Acing These Finals, but Falling Short of Graduation

When March Madness ends next Monday, the NCAA men's basketball champions will get to cut down the nets at the Georgia Dome and visit the White House. What many won't go on to do is graduate from college. And the classmates celebrating their school's triumph might not either. In fact, colleges that excel in the top tier of basketball -- Division I -- have dismal graduation rates overall, not just for their players. There are also profound gaps between their graduation rates for white and black students. Three of the Sweet 16 schools fail to graduate even half of their overall student populations. Fourteen schools have overall black-white male graduation rate gaps of more than 10 percentage points.

At schools in this year's Sweet 16, only 38.5 percent of men's basketball players have left with a diploma in hand. Superstars such as Roy Hibbert and Greg Oden, who can head for greener NBA pastures before completing college, are only a small part of this phenomenon. Even schools with high overall graduation rates fail to graduate many of their players. Georgetown University, for example, graduates 93 percent of its undergraduates but only 47 percent of its men's basketball team. Georgetown also reports a huge gap in the overall graduation rates of white and black men -- a 20.4 percentage-point difference.

Butler and Vanderbilt have the best basketball team graduation rates of the Sweet 16. Anyone have a Butler-Vandy final in their office pool? We didn't either.