The Ivy League is an association of eight universities in the northeast United States, which have high academic and social status. It comprises Brown, Columbia, Cornell, Dartmouth, Harvard, Princeton, the University of Pennsylvania, and Yale. All of the Ivy League universities share some general characteristics: They are among the most prestigious and selective universities in the U.S.; they consistently place close to the top of college and university rankings; they rank within the top one percent of the world’’s universities in terms of financial endowment; they attract top-tier students and faculty (although many undergraduate classes are taught by graduate students or adjunct faculty — the extent of this practice varies greatly, for example, Brown University and Columbia University require all their professors to teach undergraduates as part of their university-college models, and Dartmouth College simply avoids letting graduate students teach undergraduates in most cases); and they have relatively small undergraduate populations, ranging between 4,100 for Dartmouth College and 13,700 for Cornell University. The Ivies are among the oldest universities in the country — all but Cornell University were founded during America’’s colonial era. Notably, the Ivies also prohibit the offering of athletic scholarships to students in most cases; this ban differentiates Ivy teams from those of schools that permit students to be paid to attend or to join a team. The Ivy League universities are privately owned and controlled. Although many of them receive funding from the federal or state governments to pursue research, only Cornell has state-supported academic units, termed statutory colleges-, that are an integral part of the university. In 1936 the undergraduate newspapers of these universities ran an editorial at the same time advocating the formation of an "Ivy League," but the first move toward this end was not taken until 1945. In that year, the presidents of the eight schools signed the first Ivy Group Agreement. As late as the 1960s many of the Ivy League universities’’ undergraduate programs remained open only to men, with Cornell the only one to have been coeducational from its founding (1865) and Columbia being the last (1983) to become coeducational. What is the practice of the Ivy League universities concerning athletic scholarships

A. They follow the practice of other universities.
B. They usually won’’t offer athletic scholarships to students.
C. They are often inconsistent in their practice regarding athletic scholarships.
D. They hold athletic scholarships the most important of all.