Graduation Rates Cause Alarm

With the NCAA expected next month to pass radical new legislation designed to improve graduation rates, figures released this week showed that 44 of 65 schools represented in the men’s Division I basketball tournament failed to graduate more than 50% of their players.

The statistics, released by the NCAA in conjunction with the Knight Foundation Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics, also revealed that nearly half of the schools failed to graduate 40% of their players.

Stanford had the highest graduation rate at 100%, with Lehigh second at 90% and Dayton third at 82%. Two of the schools, Air Force and Princeton, do not award athletic scholarships.

Four schools failed to graduate any players, although their and 12 other schools’ graduation rates cannot be identified because of new federal privacy guidelines imposed by the Department of Education that suppress data when there is a small number of scholarship athletes or graduates.

The Knight Foundation in 2001 called for schools to be banned from the tournament if they failed to graduate 50% of their players.

“It is alarming that four of the teams in the men’s tournament failed to graduate a single athlete over the period we reviewed,” said Knight Commission Chairman William C. Friday, president emeritus of the University of North Carolina. “Transfers and early departures to the NBA cannot explain away such dismal graduation rates. It is unconscionable that these schools will be rewarded financially for their tournament participation when they have failed at their primary mission.”

The NCAA’s so-called incentive-disincentive program wouldn’t immediately ban schools with poor graduation rates from postseason play, but would reward those with consistently high rates over several years and punish those with consistently poor ones. The proposal, backed by NCAA President Myles Brand, is expected to be passed next month.

How and to what extent schools will be rewarded or punished remains to be determined, although postseason bans for under-performers figure to be a possibility.

“Nothing is perfect,” Todd Turner, a former Vanderbilt athletic director who led the panel that devised the program, told the Washington Post this week.

“But there is not a better idea that I have seen to try to put some academic credibility into the NCAA universe.”

-- Elliott Teaford

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The opening day of the NCAA men’s Division I tournament drew its highest overnight rating since 1993.

The games Thursday on CBS drew an average rating of 5.1 with a share of 10, up 2% from last year’s 5.0/11 and up 11% from the 4.6/11 in 2002.

Overnight ratings measure the 55 largest TV markets in the United States, covering nearly 70% of the country. Each overnight rating point represents about 735,000 TV homes. The share is the percentage of homes with sets in use.