Last Monday, a federal judge approved a landmark settlement in higher education: Title IX financial aid obligations are enforceable, they carry real financial consequences, and the era of waiting to be caught is over.

San Diego State University (SDSU) agreed to pay $300,000 in class-wide damages to female student-athletes who competed between 2018 and 2025, plus $1.3 million in attorneys’ fees, totaling $1.6 million to close a case that began with 17 women on the track and field and rowing teams who had asked to be treated fairly.

Lead plaintiff attorney Arthur Bryant said it clearly: “This is the first school to pay class-wide damages to female athletes for discriminating against them in violation of Title IX. But it sure won’t be the last.”

He is right. Here is what you need to know.

What Happened?

The lawsuit, originally filed in 2022, alleged that SDSU systematically underfunded athletic scholarships for its female athletes in violation of Title IX’s proportionality requirement. Title IX requires that athletic financial aid be awarded in proportion to the participation rates of male and female athletes. In the 2020-21 academic year, female student-athletes made up 57.22% of SDSU’s varsity athletes but received only 50.64% of total athletic financial aid. Plaintiffs alleged that between 2010 and 2020, female athletes were deprived of more than $5.36 million in aid.

In one particularly striking example from 2018: female athletes outnumbered male athletes 316 to 221, yet male athletes received $4.6 million in total financial aid while women received $4.58 million.

According to the terms of the settlement and the judge’s final order, the $300,000 will be split between 798 women who were student-athletes between 2018 and 2025. Each woman will receive between $172 and $860 depending on the number of years she qualifies as a class member.

SDSU did not admit wrongdoing. However, the settlement’s structural requirements are significant. Beyond the money, SDSU agreed to hire a mutually agreed-upon outside expert to conduct a Gender Equity Review, develop a Gender Equity Plan, provide entirely equal athletic financial aid, treatment and benefits to current and future female athletes, and ensure its athletic department aligns with all Title IX requirements by the end of the 2026-27 academic year. Equal athletic treatment includes, but is not limited to, professional photography, recorded and streamed home games, and equal publicity for both men’s and women’s teams.

Why This Truly Is History-Making

This is the first time a university has been required to pay class-wide monetary damages to female athletes specifically for unequal athletic financial aid. Prior Title IX enforcement in this area has largely resulted in structural remedies such as program additions, policy changes, or consent decrees, without direct financial compensation to the women who were harmed.

The class-action structure is what makes this particularly important. Rather than requiring individual athletes to bring separate claims, this model allows hundreds of women to be compensated together. That framework dramatically lowers the barrier to bringing similar lawsuits at other institutions and increases the potential financial exposure for institutions that are out of compliance.

Tuesday Takeaways

1. Title IX proportionality is not a goal to work toward. It is a requirement you are already expected to meet.

Title IX’s athletic financial aid requirement is one of the more mathematically concrete obligations in the law. If your institution’s female athletes make up 55% of your varsity roster, they are entitled to receive approximately 55% of athletic scholarship dollars. Institutions that have historically treated this as a guideline rather than a mandate should understand that the gap is quantifiable, documentable, and litigable.

2. Litigation is expensive. Compliance is cheaper.

SDSU fought this lawsuit for more than three years before settling. The $1.3 million in plaintiffs’ attorneys’ fees alone likely exceeds what proportional scholarship funding would have cost in many of the years in question. Proactive audits and corrective action are almost always less expensive than litigation. The time to identify and close equity gaps is before a complaint is filed.

3. Equal funding is required, and so is everything else.

One element of this settlement that deserves more attention than it has received is the equal treatment requirement that goes well beyond scholarship dollars. SDSU committed to parity in nutrition, travel, photography, game broadcasting, and publicity. These are areas where inequities are often visible, persistent, and entirely correctable without significant expense, and they are areas that advocacy groups, student journalists, and plaintiff attorneys know exactly how to document. Institutions should audit the full spectrum of athletic benefits, not just the scholarship line item.

4. Institutions that audit themselves choose the outcome. Institutions that wait let a judge choose it for them.

The settlement requires SDSU to hire an outside expert to conduct a Gender Equity Review and use its findings to build a remediation plan. Institutions that commission voluntary independent reviews before litigation demonstrate a good-faith compliance posture, create a documented record of intent to comply, and identify vulnerabilities while there is still time to address them quietly. The difference between choosing to conduct a review and being ordered to conduct one matters legally and reputationally.

5. This is the first one, but won’t be the last one.

The students’ attorney praised the settlement as “a huge victory” that could lead to similar agreements at other institutions where female athletes have allegedly been underawarded scholarships. If your institution has not recently verified that its athletic financial aid distribution aligns with actual participation rates by gender, by sport, and across years, that audit should happen now. The data plaintiffs used in this case came directly from publicly available institutional records. The exposure is already visible to anyone who knows where to look.

A Note Beyond Athletics

Although this case centered on athletic scholarships, the underlying principle that Title IX requires proportional, equitable access to the full range of educational opportunities and benefits applies across every corner of campus life. Institutions that are thoughtful enough to examine equity in athletics should use that same lens in academic programs, extracurriculars, facilities access, and student services. Compliance is not a silo.

If this has raised questions about where your institution stands, ICS can help you find the answers. We are offering two trainings this fall designed for exactly this moment: Title IX and Athletics Compliance on August 27 and Navigating Athletics Complaints: From Report to Resolution on September 10. Remember, Community Partners receive access to all ICS live virtual trainings at no additional cost, but registration is required.