Athletics

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.