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Utica College, in New York, has been punished by the National Collegiate Athletic Association for failing to monitor its Canadian International Student Award program, with the end result being that Canadian athletes -- ice hockey players, primarily -- received more financial aid than the general Canadian student body at the college. Utica created the award program in 2010 in order to make the cost of attendance roughly equivalent for Canadian and domestic students and thereby attract more Canadian students to under-enrolled majors. However, Utica suspended the scholarship program for incoming Canadian students for the 2012-13 academic year after discovering that the aid was disproportionately going to athletes, a violation of Division III rules.
“This was unintentional and Utica College and the NCAA agree it is,” Utica’s athletics director, Dave Fontaine, told the Utica Observer-Dispatch. “Nonetheless, we have to be accountable. We take full responsibility. We self-reported it.”
Sanctions for Utica include two years of probation and postseason bans for teams whose rosters include one or more athletes who received a Canadian International Student Award. Utica is not the first college to get in trouble with the NCAA for disproportionately awarding a scholarship intended for Canadian students in general to ice hockey players in particular: Neumann College, in Pennsylvania, was similarly penalized in 2012.
