The NCAA plans to vote on giving greater autonomy to high resource college sports conferences, and some critics think this could compound stratification between wealthy and poor schools. With this autonomy, some have proposed a number of athletic reforms, including guaranteed student-athlete scholarships and better athlete healthcare.

Jake New at Inside Higher Ed has the story:

Growing ‘stratification’ of NCAA conferences concerns less wealthy Division I colleges

At the American Athletic Conference’s football media day in July, Commissioner Michael Aresco sought to assuage any fears that upcoming changes in how the National College Athletic Association is governed could hurt the teams in his league.

His comments came after a season that saw teams from the AAC – which includes universities that were in what used to be the powerful Big East Conference – finish in the top 10 and win national titles in two sports. On August 7, the NCAA Division I Board of Directors will vote to grant a greater level of autonomy to the five high-resource conferences: the Big Ten, Big 12, Pac-12, Atlantic Coast, and Southeastern Conferences.

The AAC is not among them.

“We hear that the new NCAA governance system, which allows autonomy in limited areas, will cause us somehow to be left behind, that resources of those conferences are simply too great,” Aresco said during media day. “I don’t buy that for a minute and what we did this year proves it.”

In an interview after media day, Aresco admitted that “nobody wants to be left out of the room” where major decisions are made. “We should be in that room,” he said.

Other institutions and conferences are worried that they will, in fact, be left behind – and that the new governance system is, as one Division I college president put it, part of a larger and problematic “stratification of college sports” that will put more distance between the richest programs and the rest.