From Wall Street Journal (an excerp)
Basketball players at the University of Pennsylvania tend to spend their summers interning for top-tier finance firms, clerking for judges or working in medical research labs. But after his
freshman season at Penn, Tyler Perkins chose somewhere very different. He went to Villanova, sacrificing his chance to earn a coveted Ivy
League degree in favor of transferring to a different school to continue his basketball career.
“To get an internship at Goldman Sachs and stuff like that, that’s amazing,” Perkins said. “But
I’m a basketball player, so I just
wanted to do what was best for me.”
Perkins isn’t alone. The Ivy League has shed a load of talent over the past few months, with at
east five of the conference’s best players leaving their esteemed schools to take advantage of loosened transfer rules, better facilities and potential endorsement deals at more decorated basketball programs. None of them went to another Ivy.

Harvard’s Malik Mack, one of the best freshmen in the nation, bolted to Georgetown, while his teammate, Chisom Okpara, left for Stanford. All-Ivy forward Danny Wolf ditched Yale with two years of
eligibility remaining to attend Michigan. Kalu Anya, who averaged nearly 10 points and seven rebounds a game last season, gave up Brown to play for Saint Louis instead.
It’s an exodus that was once unthinkable, given the prestige and an economic opportunity that
comes with a degree from an institution like Harvard or Yale.
Even in an era of college sports where star players can make huge sums of money from donors at the wealthiest athletic programs, it seemed as
if the Ivy might be shielded somewhat from this rapidly evolving landscape.

But it has become clear that not even the Ivy League is immune to the market forces reshaping the
entire industry, forcing the conference to reckon with its identity.
Last spring, Ivy League Player of the Year Jordan Dingle transferred from Penn to St. John’s. Richard
Kent, a Connecticut attorney who works in the NIL space and broadBcasts Yale basketball games, said
Dingle’s departure was a resounding warning sign “that something may be up.”
Now, the trend has become impossible to ignore. “I don’t think the Ivy League, the Ivy administrators and the coaches really thought that they would get hammered likethey did,” Kent said.

The players who transferred generally say that money isn’t why they opted to change schools. Perkins, for instance, said it was about developing his basketball talent at Villanova, which won the national championship in 2016 and 2018.
Okpara likewise wanted to maximize his talents at a school “witan Olympian in every sport.”
But there’s no doubt players are aware of the money that’s out there. Okpara said the possibilities of big paydays has become a topic of conversation among Ivy athletes. “I will say, once I entered the
[transfer] portal and heard the opportunities available for NIL,” Okpara said, “I was like, ‘Wow. This is a serious matter.’”