Back in the 1960s, Major League Baseball developed the Professional Baseball Scholarship Plan. The goal of “The Plan” was to help players entering professional baseball to further their education, since many players had yet to start college or complete it. That’s still the way it is today.
According to an article in the New York Times in 2009, from 1962 to 1999, a total of 69.2 percent of baseball players returned to the classroom under the Plan, said Pat Courtney, a spokesman for Major League Baseball.
Perhaps the important factor in the Plan is that the player must negotiate this into his first professional minor league contract.
That contract is typically divided up into three parts: The signing bonus, the Professional Baseball Scholarship Plan (PBSP) and the Incentive Bonus (optional).
Unlike a college scholarship, which is year-to-year and can fluctuate with the amount of money involved, the Plan is guaranteed. The amounts are agreed upon by both parties (the player and the club) and those totals are the ones used for the Plan.
“Athletic scholarships are typically done on a year-by-year basis and this is guaranteed money towards the school of their choice,” remarked a National League scout.
Players typically negotiate the Plan into their first-year contract.
For players coming directly out of high school who are not going to the college they may have signed a letter of intent with, if they include the Plan in their first contracts they would still have access to that money and the club would still pay for their schooling even if that player were to eventually get released. There are some rules that apply for using the funds after a player has decided no longer to pursue professional baseball, but generally the funds can still be used.
For a player who has chosen to go to college first, the Plan comes into play for them because they will become draft eligible prior to them graduating from college. When this happens and they do indeed get drafted, they are no longer on their college scholarship. The Plan can then be negotiated into their first pro contract to aid them in finishing up their college degrees.
“It is a great incentive for (high school) prospects to sign on top of a signing bonus they may receive,” the scout added.
Another bonus of the PBSP is that when a player graduates from high school, he can go to college and there often is little to none out-of-pocket expenses to do so. And it doesn’t matter what school you want to attend. If you plan on going to a private school that charges $75,000 per year or decided to attend a public university that charges perhaps $10,000 per year in tuition, then the Plan can be set up so you are covered. Conversely, if you negotiated the Plan for the reverse, the player would be on the hook for the difference.
It should also be noted that if there is any negotiated money left over for the Plan, it goes back to the club.
Could the Plan work in basketball?
With the current draft rules for the NBA, in which many top players are only attending college for one season, having a Professional Basketball Scholarship Plan probably doesn’t apply because of the much more lucrative contracts involved. Any NBA lottery pick player is going to be signing a contract that will enable him to go back to college and pay for the rest of his education if he so desires.
The NBA Players Union is supportive, however, of players finishing their degrees and many players sign symbolic contracts at the players’ union high school camp that they intend to finish their college work should they become NBA players before they graduate.
There also can be other motivating factors for a player to finish and collect a college degree. For Kevin Durant of the Oklahoma City Thunder, for example, he has said it will be just as important a moment for he and his mother for him to get a college degree as it was for him to be chosen No. 2 in the NBA Draft in 2007. Durant only went to the University of Texas for one school year, but has made a promise to his mother and has been taking summer classes with the goal of graduating.
Could the Plan work in football?
It could work in football if a lot more players left college early and headed to the NFL before their senior year of college. As it stands, though, most NFL players still stay in college for four to five years and some of them – Andrew Luck at Stanford for example – had already graduated before they were chosen in the NFL Draft.
The NFL does have a management program set up with several universities and players can get up to $15,000 to be reimbursed for educational costs.
Many in the NFL also are more than aware that players getting their college degrees also may help lower the percentage of former NFL players who suffer from severe financial stress, and even bankruptcy. A recent study found that 78 percent of all former NFL players with the average four-year career fall into that group.
Could the Plan work in soccer?
Since about 12 percent of Major League Soccer pro players only make the league mininum salary of $35,125 and league average isn’t close to other pro sports (about $140,000), a similar plan just isn’t applicable.
“I cannot see professional U.S. teams guaranteeing four years of college at $40K per year as part of a contract with a freshly-signed 18-year-old, who they are only paying 35K a year,” said Sheldon Shealer, the Student Sports national editor for soceer. “In addition, so few teens turn ‘pro’ in MLS that this really doesn’t seem to have much application. Some teams can barely afford the players they’ve got in the first place.”
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