The rules governing college sports are undergoing major changes.

Embarrassed by a series of scandals, the NCAA last week approved a series of rules changes that will further change the face of big-time college sports.

The most significant is a plan to allow conferences, like the Big Ten, to add up to $2,000 in spending money to the scholarships its members award to athletes.

That is not a huge amount of spending money to add to the incidental costs of attendance, but it's high time that the NCAA recognized some of the serious financial challenges some athletes face.

The reality is that many athletes, particularly in the major revenue sports like men's basketball and football, come from impoverished backgrounds and desperately need some extra financial assistance.

There is, however, an element of the haves and have-nots that will come into play here. It may well be that BCS conferences will be able to afford to award the stipends while conferences representing smaller schools may not.

That would be unfortunate. But it's better to solve a problem halfway than not at all.

The NCAA also announced other changes, including allowing conferences to award four-year scholarships rather than renewing them on an annual basis. That rule is aimed at those coaches who revoke a recruited athlete's scholarship because the athlete either has not met expectations or another, more highly valued recruit is available.

Given a series of embarrassing revelations involving high-profile athletic programs at Miami University, Auburn University, Boise State and the University of Connecticut, the NCAA is taking a multi-dimensional approach to discourage misconduct in academics and recruiting. The NCAA also is trying to clarify its Byzantine rule-enforcement process.

No amount of rule writing or clarification is going to end the kind of egregious violations that have been revealed in recent years. But the NCAA deserves credit for encouraging a more financially realistic approach for the athletes themselves as well as requiring that universities take more responsibility for the academics that accompany that athletics.