Well, truth be told, Ivy athletics have improved since the schools started spending more of the endowment on economically-based financial aid grants. More or less, in any of the non-revenue sports and just about anything thagt you can't give everyone on a team a free ride, the Ivies can get close enough on cost so that it is less of a factor. This has been the case for Ivy LaX for a while. For baseball, these schools suffer more from the short seasons than from the money. It's not just that Amaker is a brilliant coach. He can go into any home with working parents and say, "I can't give your kid an athletic scholarship like mid-major X can, but given your income, I can say our school will limit the family's cost to about $6K a year. You son will get to play, and at the end of the day, he'll get a Harvard degree and may meet the next generation's Zuckerberg or Gates."
Clarkson and RPI are good places for engineering, Colgate gives you a valuable degree, and QU has a number of strong programs and is a school with a sharp president interested in building the school's reputation. ECAC can compete that way.
