The Heartless Bunch : College Presidents Disregard NCAA Studies: SAT Tests Are Unfair to Athletes

Members of the national college advisory committee known as the Presidents Commission are taking a strange, controversial stand this week at the NCAA’s annual convention in San Diego.

They are urging the use of a discredited weapon--standardized testing--to harden eligibility requirements for young athletes.

And that has provoked what figures to be the convention’s argument of the year.

For, according to the NCAA’s own data, such tests unfairly punish low-income blacks, low-income whites, and other minority applicants.

While convention delegates consider which way to vote Monday on a proposal that seems plainly discriminatory, some serious charges are being made against some of the country’s most respected leaders: the heads of prestigious universities.

As associates on the Presidents Commission, they are being accused of disregarding a body of pertinent research that has been accumulating for 10 years.

This research by independent scholars as well as their own experts--including the NCAA’s Academic Performance Study group--has shown, first, that high school classroom performance is by far the best predictor of academic achievement in college.

Second, and more significant, studies by many scholars--both in and out of the NCAA--have demonstrated that standardized test scores do much more harm than good when used to measure the capacity of student-athletes for college work.

The nation’s college presidents have apparently decided to ignore all that, covering it up under a new proposal that is their strangest yet:

They now propose to use even higher test-score minimums, which will exclude even more poor black and poor white football and basketball players, among other athletes.

Opposing their presidents on that idea are, among others, 15 scholars who, as a panel, have prepared a report on NCAA abuses for a House subcommittee.

The panelists, representing Purdue, Princeton, Virginia, Pepperdine and other universities, are members of the McIntosh Commission on Fair Play in Student-Athlete Admissions, a study group funded by Florida’s McIntosh Foundation.

The panel is recommending that the NCAA rescind Propositions 48 and 16, the two mechanisms of NCAA misconduct on test scores, one old, one new. Both require standardized tests to measure a prep athlete’s college aptitude.

Some of the McIntosh group’s main findings:

* As long ago as 1983, NCAA leadership was advised that standardized tests have an unfair impact on college-qualified blacks, females and other minorities.

* That information, in the form of a letter, was sent to the NCAA by Gregory Anrig, president of the Educational Testing Service, whose experts design the most widely used testing process, the Scholastic Assessment Test, known as SAT.

* Within a year after Anrig had told the NCAA that it was misusing the SAT to discriminate against low-income athletes, the findings were confirmed in an NCAA research report.

Disregarding such evidence identifies the nation’s college presidents as not only willful but heartless. If they’re in harmony with the angry, racist strain in today’s national mood, is that where university leaders belong?

AVERAGE IQ IS ENOUGH

NCAA schools, contemplating initial-eligibility policy, have always had one good option.

They could simply approve the admission of high school athletes who graduate with a grade-point average of C in any curriculum--or 2.0 on a four-point scale--secure in the knowledge that, as Thomas Jefferson said, anyone of average intelligence can be educated by caring professors.

Instead, the heads of the great NCAA universities, repeatedly stung by criticism that they are soft on athletes, seem more interested in creating a we-are-tough image.

According to other college people, image has been a problem for their presidents since a 1980s public discovery that two or three universities harbored athletes who could scarcely read or write.

Institutional reaction to that exposure was as swift as it has been continuous: Blame the victim.

Rather than step up university efforts to educate student-athletes, the NCAA adopted Prop. 48, which, by stiffening admission standards, transfers the educational responsibility to the athletes--as if they had been to blame for exploiting themselves.

And, now, recommending even stiffer standards in the name of academic integrity, the Presidents Commission has chosen to ignore the research of, among many others, professors James Crouse and Dale Trusheim of the University of Delaware.

In their book, “The Case Against the SAT,” the Delaware professors conclude, first, that after high school grades are factored in, SAT scores fail to make university-admission decisions significantly more accurate--for either white or minority students--and, second, that the tests block the admission of a high percentage of low-income applicants.

