Athletics

No NCAA Showdown Over Academic Penalties

Lindsey Luebchow — Thu, 08 May 2008 14:00:00 -0400

When the National Collegiate Athletic Association announced its penalties for poor athlete academic performance this week, it let many high-profile Division I college basketball and football teams off the hook.

After four years of collecting data, the organization was set to enact full scholarship penalties for teams that fail to keep their athletes on track to graduate. But because of the NCAA's generous use of waivers for wealthy, high-profile athletic programs, as well as a flawed penalty structure, many teams with poor academic records found themselves in the clear.

Under the NCAA's Academic Progress Rates (APR) system, teams get points each semester for retaining athletes and for keeping them academically eligible. The NCAA has a system of penalties for teams that post low APRs. For the past three years, most teams have not been subject to the penalties, however, because of squad-size adjustments, or exemptions due to insufficient data.

This year, the full penalties came into effect, and any team with an APR below 925 (which corresponds to a 50 percent federal graduation rate) was supposed to be subject to "immediate penalties," or reductions in scholarships. Any team with an APR below 900 was supposed to be subject to "historical penalties," which are more severe and range from reductions in practice time to restrictions on postseason competition and Division I membership.

The APR isn't a rigorous test of academic performance: athletic programs are awarded one point for each athlete who simply remains enrolled in school and another point for each athlete who maintains their academic eligibility. The goal is to make sure that players are actual students, in a very minimal sense of the word.

But many teams are struggling to meet even these low standards. Over 40 percent of men's basketball teams (137 teams) and nearly 34 percent of football teams (81 teams) posted a four-year average APR (2003-07) below 925.

Yet this week the NCAA announced that only 37 college football teams and 53 college basketball teams would be penalized next season—about 40 percent of those with APRs below 925. What gives?

One reason that many teams escaped being hit with scholarship reductions involves the NCAA's penalty structure. If a team posts an APR below 925, it loses scholarships only if a player leaves the college early in poor academic standing (otherwise known as a "0-for-2" players—those who drop out when they are also academically ineligible).

Take, for example, Maryland's basketball team, which recorded a very low APR score of 906. The team did not lose any scholarships because the players who left the school without graduating had already exhausted their academic eligibility (and thus technically weren't "0-for-2" because they didn't drop out early). This is a pretty large loophole, especially for a basketball team with such a low APR—and a most recent graduation rate of zero percent (for players who entered between 1997 and 2000).

In addition, the NCAA granted waivers to some low-performing football and basketball teams at "low resource institutions," including many historically black college and universities. Such waivers are considered appropriate, so long as the NCAA requires the athletic programs at these schools to demonstrate improvement over time.

But the NCAA also granted waivers to wealthy, big-time sports schools that have plenty of money to spend on academic support. Instead of standing up to these universities and penalizing them for their academic failings, the NCAA quietly consented to their waiver requests.

Ohio State University's basketball team is a perfect example: with an APR of 909, and a most recent federal graduation rate of 27 percent, the program should have been subject to scholarship reductions for next year. But Ohio State submitted an "APR Improvement Plan" to the NCAA, with promises of more tutoring and monitoring of athletes, and thus avoided the penalty.

Other high-profile teams that were granted waivers include the University of South Carolina's football team, Purdue University's football team, and Indiana University's basketball team. The NCAA granted waivers to 11 percent of teams of teams with APRs below 925 in this category.

If the NCAA is serious about academic reform, it should make an example of these high-profile sports schools. And if it wants to force real change, it needs to strengthen its penalty system. Little will change if fewer than half of the men's basketball and football teams with scores below 925 are actually punished.

In announcing the recent penalties, Myles Brand, the president of the NCAA, passed the ball. It might make sense, he said, for schools "to put money into the development of academic resources than into the development of new [football stadium] suites."

We hate to break it to you Mr. Brand, but no big-time sports school is going to shift money to academics by choice. You need to force them to by implementing and enforcing academic penalties with teeth.

