The Ivy League Muscles Up

Harvard, Yale and Princeton perennially finish among the top five in rankings of universities for their academic offerings and research. Could they, one day, also compete for the Final Four of the NCAA basketball tournament?

Ivy League colleges have not been serious competitors in major sports since the signing of the Ivy Group Agreement in 1945, which banned the use of athletic scholarships. Harvard and Yale dominated college football in the late 19th and early 20th century but de-emphasized sports in the aftermath of a series of controversies over gridiron violence. (Harvard's invention of the "flying wedge," in which a mob of defensive players targets a single opposing player, led to the creation of the National Collegiate Athletic Association.)

But now two Harvard initiatives—a dramatic restructuring of tuition assistance and aggressive recruitment of the nation's best high-school basketball players—could spur Harvard and other Ivy League schools to produce basketball teams worthy of March Madness. Basketball is likely to see the greatest change from these new rules, since one good player can significantly improve the fortunes of the team; see, for instance, the career of Bill Bradley, who led Princeton to the Final Four in 1965. Because of the volume of elite athletes needed, the initiatives are less likely to impact sports such as football or baseball.

Under Harvard's new tuition policy announced in December—and matched by Yale, Penn, Brown, and Dartmouth—families with incomes under $60,000 could send their children to college for free. Families earning up to $180,000 would pay, at most, 10 percent of their incomes on tuition. Other grants could make tuition nil for many other students.

"For everyone who is highly qualified, if their income is $80,000 to $180,000, the incentive to go to Harvard is going to be huge," says Sandy Baum, an economist at Skidmore and the College Board. "You could see vast numbers of new people deciding to give Harvard a try, and that could include some [superior] athletes." Already Harvard has seen a spike in applications with the new tuition policy.

"This will definitely benefit our coaches in recruiting," Amy Backus, a longtime women's basketball coach at Yale who is now associate athletic director, said in an e-mail. But she doubts "the extent that we will be competing for a national championship in basketball," she said, noting the challenge of finding athletes who can compete academically at Yale.

But the new tuition policies could enable schools like Harvard and Yale to compete for athletes who might otherwise attend other elite schools with major sports programs, like Stanford, Duke, Northwestern, Georgetown and Vanderbilt.