Why Ivy League degrees are losing power in college basketball, as top prospects look elsewhere

He went to Villanova, sacrificing his chance to earn a coveted Ivy League degree in favour of transferring to a different school to continue his basketball career.

“To get an internship at Goldman Sachs and stuff like that, that’s amazing,” Perkins said. “But I’m a basketball player, so I just wanted to do what was best for me.”

Perkins isn’t alone. The Ivy League has shed a load of talent over the past few months, with at least five of the conference’s best players leaving their esteemed schools to take advantage of loosened transfer rules, better facilities and potential endorsement deals at more decorated basketball programs. None of them went to another Ivy.

Harvard’s Malik Mack, one of the best freshmen in the nation, bolted to Georgetown, while his teammate, Chisom Okpara, left for Stanford. All-Ivy forward Danny Wolf ditched Yale with two years of eligibility remaining to attend Michigan. Kalu Anya, who averaged nearly 10 points and seven rebounds a game last season, gave up Brown to play for Saint Louis instead.

It’s an exodus that was once unthinkable, given the prestige and an economic opportunity that comes with a degree from an institution like Harvard or Yale. Even in an era of college sports where star players can make huge sums of money from donors at the wealthiest athletic programs, it seemed as if the Ivy might be shielded somewhat from this rapidly evolving landscape.

But it has become clear that not even the Ivy League is immune to the market forces reshaping the entire industry, forcing the conference to reckon with its identity. Last spring, Ivy League Player of the Year Jordan Dingle transferred from Penn to St. John’s. Richard Kent, a Connecticut attorney who works in the NIL space and broadcasts Yale basketball games, said Dingle’s departure was a resounding warning sign “that something may be up.”

Now, the trend has become impossible to ignore.

“I don’t think the Ivy League, the Ivy administrators and the coaches really thought that they would get hammered like they did,” Kent said.

The players who transferred generally say that money isn’t why they opted to change schools. Perkins, for instance, said it was about developing his basketball talent at Villanova, which won the national championship in 2016 and 2018. Okpara likewise wanted to maximise his talents at a school “with an Olympian in every sport.”

But there’s no doubt players are aware of the money that’s out there. Okpara said the possibilities of big paydays has become a topic of conversation among Ivy athletes.

“I will say, once I entered the [transfer] portal and heard the opportunities available for NIL,” Okpara said, “I was like, ‘Wow. This is a serious matter.’”

The Ivy League, a collection of eight of the most renowned schools in the country, has always been different than everyone else at the highest level of college sports. Despite competing in Division I, Ivy League programs don’t award athletic scholarships, maintain rigorous academic requirements, and prohibit graduate students from playing for their teams. Ivy football teams also don’t participate in the playoffs.

All of these policies are in service of the notion that Ivy League players are students first and athletes second. The oft-repeated mantra among Ivy League schools is that coming to play in the conference isn’t a four-year decision, but a 40-year decision.

That hasn’t been the case for the league’s premier basketball players of late, a sign that the lure of an Ivy education often can’t compete with the hundreds of thousands of dollars that athletes can get elsewhere.

“It’s our responsibility to figure out how to evolve so that we can stay relevant and competitive but also evolve in a way that allows us to stay true to our values,” Princeton athletic director John Mack said.

Ivy League athletes are allowed to profit off their names, images and likeness, just like their counterparts. In practice, however, it isn’t that simple. Ivy League schools have been squeamish about fully embracing the new economic realities of college sports, where athletes have the freedom to transfer schools to chase a bigger payday.

For instance, no Ivy League school has a collective, an organisation of donors that help connect athletes with endorsement deals. In May of last year, amid rumours of a collective possibly forming at Harvard, the school sent an email to supporters saying that “Harvard Athletics hasn’t directly or indirectly sanctioned or supported this group.”

Tim Brosnan, the chairman of the Georgetown collective Hoyas Rising, said that — even at an institution renowned for its academics and campus life — being able to provide prospective athletes with NIL opportunities is paramount.

“If Georgetown did not have an NIL collective or an organised NIL vehicle, they would be at an enormous and distinct disadvantage in recruiting the kinds of athletes they want to recruit,” Brosnan said. “At least for the men’s basketball program.”

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Still, even as athletic talent leaves the conference, administrators have held on to the idea that there are reasons to stick with the Ivy League despite sacrificing present-day income.

“The lifetime value of a Princeton education will trump any NIL deal that student-athletes are going to be offered,” Mack said. “We want our student-athletes to have those opportunities, but what we don’t want is for them to turn down the opportunity to change their life in a long-term way just for the short-term benefit of getting paid to go somewhere else.”

– The Wall Street Journal