In Pursuit of a Quality College Education: An Academic All-Star Basketball Team

Lindsey Luebchow — Wed, 02 Apr 2008 13:33:00 -0400

Last week, Higher Ed Watch published its annual "Academic Sweet Sixteen" bracket, which ranks the teams in the NCAA tournament based on their basketball team graduation rates. While it's important to consider how many players leave school with degrees in their hands, there's a significant flaw in the comparison. We have no way to determine whether players who graduated actually learned anything or obtained the skills necessary to enter the workforce.

As we discussed during the football season, there is no data on college quality for athletes and very little for college students in general. It's widely known that athletes often cluster in "jock majors," which provide them with classes that demand and teach very little. The goal of many big-time basketball teams is simply to keep their players academically eligible, not to give them an education that will be of value in the future.

But because there is no objective way to track the relative worth of athletes' degrees (and remember, this problems extends to all consumers of higher education), we have to rely on anecdotal evidence.

On the positive side, there are examples of basketball players and teams that excel both on the court and in the classroom. Higher Ed Watch wants to applaud some of these current players, and use them as an example for the teams that place little value on academics. As shocking as this may sound, these athletes show that it is possible to be a highly successful Division I basketball player and graduate with a meaningful degree.

The following players are seniors who will graduate in May, and they have all started games for teams that made the NCAA tournament this year:

Adam Emmeneker, Drake
Four majors: management, business, finance and entrepreneurial management
3.97 GPA
Cliff Hammonds, Clemson
Double major: architecture and psychology
3.2 GPA
First scholarship basketball player on record at Clemson to earn a degree in architecture
A. J. Graves, Butler
Major: Mathematics and Actuarial Science
3.35 GPA
(Butler also won Higher Ed Watch's Academic Sweet Sixteen last year with a 83 percent graduation rate)
Justin Hare, Belmont
Major: Exercise Science, Pre-Med
3.86 GPA
Plans to attend medical school
Sasha Kaun, Kansas
Major: Computer Science
At least 3.2 GPA
"Computer whiz"; participated in an engineering robotic competition
Jonathan Wallace, Georgetown
Major: Government
Admitted to Georgetown University Law Center
Ty Rogers, Western Kentucky
Major: Business management, minor in entrepreneurship
3.8 GPA

That's a pretty impressive list. In contrast, consider the University of Memphis men's basketball team this year (most recent graduation rate: 30 percent): Of the six juniors and seniors who have declared majors, three are majoring in "Interdisciplinary Studies," two in "Sport and Leisure Management," and one in "Communication." These don't sound like the most rigorous academic tracks to us.

The broader point, however, is that we don't really know anything about the education that these athletes received. Maybe the Sport and Leisure Management department at Memphis has very high standards and produces students well-prepared to enter a management career upon graduation.

However, stories like this recent investigative series in The Ann Arbor News raise major questions about the academic integrity of big-time sports programs. The Ann Arbor News found that a very high percentage of University of Michigan athletes, particularly football players, major in "general studies" and enroll in numerous independent study classes. This clustering of athletes in a cushy academic track raises red flags about the quality of Michigan athletes' degrees.

But it's only when the media takes the time to do these investigations or when frustrated faculty members speak up that academic quality problems are exposed. The NCAA needs to start keeping comprehensive data on academic quality for its athletes—for example, an accounting of the courses taken by athletes with statistics such as GPAs or course requirements. And higher education institutions in general need to establish better quality measures for all students.

All college degrees are not equal—and unless colleges and the NCAA take steps to prove that the degrees received by their students have real value, they are both at risk: colleges of losing consumers, and the NCAA of losing its tax-exempt status.

Academic Madness in March

Lindsey Luebchow — Wed, 26 Mar 2008 15:10:00 -0400

Amid the flashy, commercialized spectacle of March Madness, it's time again for Higher Ed Watch to bring some sanity to the national debate about which team deserves to be crowned the NCAA champion. Like last year, we have a different take on how to calculate basketball team success. It's not about RPI, or victory margin, or strength of schedule. We're interested in how the Sweet Sixteen basketball teams are performing in the classroom.

