Starting in the 2013-14 school year, four major California universities will be required to continue providing scholarships to student-athletes who suffer career-ending injuries, under a law signed by Governor Jerry Brown.
California becomes the first state to establish such legal protections for injured collegiate student-athletes, as athletic scholarships are otherwise renewable on a year-to-year basis at the discretion of the school.
The “Student Athlete Bill of Rights,” signed last week, requires any four-year university whose athletic program receives $10 million or more in media revenue to provide an academic scholarship to student-athletes who suffer career-ending injuries that cause them to lose their athletic scholarship.
Combined with the time already spent on the athletic scholarship, schools must provide each former student-athlete an academic scholarship for up to five academic years, or until he or she graduates. In other words, if the student has already been on scholarship for three years, he or she would be eligible for two more.
The universities affected by the law, based on current media revenues, are Stanford University; the University of California, Berkeley; the University of California, Los Angeles; and the University of Southern California, according to the .