The McIntosh research group, in a further study, uses NCAA statistics to show that in the three freshman classes admitted by U.S. universities before the first year of Prop. 48, a substantial number of athletes who in fact did graduate would have been denied admission if that proposition had then been in place.

“According to the NCAA’s own research, Proposition 48 has eliminated 45% of the African American students who would have graduated had they been allowed to enroll,” McIntosh panelist Robert A. Schaeffer says.

Schaeffer, an executive for the National Center for Fair and Open Testing in Boston, also uses NCAA statistics to warn that Prop. 16--the presidents’ pending weapon--will be even worse, severely discriminating against all low-income minorities, white, black, female and otherwise.

“More than two-thirds of the students newly disqualified by Proposition 16 will be white,” the Boston executive says.

That, in the view of Pepperdine Ethics Prof. Russell Gough, is an injustice.

Gough, a McIntosh panelist, says, “It is unfair to exclude students who, in fact, would graduate simply to make the NCAA look like it is cracking down on programs which exploit athletes.”

It is more than unfair, he says.

“It is morally questionable, to say the least,” the ethics professor charges.

The reality is this:

* The universities have something that able-but-deprived young athletes need to pull themselves out of an environment that is often all but hopeless.

* The athletes have something that great universities need to make a profit on football and basketball in the overloaded U.S. entertainment market.

The tragedy is not that athletes are unprepared for college but that the universities are unprepared for athletes.

Clearly, if they want big-time college sports, it is the responsibility of the universities--not the high schools--to educate big-time college athletes. The presidents are in the education business. They should get on with it.

NO FRESHMAN SPORTS

Athletic skill--the ability to play football or basketball well--is a lucky endowment. Few are born with it.

So, is it proper for the colleges to give a guy from that class a break?

Well, they give breaks to other minorities. Every year, the universities reach out to the lucky minority born rich, to the lucky minority born into neighborhoods with good schools and motivated teachers, to the lucky minority with hard-working parents who set aside money for college education from the day their children were born.

The universities only lose patience, it seems, with the low-born athletic minority.

That is evident again this year in an unsympathetic new NCAA proposal that, if passed, would separate incoming athletes into three classes.

Depending largely on SAT grading, all new players would be classed as full, partial or non-qualifiers. Some would be free to practice with but not play for college teams, some would only get three seasons of athletic eligibility, and some could get financial aid only if they were walk-ons.

That is preposterous.

What is needed from NCAA educators instead of such nonsense is a wiser, more humane program combining justice with integrity and featuring components such as these:

The enrollment of athletes who can make average high-school grades.

Students earning an average of C in the subjects required for graduation in either a disadvantaged rural area or a boisterous inner city--where they are already battling the ignorance and poverty that surround them as an accident of birth--are college material to any college person who cares.

No freshman competition.

The first college year, normally a difficult time, should be for academic and social adjustment. As an indicator of down-the-road academic performance, the freshman year, moreover, is many times more reliable than any SAT score.

For everyone, thereafter, four seasons of athletic eligibility.

The five-year span is common today for college graduates.

For junior college transfers, a mandatory year off from sports to adjust to college. And for young athletes who try but fail to make a pro club, no loss of college athletic eligibility.

In a free country, it is revoltingly undemocratic to deny free citizens free choices.

Athlete-education programs to be supervised by the individual university, not the NCAA, and not the conference.

Oversight on each campus should be in the hands of three or four tenured professors reimbursed in some way, perhaps with lighter teaching loads.

The four qualifications required of all oversight committee members are easy to define: intelligence, empathy for minorities, the maturity to tolerate if not support big-time college sports and the courage to fight unceasingly for academic integrity.

College presidents recommending such a platform, and making sure that every athlete who is willing to work gets an education, could undo a decade of disgrace.

Americans are ready for that. They’re rooting for their college leaders to regain the moral high ground.