Higher Ed Watch has been critical of the student-athlete charade at most top basketball and football programs. These teams do not adequately support the academic development of their athletes, instead using them to win on the field and court and gain national media attention and commercial value for the school.

A majority of players leave without a professional career (around one percent make it to the NBA), without a college degree (55 percent of Division I basketball players do not graduate), and without a future. Even those with degrees are tracked into jock majors and do not receive a quality education. Most of this year's Sweet Sixteen teams—particularly the top-ranked powerhouses—fit this mold.

Last year, we compared the final sixteen teams on several factors, including basketball team graduation rates. Butler and Vanderbilt squared off in the championship game, and Butler's 82 percent graduation rate prevailed over Vanderbilt's 67 percent. We played out the Sweet Sixteen bracket again this year, first using the most recent federal graduation rates, for players entering college between 1997 and 2000 and graduating within six years of initial enrollment. The results of our Academic Sweet Sixteen bracket are almost certainly not what you will see on the court this weekend.

Davidson, a small "mid-major" school in North Carolina—with its first NCAA tournament wins this year since 1969—is the champion. Xavier and Stanford pull in at second place, and UNC is the only top-ranked team with a fairly strong showing. None of the other number one seeds graduate more than 40 percent of their players. The average graduation rate of the 16 teams is a dismal 44 percent—a slight uptick from last year's Sweet Sixteen average of 38.5 percent.

One criticism of the graduation rate bracket is that we are judging this year's teams based on the academic performance of previous teams. Well, the NCAA has an "Academic Progress Rate" (APR) measure that tracks how the current basketball players are progressing towards a degree. If we play out the bracket based on APRs, the results are almost exactly the same, except that Michigan State makes the Final Four instead of Stanford, but then loses to Xavier. With either measure, the teams that perform well in the classroom set themselves apart. It doesn't appear that relative academic performance is changing much over time.

But in addition to looking at the team's overall graduation rate, it's also important to consider how these teams are supporting their black players. There are disturbing graduation rate disparities between black and white basketball players at many of the big-time sports programs. UCLA, for example, graduated only 20 percent of its black players, in comparison to 100 percent of its white players. Coaches often recruit black players who are athletically gifted but not prepared for the academic rigor of college, a sad result of K-12 achievement gaps.

Athletics represents a gateway to higher education for many black students. A disproportionate number of black undergraduates participate in athletics, in comparison to the white student population. But when athletics is used as an access tool for black students, and then those students are not given the tools to graduate, the purported educational opportunity becomes a farce. Schools have a responsibility to ensure that their black athletes are on track to get a degree; otherwise, they are using them, plain and simple.

Of the Sweet Sixteen teams, Stanford had the highest black basketball player graduation rate, at 71 percent, with Davidson in second at 67 percent. Tennessee, Washington State, Memphis, and West Virginia are at the bottom with UCLA—they all fail to graduate more than 30 percent of their black players. [Unfortunately, we cannot compare the teams' black-white graduation rate disparities, because many schools have a small number of white scholarship basketball players and thus do not report their disaggregated graduation rate.]

As you watch the rest of the NCAA tournament, take a moment to think about the NCAA's promotional tagline: "There are 380,000 NCAA student-athletes...and just about all of them will go pro in something other than sports."

They aren't referring to basketball players. In order to go pro in something other than sports, you need a college degree. You need to get a quality education and leave college with meaningful skills (tune in next week for more on this issue). Many basketball players aren't going to be able to go pro in anything, sports or otherwise.

March Madness, Big Money

Lindsey Luebchow — Tue, 18 Mar 2008 10:26:00 -0400

It's March, and for any basketball fan, this means three glorious weeks of watching the premier teams in the nation battle it out in a single-elimination, high-stakes, high-pressure tournament. March also means big money for the NCAA, which cashed in on the popularity of March Madness by giving CBS the rights to broadcast the tournament for $6 billion over 11 years.

