Title IX and Shocker Football Part...2

As discussed earlier, Title IX is kind of a mess. Lets look at it like this. Lets say that you have 1000 students attending institution A. 60% of those students are female while 40% are male. If you elect to abide by prong 1 then 60% of your unduplicated participating athletes should be female while 40% should be male. In order to be in compliance with part two of Title IX your scholarship proportions should be in line with your participating unduplicated student athletes. For school A, that would mean that 60% of their athletic scholarships would go to females while 40% would go to males.

What about prong 2? This is where the loopholes begin. Lets say that school A really wants to be in compliance with Prong 1 but just can't afford to yet as they have recently added football. Under this prong, as long as school A is making progress towards being compliant by adding women's scholarships and participation opportunities they are good to go regardless of the percentages. Obviously there is an end game to this as eventually School A must reach its goal or it will fail to be compliant.

Have I lost everyone yet? If not, here is how prong 3 works. Lets say that School A still has a gender ratio of 60% female to 40% male. Trying to balance out those numbers would be tough even at a Big Ten university. So what to do? Under prong 3 School A must ensure that the interest and abilities of the underrepresented sex be accommodated. In order to find out this information, School A will then conduct a survey with the underrepresented sex. However, when Title IX refers to the underrepresented sex it is referring to the sex that is the most underrepresented athletically nation wide which has always been female. In school A's case, this would be the 60% female population.
The department of education has put together a PDF on how this survey should take place. Interestingly, this survey places the burden on the female student population to indicate what athletic opportunities are not currently being met. There are a variety of exceptions to this as the sport must be of interest in the geographic location (no women's hockey). The most notable of Prong 3 is that the Office of Civil Rights at the Department of Education has made it very clear that Prong 3 is equally valid and offers the same compliance as the first two prongs. For further reading here is the PDF. http://www.ed.gov/about/offices/list/ocr/docs/title9guidanceadditional.pdf

CONCLUSIONS
It is clear that WSU is not required to award scholarships in an even straight forward fashion between men and women. It goes much deeper than that. In part 3 I will examine where Wichita State is in regards to Title IX and list some schools that achieve compliance through prong 3 of this act.