It’s Worth Trying Again

The National Collegiate Athletic Assn., meeting at its annual convention this week in New Orleans, is being asked to water down new rules for college athletics that some educators fear may discriminate against black students.

The regulation is a bylaw to NCAA regulations that establishes the minimum academic requirements that an incoming college freshman must meet in order to be eligible to play for his school starting next fall. The student must have earned at least a 2.0 grade-point average (a C) in high school and a score of at least 700 on the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT).

Several black educators question the use of SAT scores as a guide to academic ability. They warn that standardized tests like the SAT may be culturally-biased against blacks and other minority groups. They also point to the many black student athletes who have graduated from college in recent years but would have been barred from teams had the new academic requirements been in effect when they entered school. Both are valid reasons to be concerned about the new rules, and to modify them if they are shown to have discriminatory side effects.

But, given the seriousness of existing abuses that the new rules were meant to stop, including the exploitation of marginal students by colleges that used their athletic skills until their academic eligibility ran out and then discarded them, the new rules must be put into effect, even if they must be modified later. The new regulations offer other options to freshmen who do not meet the minimum academic requirements, such as using their first year in college to establish a satisfactory academic record before competing in athletics. That system worked well in the past, and is worth trying again.