NCAA Board Approves Athletics Reform
By Justin Beland
The National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) in April approved an academic reform package aimed at improving the educational success of student athletes. As part of a broader effort that includes several other measures, the NCAA will modify the way it reports graduation rates, institute a new method to gauge the academic progress of student athletes, and create a system of penalties against institutions with poor records of graduating athletes.
Starting next year, the NCAA will examine a program's academic performance annually rather than through the six-year window of graduation rates. Programs will earn points for having high rates of students who maintain athletic eligibility by keeping their grades up and of student athlete retention and graduation. The NCAA will measure the progress rate of each Division I team at the start of each academic year.
The new standards also raise the re-quirements for progress toward a de-gree. After two years, an athlete must have completed 40 percent of the school's requirements for graduation, as opposed to 25 percent under the old system. At the end of three years, athletes must have completed 60 percent, and after four years 80 percent. Most student athletes are on a five-year academic calendar.
Programs may face penalties, including scholarship loss, stricter limits on the recruitment of potential athletes, and bans from championship tournaments if their progress rates consistently fall below a "cut line" when compared with three measures: all Division I teams in all sports, all Division I teams in that particular sport, and the academic performance of an institution's general student body. The NCAA has not yet determined what the cut point will be.
R. Scott Kretchmar, Pennsylvania State University's faculty athletics representative to the NCAA, says the new regulations were "put into place not to strike fear in the hearts of schools that are doing okay; they were designed to catch the worst of the worst" programs. Kretchmar was a member of the AAUP committee that drafted The Faculty Role in the Reform of Intercollegiate Athletics: Principles and Recommended Practices, published in the January-February 2003 issue of Academe.
Pressure has been on the NCAA for some time to take steps that would increase graduation rates, especially among athletes in football and basketball. The NCAA's most recent statistics show that among Division I football players who entered college between 1993 and 1996, only 51 percent graduated within six years. Among Division I men's basketball players, just 42 percent graduated.
Kretchmar acknowledges that some people will take a "cynical view" of any attempt to enforce new regulations. "There's a perception that any time you increase regulations, you open the spigot at the other end for fraud. But if you follow that logic, you'd never change anything. You have to set standards that you think are reasonable. We want real student-athletes whose credentials mimic those of other students."
(See the article by James Earl for an account of a nationwide movement among faculty members to reform intercollegiate athletics.)
|