From an article quoting Athletics Director Ron Wellman of Wake Forest :
http://www.journalnow.com/college-ba...c6013f51f.html
Rule exceptions: Endowment
If no private schools ever flourished in baseball, the NCAA might feel compelled to take action. But Vanderbilt, TCU, Rice and Stanford have fielded programs that have thrived in recent seasons; in fact, Vanderbilt happens to be the defending national champion. Meanwhile, Georgia Tech, also a private institution, has won two of the past four ACC titles.
The explanation is that all of those schools spend more on academic or need-based scholarships for baseball, at least partly because they can. Wake Forest's total endowment for 2014 was $1.148 billion, which is quite a bit of coin but decidedly less than the endowments of Rice ($5.5 billion), Stanford ($21.4 billion) or even Duke ($7 billion). TCU has invested a larger portion of its $1.4 billion endowment on baseball, but the school most famous for supplementing its baseball scholarships with academic or need-based grants has been Vanderbilt.
"They're well-endowed and so they're able to do things with financial aid based upon need that a lot of other institutions have not been able to do," Wellman said. "And they've been very judicious in the manner in which they've done it."
In 1998, Vanderbilt received the largest gift that had ever been given to an American college or university.
The Ingram Charitable Fund, whose chairwoman, Martha R. Ingram was the daughter, wife and mother of Vanderbilt graduates, donated stock valued at more than $300 million to the school.
"That really turned that university around, really shot that university ahead, "Walter said. "It's not only an athletic issue, it's an academic issue as well. It helps Vanderbilt get top, top students. That's why you see Vanderbilt ranked in the Top 15 of universities because they get a higher yield of the kids they offer because they offer better financial packages.
"There's a direct correlation to endowment and size of packages, and academic scholarships."
Vanderbilt's endowment of $4 billion is only part of the story. What has helped Tim Corbin coach the Commodores into the elite circle of baseball programs has been how willing the school has been to spend money on academic and need-based scholarships and the programs, frameworks and considerations it has established to do so.
Two notable Commodore baseball players of recent seasons have been left-hander David Price (now with the Detroit Tigers) and third baseman/first baseman Pedro Alvarez (of the Pittsburgh Pirates). Neither received athletic scholarships while attending Vanderbilt, which freed up money for Corbin to spend on other recruits.
"For schools like Vanderbilt, to use them as the example, the way they assess need-based scholarships is very different than us,'' Walter said.
"Vanderbilt just looks at their income, the income of the custodial parents. So if you get a divorced family situation where the father makes a million dollars a year but they live 51 percent of the time with the mom, who has no income, then it's a full financial-aid situation for that.
"So the point of all that is, for us and the way Wake looks at a person's balance sheet, one of the things they look at is their ability to borrow. So if they have a nice home that they can borrow against...."'