One team you aren't going to hear anything about during the tournament is Alcorn State, a small, historically black college that finished the season 7-24, at the bottom of the Southwestern Conference (SWAC). As we at Higher Ed Watch discussed last week, there is a growing college sports spending gap between schools like Alcorn State that are struggling to sustain athletics programs and elite sports schools that are rolling in millions of dollars of revenue.

The NCAA has the power to do something about college sports gap, in the form of around $500 million in revenue it makes each year from its contract with CBS. But instead of devoting all of this money towards a positive end—helping, for example, less wealthy schools like Alcorn State—the NCAA provides a substantial share of this bounty to big-time sports programs, thus further encouraging the profit-driven commercialization of college sports.

Schools like Ohio State—which brings in its own $109 million in revenue each year—don't need the NCAA's money. But those like Alcorn State desperately do. The NCAA needs to modify its allocation formulas and actively help sustain sports teams at these schools, so that all college athletes can enjoy the educational benefits of healthy athletics participation.

At present, only one of the NCAA’s revenue distribution formulas takes into account the relative need of individual schools and conferences—the Special Assistance Fund. Of the $332 million given directly to Division I institutions in 2006-07, the Special Assistance Fund represented $12.3 million, or four percent. In addition, only part of its formula is need-based.

So what about the other 96 percent? Well, $133 million, or 40 percent of the 2006-07 total, was distributed based on how teams performed in the NCAA men’s basketball tournament (total appearances in the tournament for each conference, over rolling six-year periods, determine the pay-outs). This means that conferences like the Big Ten and the Big East received between $13 and $14 million in 2006-07, while the SWAC received only $1.06 million.

The other 56 percent of the revenue ($187 million) was allocated either evenly among conferences and institutions or based on the size of each school’s athletics program (the number of teams and number of scholarship players). Thus if Alcorn State had the same number of sports teams and players receiving athletic scholarships as Ohio State, they would each receive the same amount of money under these formulas.

This allocation system makes the big-time programs richer and contributes to the commercialization of college sports by emphasizing performance on the field and court. The elite basketball and football programs are raking in more and more money and becoming less and less associated with the academic life of universities, trends being subsidized by the NCAA.

The NCAA has the power to narrow—or at least stop the rapid widening of—the athletics spending gap. It should target a much larger portion of its revenue to schools based on financial need (using factors such as Pell Grants per institution and spending per athlete), and eliminate revenue distribution based on performance. In addition, the NCAA should require that schools that receive the funds spend a portion of them on providing more and better academic support to their student-athletes.

Not only would the additional money help sustain athletics programs at places like Alcorn State (while the lost money would matter little to places like Ohio State), the NCAA has a chance to prove that it is actively working to reign in commercialization and keep sports integrated with the educational mission of universities.

In addition to being good policy, this just might be a good strategic move. Congress is paying attention to the NCAA's use of its tax-exempt status...

Uneven Playing Field

Lindsey Luebchow — Thu, 06 Mar 2008 15:00:00 -0500

News is circulating about the growing wealth gap between a few elite, well-endowed colleges and the rest of higher education. A Congressional investigation into endowment growth and hoarding, the fears of budget cuts at state universities as the economy declines, and the new, expensive financial aid plans at many elite schools have added fuel to the story and brought focus to a worrisome picture that has been developing for some time.

[slideshow] The widening wealth gap is also a stark reality in the world of college sports. Just as most of the higher education media attention traditionally has been given to elite colleges and their spending decisions, most of the interest in athletics spending is directed at a small number of big-time football and basketball programs and conferences.

Now the institutional spending gap is starting to get more notice. But there aren’t a lot of feasible solutions being offered to reverse the trend, mostly because there aren’t any easy ones (for example, a proposal recently floated to create a wealth-sharing arrangement using the endowment returns of elite colleges has yet to be picked up).

