>>[Big Daddy] "What I don't accept is your fundamental premise that you can discuss soccer with respect to college scholarships outside of college scholarships for all sports. It seems to me to be a fundamentally silly point of view that you can somehow separate different sports and ask for "fairness" or "equality" and disregard everything else going on within the athletic department of a college."

Chico, you are thinking too narrowly, if you want to use this line of logic. You want to compare gender based spending in sports and not look at it on a sport by sport basis. Then I ask......why would you separate sports based scholarships from academic or needs based scholarships?<<

Not a bad point at all. The issue that I see is that you have three categories of aid: merit-based academic, merit-based athletic, and needs-based academic. Lumping all three together somewhat obviates the motivation behind each, e.g., if you have a tremendous number of minority males getting merit-based academic aid then you've wiped out your male athletic and needs-based stuff.

>>These are colleges and universities, right? The objective of scholarships is to provide access to an education. Therefore, evaluating the awarding of scholarships based on gender.....solely on the basics of athletics is silly. If girls makeup 52% of the college population and receive 52% of total scholarship dollars, isn't that at a top level what fairness is?<<

Yes; if your objective is to treat all aid equally. In other words, if you don't wish to distinguish among academic, athletic, and needs-based programs then using a single measure would seem to be fundamentally fair.

The issue as I see it is that there is a strong desire to distinguish among academic, athletic, and needs-based programs. For example, I'd gladly vote to keep needs-based programs if we could only have one.

>>If it isn't reasonable to look at a soccer to soccer comparison...then lets look at the student population as a whole as it relates to scholarships. <<

The latest numbers then show that we should be awarding 56%+ of all scholarship dollars to females, since that is the average percentage of females in the undergraduate student population. It is estimated that this will increase to 61%+ in the next two years.

Again, the proposal makes some amount of sense if you're willing to do away with various programs with various motivations. Honestly, I could care less what such a proposal would do athletically -- since acting as a feeder system to professional leagues doesn't really seem to be an original mandate of higher learning -- but I would tend to be concerned about the impact on needs-based programs in terms of what it would do to what is rapidly becoming an increasing minority -- the male college student.

>>[Big Daddy] I'm also going to ask you to watch your language. You have used words like misogynist, racist, sexist, apartheid...and to a far lesser degree used insulting language like calling something silly, simply because they have a different perspective than you do.

I can use words too........how about arrogant, hypocritical, narrowminded, intolerant and intellectually reckless.<<

I am pleased you can use these words and I honestly don't mind your using them in describing my posts. However, in order to make your point, you might actually want to explain specifically what it is that I am writing that exhibits these characteristics.