Ivy League took legal action against over its no-scholarship policy

HARTFORD, Conn.– A pair of basketball players from Brown allege in a federal claim that the Ivy League’s policy of not using athletic scholarships totals up to a price-fixing agreement that rejects professional athletes proper financial assistance and payment for their services.The suit was submitted Tuesday in U.S. District Court in Connecticut by lawyers representing Grace Kirk, a member of Brown’s females’s team, and Tamenang Choh, who played for the men’s team from 2017 through 2022. They are seeking class-action status to represent all existing and previous athletes at the 8 Ivy League schools going back to those recruited given that March 2019. The fit argues Ivy League schools unlawfully conspired to restrict financial assistance and not compensate athletes for their services.” In either case, regardless of whether thought about as a restraint on the price of education, the worth of financial aid, the price of athletic services, or the level of compensation to Ivy League professional athletes, the Ivy League Agreement is per se unlawful,” the lawsuit states.Harvard, Yale, Brown, Princeton, Dartmouth, Cornell, Columbia and Penn don’t use merit scholarships of any kind, consisting of athletic scholarships. The policy, which dates back to 1954, makes the Ivy League the only Division I athletic conference that forbids member schools from offering athletic scholarships.Ivy League executive director Robin Harris protected the policy in a statement responding to the legal action, noting there are a wide range of choices when it comes to chances available to college-level professional athletes.”The Ivy League athletics design is built on the fundamental concept that student-athletes need to be representative of the broader trainee body, including the opportunity to get need-based

financial assistance,”she said.”In turn, picking and embracing that concept then provides each Ivy League student-athlete a journey that stabilizes a world-class academic experience with the chance to contend in Division I athletics and ultimately paves a path for lifelong success.”However attorneys for the Brown professional athletes explain that other elite academic schools, such as Stanford and Duke, do offer athletic scholarships.” These schools are not part of the Ivy League, however they demonstrate they can maintain stellar scholastic standards while completing for outstanding athletes, and without concurred upon limitations on price, “the suit said.The fit likewise argues that Ivy League schools have a significant impact over the course that a small pool of people who are both elite students and elite professional athletes can take, so by not providing athletic scholarships, the league is artificially suppressing the market for those students.”The natural, foreseeable, and designated outcome of the Ivy League Agreement is that Ivy League athletes have actually paid more for their education and made less in payment or compensation than they would have in the lack of the contract,”the lawsuit stated.