In the basketball world, however, there is an entity with spending power that can help control the gap: the NCAA. The NCAA has its own, significant revenue stream from a $6 billion, 11-year contract with CBS to broadcast the final basketball tournament in March. And it has the power to distribute this revenue among NCAA schools as it sees fit.

Alcorn State: A "Have-Not" Basketball Team

Unfortunately, the sports media generally isn’t interested in covering the plight of struggling, low-budget programs. They want glitz and glamour, all of the professional-grade trappings of big-time programs. They want to show you that college athletes are being treated like royalty with over-the-top facilities and perks.

That’s why we at Higher Ed Watch were pleasantly surprised to find an article on ESPN.com about the basketball team at Alcorn State University, a small HBCU in Mississippi. The basketball team competes in Division I as a member of the Southwestern Athletic Conference (SWAC), and the school is rarely ever mentioned in the national sports media (and likely only in passing as the alma mater of Steve McNair, the quarterback of the Baltimore Ravens).

Dana O’Neil of ESPN.com highlights the extremely poor, run-down state of athletic facilities at schools like Alcorn State, and the lack of resources that would seem like basic necessities at any big-time school:

Late checks, money crises, ice machines that don't work, a student serving as athletic trainer without any formal training or CPR certificate, a basketball budget that wouldn't cover the expenses of one athlete at a top-tier university, a staff made up of just two coaches, and road meals that include whatever's on the local buffet restaurant menu -- that is the choppy river that carries Alcorn.

She also notes that the wealth gap (and in turn, the competitive gap) did not used to be as wide, but that the commercialization of college sports has produced two extremes of haves and have-nots.

Alcorn State’s entire athletics program had an operating budget of a little more than $3 million in 2007, ranking it 337 out of 339 schools in Division I, according to the U.S. Department of Education's Office of Postsecondary Education. Its basketball team’s budget was only $306,885, and operating expenses per player were $919. Ohio State, the wealthiest and most extravagant athletics program, has an operating budget of $109 million overall, more than $4 million for basketball, and $125,602 per basketball player.

When one team can’t even afford a treadmill or a full-time trainer while another has a "players-only entrance, a lounge with six flat-screen TVs, three videogame systems and a juice bar," it shouldn’t be hard for the NCAA to figure out where it should concentrate its around $500 million in annual basketball revenue.

But right now, that money is not being sufficiently targeted to the schools that actually need it to sustain athletics programs. Instead, it’s having the adverse effect of contributing to the commercialization of big-time programs.

Next week we will write more on how the NCAA currently distributes its revenue, and how it could change its allocation formulas to help sports teams at places like Alcorn State stay alive and continue enhancing the educational experience of their athletes.

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Who's Afraid of the NCAA?

Lindsey Luebchow — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 15:00:00 -0500

Two weeks ago, the NCAA accused Kelvin Sampson, the basketball coach at Indiana University, of committing five major rules violations involving recruiting and improper phone calls. The NCAA report was harsh in its assessment of the situation, and media coverage of the report was extensive. The media portrayed the NCAA as a serious actor that would come down hard on Indiana if the school didn't take swift action itself. The school responded by getting rid of Sampson last Friday with a $750,000 settlement.

Contrast this with the academic cheating scandal at Florida State University that came to full light last December. Sixty-one players on various sports teams cheated in an online music history class, making this one of the most widespread cases of academic corruption ever publicly disclosed. Media attention to the scandal was limited outside of Florida, and was mostly focused on the fact that FSU wouldn’t be competitive in its football bowl game because the school had suspended 36 players.

So here’s the question: does the NCAA treat academic fraud as seriously as it treats recruiting and other rules violations, such as illegal payments to players? It appears that the media doesn’t think so, as predictions of doom and gloom for Indiana were prevalent and are still being discussed, while no one is talking about the NCAA doing anything serious to FSU.

For the most part, cheating is framed as the school’s problem. There have been a few examples of the NCAA stepping in and enacting harsh penalties for academic fraud, but only in the most extreme cases. In general, it has been left to colleges to monitor academic honesty and deal with infractions by their student athletes.

