Indiana Hoosiers unveil student-athlete ‘Bill of Rights’
The last six months have tested the NCAA model unlike anything we’ve seen before, and it has caused many conferences and sports to take a look at how things are done. However, on Friday one school went a step further than any other—the University of Indiana.
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Indiana produced the first bill of rights for its student-athletes, a 10-point plan of current and future reforms the school guarantees its student-athletes. Some of those reforms are things like a lifetime degree guarantee and the use of a career center even after graduation.
“We developed the Bill of Rights to identify not only what we were currently doing for our student-athletes but what we should be doing,” said Fred Glass Indiana University Vice President and Director of Intercollegiate Athletics. “We have committed to this extensive set of benefits and set it out transparently in writing, so that we can be held accountable for them by our student-athletes and other stakeholders such as our faculty and trustees. While no other school has done this, we hope that others will follow for the betterment of the student-athlete experience.”
Central to the Bill of Rights is the lifetime degree guarantee, which is open to any student athlete that was on scholarship for at least two seasons. It isn’t just open to current student-athletes either, as the school announced anyone from the past who hasn’t completed their degree has this program open to them.
Along with that long-term commitment, the Hoosiers will make a four-year scholarship guarantee for all of its scholarship athletes.
Under the Student-Athlete Bill of Rights, IU student-athletes will also have access to cutting edge technology, including every student-athlete being supplied an iPad, along with additional benefits such as official IU Athletics blazers and internal internship opportunities.
The full bill of rights can be viewed here.
A lot of the IU announcement mirrors the letter sent out from the Big Ten Presidents and Chancellors earlier in the week, and this could be the first of many such announcements across the conference.