Chess As College Image Booster

Move over, football and basketball stars. Now chess players are also being offered scholarships as colleges look to world-class chess play to try to enhance their public image.

Seven years ago, the University of Texas at Dallas and the University of Maryland, Baltimore County were alone in actively recruiting chess players as a way to boost their academic reputations.

Now, as many as 15 colleges and universities have followed suit in offering chess scholarships, according to the executive director of the U.S. Chess Federation.

Yuri Shulman, a graduate student in business administration at Texas-Dallas, and Alex Woitkevich, a modern languages student from Maryland-Baltimore County, are among those who were recruited. They will meet this weekend in the national collegiate chess championship.

Both Texas-Dallas and Maryland-Baltimore County began in the 1960s as mid-size research campuses and technology training grounds. In the past decade, organized chess has taken on a more critical role in campus life.

This year, chess scholarships were valued at 19-thousand dollars a year for in-state students and 43-thousand dollars for out-of-state students.