I'll take a shot at trying to explain that. First, there's one school of thought amongst hockey people that the main goal of the ECAC (new commissioner and all) in adding a school is to improve their overall league strength and thus strength of schedule. Obviously, adding a non-scholarship school is less likely to achieve this goal than schorarship program. Argue this point if you want but IMO few would debate that we've had unusual success with out scholarships and that it's clearly easier to be successful with scholarships than with out.
We can argue if this is the ECAC's primary goal (certainly HC seems to hope that academic fit is their primary criteria), but the ECAC really IS a scholarship league. Colgate now gives scholarships which makes all the non-Ivy schools scholarship except Union and Union is clearly the blacksheep program of the league. In fact, there was a fair amount of speculation that the league might attempt to give the boot to Union and then add an even number of teams (particularly after the Union President angered the other schools by voting against the D-III scholarship exemption at the NCAA vote this spring, but that's another issue).
Now I know what you're going to say, "but the Ivy's don't give scholarships." LOL. First, they're the Ivy's, period, nuff said. And we've seen the results of the "let's compete against the Ivy's with out scholarships" experiment. Secondly, as Paul Pearl once said, "What is a scholarship?" (or something to that effect). Ask around and you'll find plenty of people (and its been debated here) that will tell you that the Ivy's can be interestingly creative with financial aid; particularly with hockey players.
So, I've gone on a while but the point is this league arguably is a scholarship league (Ivy + Scholarship). A school of thought says that the primary goal for ECAC inclusion is a school that maximizes (now or eventually) in-conference SOS. And the theory goes, a scholarship school(s) is most likely to achieve this goal.
I agree with your comments about the ivies. First, they all offer full need based aid and their cut off for aid is at a much higher family income level than almost all other schools. Second, no one will convince me that they are not more liberal with aid for athletes they want to attract compared with the rest of the student body. All this amounts to the same thing as scholarships. I have some first hand information in this regard.
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Harvard Financial Aid -- KY Crusader '75, 06:29:08 05/20/04 Thu
Setting aside whatever the school may have been doing for athletes, Harvard has a new policy that requires no parental contribution for students whose parents earn less than (I believe) $43,000 per year. That probably opens 30% to 40% of America to full rides--most likely a few athletes in that group.