Recruiting and rules violations, on the other hand, are tracked closely by the NCAA because, the organization assumes, universities would not comply with them without a supervisory body.

But can the NCAA assume that universities are taking academic corruption seriously without the presence of a meaningful watchdog? Given the tacit acceptance by many schools of improper tutoring and cheating in high-profile sports programs, we think the answer to that question is a resounding "no."

Current NCAA Monitoring and Infractions

At present, 25 Division I institutions have been charged with NCAA infractions and are on probation with the NCAA (in addition to receiving a range of other penalties). Being on probation itself doesn’t have any real consequences; it basically means that if the school commits another infraction while on probation, the penalties will be much harsher (and it means that the athletics program is likely under stricter scrutiny).

Of those 25 violations, only three are specifically related to academic fraud (McNeese State University, Nicholls State University, Purdue University), while another five primarily involve other recruiting and player benefit infractions but also include instances of academic fraud (Baylor University, Ohio State University, University of Arkansas-Fayetteville, University of Georgia, University of Kansas). Most of the NCAA infractions rulings are related to eligibility questions or illegal payments and benefits provided to players.

This doesn’t necessarily mean that the NCAA is ignoring academic fraud; it could mean that cases of academic fraud occur much less frequently than other rules violations. We would be shocked, however, if this were the case. There isn’t concrete data to support widespread academic corruption, because so much of it is under the radar and tacitly accepted by schools. But just talk to anyone involved in athletic academic support services at a big-time football or basketball school, and you’ll get an idea of just how prevalent and widely accepted such conduct is.

NCAA Penalties and Rhetoric: Indiana vs. Florida State

Indiana

When the NCAA released its report on Kelvin Sampson’s recruiting violations, its allegations were pointed and unsympathetic: Sampson "acted contrary to the NCAA principles of ethical conduct when he knowingly violated recruiting restrictions imposed by the NCAA" and "failed to deport himself…with the generally recognized high standard of honesty."

Sports commentators immediately began to assess Indiana’s options, and most gravely warned Indiana that if the school didn’t take swift action by firing Sampson and imposing penalties on itself, the NCAA wouldn’t be kind. The violations do appear to be serious, and they shouldn’t be trivialized. If true (and given Sampson's acceptance of a settlement, they likely are), Sampson blatantly lied to the NCAA and knowingly violated recruiting rules over and over again.

Florida State

But the infractions at Florida State were also quite serious, and weren’t confined to a single individual. Over 60 athletes were implicated, which certainly raises questions about academic integrity and the environment surrounding the FSU athletics program. Rules compliance also has been a problem in the past at FSU.

FSU uncovered the cheating operation itself, and recently announced self-imposed penalties of two years probation for the school, loss of 30 percent of eligibility for the coming season—sitting out 30 percent of games—for the students involved, and to-be-determined scholarship reductions (these certainly won’t disrupt business as usual in the FSU athletic department). It has submitted its final internal report to the NCAA, and will wait to hear whether the NCAA will go above and beyond those penalties.

What’s interesting about the way that the FSU scandal unfolded was the length of time it took for FSU to take action, the lack of pressure or commentary from the NCAA (a single news release reaffirming its academic standards), and the minimal media coverage. FSU president T.K. Wetherell first ordered an investigation into the incident last May and didn’t report the initial findings to the NCAA until September (after becoming frustrated with an uncooperative athletic department). The school didn’t suspend the majority of football players involved until FSU’s season had already gone down the drain and the team was playing in an inconsequential bowl game.

The Indiana-Sampson investigation represents a marked contrast. The NCAA took it upon itself to look into Sampson’s violations after the school first reported them and enacted its own penalties last October. The organization quickly found that Sampson was in a lot more trouble than Indiana had originally thought. The school gave itself seven days to do its own reinvestigation and respond. And the school decided that it would be too damaging to drag the situation out, so it cut its losses and settled with Sampson. (Indiana has not yet announced if it will impose further penalties on itself).

