{"id":651,"date":"2006-09-29T09:44:42","date_gmt":"2006-09-29T09:44:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/scienceblogs.com\/principles\/2006\/09\/29\/fencing-all-about-the-bling-1\/"},"modified":"2006-09-29T09:44:42","modified_gmt":"2006-09-29T09:44:42","slug":"fencing-all-about-the-bling-1","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/2006\/09\/29\/fencing-all-about-the-bling-1\/","title":{"rendered":"Fencing: All About the Bling"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/scienceblogs.com\/principles\/wp-content\/blogs.dir\/467\/files\/2012\/04\/i-3f4c93ae2653d9b5a0ad626e293464af-NCAATable.jpg\" alt=\"i-3f4c93ae2653d9b5a0ad626e293464af-NCAATable.jpg\" \/><cite>Inside Higher Ed<\/cite> had a story yesterday about the release of the <a href=\"http:\/\/insidehighered.com\/news\/2006\/09\/28\/gradrates\">new graduation rate data<\/a> for college athletic programs. The data are summarized in the table at right.<\/p>\n<p>The two columns in the table show the graduation rate under the federal standard, and the new &#8220;graduation success rate&#8221; which fixes some of the problems with the older standard. The older rate calculation counted students who transferred out of a program as not graduating, while not counting students who transferred <strong>in<\/strong> as graduates. The new calculation is a little more realistic, and counts students based on their academic standing when they enter and leave a program.<\/p>\n<p>As you would expect, this leads to a dramatic increase in the graduation rates for the &#8220;revenue sports,&#8221; namely football, basketball, and baseball. Those sports have fairly dismal graduation rates (55%, 45%, and 46%, respectively) under the old system, thanks to large numbers of players changing schools or leaving early to go pro. Under the new system, those rates go up by ten to twenty percentage points (to 65%, 59%, and 65%, respectively).<\/p>\n<p>What struck me as weird was the size of the improvement in other, non-revenue sports. Particularly striking was the 19-point jump in the graduation rate for fencers. Where in hell are the fencers going early? Is there a professional fencing circuit in Europe? Are there lucrative job openings in the Dread Pirate Roberts field?<\/p>\n<p>Also noteworthy: graduation rates for female athletes are generally 5-7% higher than their male counterparts, in corresponding sports. The only sport played by both men and women in which male athletes had a higher graduation rate was ice hockey (73% to 71%, which probably isn&#8217;t really significant). This probably means something, but I couldn&#8217;t begin to say what.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Inside Higher Ed had a story yesterday about the release of the new graduation rate data for college athletic programs. The data are summarized in the table at right. The two columns in the table show the graduation rate under the federal standard, and the new &#8220;graduation success rate&#8221; which fixes some of the problems&hellip; <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/2006\/09\/29\/fencing-all-about-the-bling-1\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Fencing: All About the Bling<\/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-651","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-academia","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/651","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=651"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/651\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=651"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=651"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=651"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}