{"id":470,"date":"2006-08-08T11:12:12","date_gmt":"2006-08-08T11:12:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/scienceblogs.com\/principles\/2006\/08\/08\/is-our-athletes-graduating\/"},"modified":"2006-08-08T11:12:12","modified_gmt":"2006-08-08T11:12:12","slug":"is-our-athletes-graduating","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/2006\/08\/08\/is-our-athletes-graduating\/","title":{"rendered":"Is Our Athletes Graduating?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Inside Higher Ed<\/cite> today offers another hand-wringing piece about the problem of college athletics<\/a>, this time from the president of Augustana College in Illinois. It’s a particularly maddening example of the form, doing a lovely job of running down NCAA Division I schools in comparison to Division III:<\/p>\n

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But I do worry that Division I sports is ill-serving far too many young people. And I challenge the NCAA to accelerate the reform movement promised in the recent past. What has happened to cries of turning down the volume in college sports? The media won’t turn down the volume, so college presidents must exercise their leadership.<\/p>\n

I strongly believe Division I sports can learn something from Division III, where the athletes play sans scholarships and typically without the promise of future sports riches. Most importantly, Division III athletes live and breathe not in the rarified air of a sports subculture, but, when they are out of uniform, just like other students on campus.<\/p>\n

I don’t expect Michigan, Ohio State and UCLA to dismantle proud (and profitable) athletics programs, and I strongly believe that would be a foolish mistake. But I do believe the subculture of today’s big-time college athlete is a problem that demands open debate and sweeping solutions.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

The problem is, he doesn’t offer any concrete solutions, not even the crazily unworkable sort that you find in many of these pieces. He only raises questions, but doesn’t suggest any answers.<\/p>\n

In an attempt to find something substantive to write about this, though, let me pick up on a point near the end of the piece:<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

The article ends with a bit of horn-tooting about Augustana:<\/p>\n

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Earlier this year I passed out diplomas to the 525 members of Augustana College’s Class of 2006. Nearly one-third of the students who crossed the stage experienced the joys and challenges of participation in intercollegiate athletics. They included members of nationally ranked teams as well as numerous conference champions and All America award winners. An NCAA postgraduate scholarship winner was among the many Academic All America honorees in the graduating class.<\/p>\n

This remarkable group of athletes is noteworthy in part for how much they have in common their classmates who don’t participate in intercollegiate athletics. Augustana athletes are just as likely as their peers to participate in volunteer projects, study overseas, or to be admitted to graduate study programs. Likewise, our athletes eat in the same cafeterias, register at the same time as their fellow students and study in the same majors.<\/p>\n

When they differ in terms of academic performance, athletes tend to come out ahead of non-athletes. Augustana’s athletes not only graduate at higher rates than their peers, but they also exceed predicted GPA based on incoming academic credentials. In short, participation in athletics at Augustana College is a predictor of academic success.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

This is the ideal being held up for Div. I programs to aspire to, with no suggestion of how they should get there.<\/p>\n

But is this really a fair comparison? After all, the student-athletes at Augustana (which, last I checked, was in the Top 100 of US News’s ranking of liberal arts colleges) are not drawn from the same demographic pool as the student-atheltes in your typical Div. I football program (“non-revenue” sports are probably more directly comparable). Does it really make any sense to directly compare the two groups?<\/p>\n

A fairer comparison might be to look at graduation rates for student-athletes at big-time programs compared to the graduation rates for non-athletes from similar economic and educational backgrounds. You never see those figures, though, probably because they’re both harder to generate, and less scandalous.<\/p>\n

The only time I’ve seen any attempt to do this kind of comparison was a half-remembered Michael Wilbon column several years ago in the Washington Post<\/cite>. At the time, somebody was making a stink about the fact that Maryland’s football and basketball teams graduated something like 60% of their players (obviously, I’m making these numbers up). Wilbon pointed out, though, that if you compare their graduation rate to the graduation rate of African-American males in the student body in general, it doesn’t look so bad– I don’t remember the exact figures, but I think the rate for athletes was actually slightly higher. The real scandal isn’t so much that the athletes don’t graduate, it’s that the non-athletes<\/strong> don’t fare any better.<\/p>\n

The problem, as Wilbon pointed out (as I recall it, anyway), is that many of the football and basketball players are from poor families, are often the first in their families to go to college, and have frequently attended poor schools. They’re starting in a deep hole, academically speaking, and it’s not terribly surprising that they, and their peers off the court, don’t do especially well in college. What we really need isn’t so much reform at the college level, but a rebuilding of the pre-college educational infrastructure, so these kids aren’t starting out at such a big disadvantage.<\/p>\n

It’s an interesting point, and at least sounds plausible. I’d love to see hard numbers on this issue (though not quite enough to Google for them myself…). And it would certainly take this debate to more interesting places than the usual round-and-round about overprivileged jocks at big schools.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Inside Higher Ed today offers another hand-wringing piece about the problem of college athletics, this time from the president of Augustana College in Illinois. It’s a particularly maddening example of the form, doing a lovely job of running down NCAA Division I schools in comparison to Division III: But I do worry that Division I… Continue reading Is Our Athletes Graduating?<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"1","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-470","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-academia","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/470","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=470"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/470\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=470"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=470"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=470"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}