Indiana values its reputation—and is scared enough of the NCAA—to take action now, rather than feel the wrath of the NCAA later. Is FSU scared that the NCAA will take matters into its own hands? Is FSU worried that its reputation might be in jeopardy?

Unlikely. The NCAA rarely exhibits its wrath for academic fraud violations. Our bet is that FSU is breathing a lot easier than Indiana right now.

Minority Recruitment: Athletics Success, Admissions Failure

Lindsey Luebchow — Wed, 23 Jan 2008 15:00:00 -0500

Diversity and minority recruitment are hot button words in most four year college admissions offices. There's congratulations when enrollment demographics show greater racial diversity and consternation when minority numbers drop.

But are college admissions office recruitment efforts working? Colleges will, in a knee-jerk fashion, say: yes, look at our racial and ethnic percentages! College access for minorities is a reality here! But how much is minority recruitment in admissions offices really contributing to the diversity of college campuses?

Unfortunately, at some Division I schools, not much. The black-white diversity on many campuses is not always the result of better minority recruitment. It’s often the result of athletics, and in particular, football.

Inside Higher Ed analyzed data from the NCAA and found that at 46 colleges (of the almost 330 colleges that participate in Division I athletics) athletes comprise at least a third of the black male student population. At 96 schools, athletes comprise at least 20 percent. Compare that to the percentage of all male students who are athletes: 3 percent.

The concentration of athletes in the black male population at public universities in predominantly white states and at smaller elite institutions with high admission standards is particularly striking. For example, at Oregon State University, 46 (35 football) of 122 black male undergraduates, or 38 percent, were athletes. At Wake Forest University, 69 (53 football) of 128 black male undergraduates, or 54 percent, were athletes.

What’s troubling about these statistics isn’t the large number of black student-athletes; it’s the low number of black non-athletes. Minority athletic recruitment is a well-oiled machine, and coaches do a great job recognizing potential in black athletes and providing them with a path to access higher education. (Of course, the issue then becomes, are these schools actually treating these players like students and supporting their academic development, or are they using them as professional money-makers?)

The problem arises when athletic recruitment is used as a substitution for minority recruitment in the non-athlete student population. An admissions office can tout the racial diversity of its student body as a sign of minority recruitment success when in reality it is simply masking its own failures with the athletic department’s success.

This "masking" could become a strategy at schools with large endowments who—in response to criticism from Higher Ed Watch and Congress that they are hoarding their wealth—have been promising to spend more of their money on efforts to increase both socioeconomic and racial diversity. When these schools report their diversity numbers without mentioning how many of their minority students were recruited for athletics, we don’t get a true picture of whether their academic minority recruitment strategies are producing results.

Unfortunately, the NCAA does not collect data from the Ivy League because they don’t give athletic scholarships, so we don’t know the percentage of black males who are athletes at some of the wealthiest schools. But it’s likely that their student populations are similar to other top-tier, wealthy schools like Stanford, Duke, Northwestern, and Notre Dame.

It’s important that schools are held accountable for their recruitment of non-athlete minorities. Many young black males believe that their only path to success is through athletics. If colleges don’t actively recruit them for academic achievement and potential, that perception becomes a reality in many high schools throughout the country.

And admissions offices should take note—there are lessons to be learned about recruitment from athletic departments. Coaches and their staffs are highly successful at finding athletic talent (and the potential for talent) in all types of places. They scour the country looking for students in communities across the socioeconomic spectrum, including in many places not normally paid attention to by the traditional higher education community. Admissions offices should communicate with athletic staff and consider how they can replicate successful recruitment models.

Minority recruitment takes money, time, and new ideas. Many wealthy schools are promising to revamp their recruitment efforts—we just need to make sure those efforts are coming from both the admissions office and the athletic department.

