PonyFans.com

I found this site interesting

https://www.ncsasports.org/best-colleges/best-mens-swimming-colleges

It confirms what ponyswim & Water Pony have said, SMU’s high tuition cost + NCAA scholarship limits work against us.

Scroll way down, they have SMU ranked #79, more importantly, avg cost after aid is $36.2k, which is clearly on the high side.

Questions for our swimming gurus

1) SMU & Stanford have similar tuitions, yet their avg cost after aid is only $11.5k. How is Stanford’s cost so much cheaper? Is it done via actions by the school itself, or via boosters creating scholarship funds??

2) Is our administration doing everything possible to provide these student-athletes academic scholarships to help circumvent the athletic scholarship limitations?

3) Has there been any discussions amongst our amazing S&D donors to create Scholarship Funds / NILs to help mitigate our high tuition costs? Seems to me this is essential to truly becoming elite again.

You are limited as a school to 9.9 Men's scholarships. You can't give out more than that no matter who pays for them. With academic/need scholarships you have to treat all students equally - you can't give an athlete academic money they don't deserve. SMU's challenge is to provide more academic money overall as a school.
As an example - there are schools like Rutgers and others that give someone $10K-$15K if you had 1300 SAT's and good HS class rank. SMU has chosen to spend money on buildings and other area rather than on scholarship money. And yes, there are those with NIL plans for swimming.

Thanks Ponyswim for your response, that was informative for me.