their student athletes a $2,000 stipend, but the idea was shot down by the NCAA, mostly by the smaller conferences whose schools could not afford the stipend. Also, if approved, it would have potentially violated anti-trust law because schools cannot get together and cap anything at a certain amount.

“They tried the stipend thing and it did not go through so this is a way they are getting that done, but there are some unintended consequences,” Swinney said. “There is no question it is not a level playing field and it is going to be the number one topic at all the coaches’ meetings because it is not good.”

“Again, the intent is good, but for one school to be able to pay three or four thousand more than another school, then at the end of the day guys are going to make decisions for the wrong reasons. It should not be that way.”

But it looks like there is no turning back now.

“A few years ago when a number of the Power 5 Schools said they wanted to give a stipend, like $2,000, it would have been a lot easier,” Radakovich said. “So at that time autonomy was not a part of it so what the Power 5 Schools had to do was create the autonomy first to be able to make these rules and the first thing they did was give the miscellaneous-expense allowance, knowing it was going to be different at Mississippi State, different at Clemson, different at South Carolina and different at Southern Cal.”

“There are a lot of tentacles to this. It is not just, ‘Hey, let’s give football more money or basketball more money,’” he continued. “I think the comment is, ‘This is a great thing for our student athletes.’ Playing a sport at our level is really an All-in affair. It is different from the late 1990s where in the summer everybody went home, they got a job and they made some money and then they came back. Now, they stay in school. They work out in the summer and they go to school. Nobody seems to create the correlation between increased graduation rates, which are really important, and the fact students stay here in some of those sports 12 months a year. If you stay in the summer for four years, you actually have another couple of semesters that you have to graduate within that eligibility period. At some places, the really gifted students might have two years of eligibility remaining, but you have graduated. Now what do you do?”