I am the guy who each March publishes the graduation rates of the Division I schools in the NCAA tournament and who each December publishes the graduation rates for the schools in the football bowl games. I do that because during March Madness and in the football bowl season, we understandably often get carried away with the great play in our arenas and on our fields, the excitement of our team being there, and the hope that its season will end in triumph.
Too often that excitement allows us to forget that at many of our schools, student-athletes competing in the arenas and on the fields will never get a college degree. It is especially true for African-Americans who, like their peers in school in general, often have a graduation rate between 20 and 40 percent lower than their white teammates’.
I feel compelled to offer a note of caution after receiving a call from Dale Brown, who coached at Louisiana State University for more than two decades. When I first got involved in looking at sports and social issues in the 1980s, Brown was one of the first people to call me to offer encouragement for our work. The Northeastern University Center for the Study of Sport in Society was looking at some of the problems in sports in addition to working to provide solutions.
Twenty years later, he called me after the publication of this year’s tournament graduation rate study. He was disappointed that it appeared that none of his students on the four teams covered in the study (freshmen entering in the 1994-95 through 1997-98 seasons) had graduated. He thought that the way the NCAA covered graduation rates was unfair. In fact, I point that out in the study each year. I agree that the way the graduation rates have been calculated is unfair.
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| Former coach Dale Brown stands up for LSU’s record in seeing students through to graduation. |
If Brown recruited a student who left LSU to transfer to another school where he graduated, it would count against LSU. If a junior college transfer came to LSU and graduated, he would not count toward LSU’s graduation rate. If Brown or LSU brought back former student-athletes after their eligibility expired and they graduated after six years, they also would not count. According to Brown, the Dale Brown Foundation funded 12 players to return to complete their degrees. Another problem with the current reporting is that they are not real-time rates but represent student-athletes who are not playing now.
I am heartened that the NCAA will reportedly change the way it calculates graduation rates in the years ahead to account for some of these flaws in measuring graduation rates. Even though those flaws exist, I have continued to report the graduation rates as they are because it has been the best way to determine how well college sports is doing in terms of academics and athletics.
In Brown’s case, he said, “We had nine freshmen join our team from 1994 to 1997. When I retired, six of those players transferred, two others I had dropped from the team for violating team rules, and one stayed at LSU for his final two years but did not graduate. Most important, however, five of the nine did receive college degrees within the six-year limit.”
I remember Shaquille O’Neal saying, “Coach Brown focused on the things that were important to me, education and family. He was a disciplinarian. If we missed class, we would have to get up at 5:30 in the morning and run.” O’Neal donated several million dollars to build a state-of-the-art academic facility for LSU student-athletes.
Another school that appeared to be doing a poor job was Oklahoma State, with a graduation rate of 11 percent. This offers a perfect example of how graduation rates are not real time. On OSU’s 2005 Sweet 16 team, Stephen Graham, Joey Graham and Ivan McFarlin had graduated prior to the 2004-05 season and are now in graduate school.
Another significant issue for college campuses: Race is an ongoing academic issue, reflected in the continued gap between graduation rates for white and African-American students, both athletes and non-athletes. While rates have improved over the last few years, a significant disparity remains between graduation rates for white and African-American basketball players. On Division I teams overall, 51 percent of white male basketball student-athletes graduated versus only 38 percent of African-Americans.
It needs to be noted that African-American basketball players graduate at a higher rate than African-American males who are not athletes. The graduation rate for African-American male students as a whole is only 34 percent, versus the overall rate of 59 percent for male white students, which is a scandalous 25 percentage point gap. One of the benefits of examining graduation rates is that they focus light on the fact that too many predominantly white campuses are not welcoming places for students of color, whether or not they are athletes.
Among all college sports, men’s basketball has the worst track record for graduation rates. When we look at all 328 Division I teams, 45 did not graduate a single African-American male basketball player in six years. This is in a sport in which 58 percent of Division I male basketball student-athletes are African-American. Of the 65 teams in the 2005 men’s tournament, 42 of them would not be eligible for the tournament if a simple 50 percent minimum graduation rate for basketball student-athletes were in place on Selection Sunday.
Academics, race and athletics remain ongoing concerns in college sports. However, the numbers don’t always tell the entire story.n
Richard Lapchick is chairman of the DeVos Sport Business Management Graduate Program at the University of Central Florida.