Roundup: Week of January 14 - January 18

Ed Policy — Fri, 18 Jan 2008 00:00:00 -0500

University of Phoenix Found Guilty of Securities Fraud, Must Pay $280 Million

A federal jury handed shareholders a major victory on Wednesday over the University of Phoenix, the largest for-profit university in the country. After only two days of deliberations, the jury found that the Apollo Group, the university's parent company, was guilty of securities fraud for withholding crucial information from investors and ordered it to pay approximately $280-million to the shareholders who had sued. In 2004, the company repeatedly failed to disclose in its Security and Exchange Commission filings and in its conference calls with financial analysts the existence of a U.S. Department of Education review that had blasted its student recruiting practices. That report, which found that the university had violated a federal law that bans colleges from compensating admissions officers on the basis of enrollments, became public only after the university reluctantly agreed to a $9.8-million settlement with the Department in which it denied any wrongdoing. The report's findings are also at the center of a separate False Claims Act lawsuit that has been brought against the university by two former admissions officers.

Elite Football Players Spend 45 Hours a Week on Sport, Study Finds

Between their sport and their studies, high-level college football players are working essentially two full-time jobs, according to a study released this week by the NCAA. The study found that student-athletes in the Football Bowl Subdivision, previously known as Division I-A, spent an average of 44.8 hours a week on their sport. While NCAA rules limit coaches to taking up 20 hours a week, players reported spending significant amounts of time watching game film, lifting weights, or engaging in other activities for their sport. In addition, players reported spending roughly 40 hours a week on academics, meaning that over 50 percent of their week was filled with either sports or coursework. Other sports, such as men’s golf and baseball, also exceeded the 40 hour mark, while women’s basketball and softball reported spending over 35 hours weekly. Not surprisingly, a majority of the athletes from those men’s sports indicated that they felt more like athletes than students. NCAA President Myles Brand both decried and defended the trend, noting "once you get past 40 hours, you’re really pushing it," but also saying that students studying music would be more likely to refer to themselves as musicians first.

College Endowments Earned Average Return of 16.9% in 2007

We’ve already reported on the strong endowment gains posted last year by Yale, Harvard and Stanford universities, but colleges overall earned a healthy 16.9 percent average return on their invested funds for the 2007 fiscal year, according to a survey released this week. A driving factor behind the solid growth, the highest average return in eight years, was international stocks, which earned a 28.3 percent return. The growth was most pronounced among the wealthiest schools, as institutions with $1 billion or more in their endowments earned a 21 percent return compared with 19.4 percent for endowments between $500 million and $1 billion. More troubling, however, is that the survey found that institutions spent only 4.4 percent of endowment assets on average, well below the 5 percent spending mark advocated for by Higher Ed Watch.

Ed Dept. Begins Holding Hearings on Regulations for Subsidy Cuts

Just as it did last week with TEACH Grants, the Department of Education began holding meetings this week to set the regulations governing the lender subsidy cuts and aid expansion passed by Congress last September. Among the biggest concerns addressed by the department was how to prevent for-profit loan companies from receiving benefits intended for non-profit lenders. The panel also addressed the question of whether the new regulations should pre-empt existing state laws governing college-lender interactions — a position supported by student-loan industry and some college lobbyists but opposed by Higher Ed Watch and other advocates for students.

College Football PR 101: Academic Bonuses

Ed Policy — Tue, 08 Jan 2008 00:00:00 -0500

When Louisiana State University coach Les Miles was carried off the field after winning the National Championship game last night, his smile likely reflected more than the pure joy of winning. Miles had already garnered $400,000 in football bonuses for making it to the game. After winning the title,

Note: This post pre-dates Higher Ed Watch's shift to a new publishing system. For the complete original post, including any comments, please click here.

Naughty and Nice

Ed Policy — Thu, 20 Dec 2007 00:00:00 -0500

Santa has some tough decisions to make this Christmas. We've decided to help him out with our own list of who's been naughty and who's been nice this year in higher education.

Let us know who, if anyone, you think should be added to the list…

Note: This post pre-dates Higher Ed Watch's shift to a new publishing system. For the complete original post, including any comments, please click here.