Student Recruitment

University attorneys are puzzled about new rules from the U.S. Department of Education that ban incentive bonuses for college recruiters but continue to allow bonuses for coaches and athletics administrators whose teams achieve success.

The department says the exception for athletics staff “merely reflects the fact that the payment of bonuses to athletic personnel is a common practice and is not typically viewed as incentive compensation based on recruitment of individuals as students,” but is instead a reward for “success in recruiting that small subset of individuals whose enrollment would benefit the institution’s athletic program.”

Eduardo Ochoa, the department staffer who has helped respond to questions about the rules, said in a statement that student-athlete recruitment “is not different from recruitment of other students. But the department does not consider bonus payments made to coaching staff or other athletic department personnel to be prohibited if they reward performance independent from securing enrollment or awarding financial aid, such as for a successful athletic season, team academic performance, or other measures of a successful team. Any interpretation to the contrary is a tortured reading of the plain language of the regulation.”

And so attorneys in higher education are now trying to figure out how to apply the rules at colleges and universities. At least three Football Bowl Subdivision universities have removed academically related bonuses from coaches’ contracts, while others, such as Oklahoma, have kept them.

“We’ve heard different opinions of what the regulations say,” OU executive associate athletics director Larry Naifeh told USA Today. The university “had a comfort level that we’re OK. If we’re not, we’ll be told and we’ll make an adjustment.”

USA Today, November 2011

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