Athletics

By Ben Miller and Lindsey Luebchow

College football’s Bowl Championship Series (BCS) is in hot water again this year with five undefeated teams and still no playoff system to determine the national champion. It’s unsatisfying to fans—and apparently to members of Congress and the White House too—when a complicated series of computer rankings, coaches’ polls, and other metrics magically reward two squads. But there’s a much more unsettling story swept under the rug during these debates: the poor academic performance and embarrassing graduation rates of most of the country’s top 25 football schools.

It is with those concerns in mind that Higher Ed Watch has analyzed, for the third year in a row, the federal graduation statistics and Academic Progress Rates of the top gridiron teams. The blog’s goal is to find those teams that have players delivering both on the field and in the classroom—and those that leave too many of their players without a degree and with few career prospects.

So who would be contending for the crystal trophy in Pasadena, Calif., if the match-up was determined by academic performance? They may not be playing for the title, but Penn State and Stanford are the class of the BCS, according to Higher Ed Watch’s rankings of the top 25 college football teams.

With two-time champion Boston College dropping out of the rankings this year, Penn State’s Nittany Lions moved up from sharing the number two spot in last year’s ranking to take over the top spot. The Stanford Cardinal, which is making its Academic BCS debut thanks to an 8-4 season, takes the second spot as the only other squad to receive more than 100 points under Higher Ed Watch's calculation. These two teams are followed by Cincinnati (number four last year) and Boise State (eighth).

Meanwhile, this year’s top football contenders wouldn’t even come close to competing. In fact, the University of Texas, which is scheduled to face the University of Alabama in the title game, again comes in dead last in the rankings. The Longhorns have occupied the bottom rung now for the past two years, and only an appearance by the University of Hawaii in 2007 has kept them from the three-peat. Other poor performers are the University of Arizona, the University of Oregon, and Oregon State University.

As for the current defending champion University of Florida Gators, they will not be competing for the BCS title this year, but they can take some solace from the fact that their score increased 10 points in the rankings, moving them from 21st to 20th in the poll.

Of the Sweet Sixteen teams, only Villanova and Purdue universities bested MSU in graduation rates of its basketball players, according to the New America Foundation think tank. "That's a point of pride. And that pride is easily transmitted to the rest ...

by Lindsey Luebchow

There haven't been many upsets in this year's NCAA men's basketball tournament, as big name basketball powerhouses have dominated the hardwood. But evaluate the Sweet Sixteen based on the most important academic competition of studying for and obtaining a meaningful degree and you'll find that most of the top teams wouldn't even come close to cutting down the nets in Detroit early next month.

Higher Ed Watch's third annual Academic Sweet Sixteen examines the remaining teams in the NCAA men's basketball tournament to see which squads are matching their on-court success with academic achievement in the classroom. And for the third consecutive year, academic indicators produce a championship game match-up that isn't on anyone's radar: Purdue versus Villanova, with Purdue's 80 percent graduation rate trumping Villanova's 67 percent. The University of North Carolina and Michigan State, meanwhile, round out the Final Four with graduation rates of 60 percent.

 

Lindsey Luebchow of the New America Foundation asks that question here. She concludes that if academics were factored into big-college football, ...

Now here's a little salt for those wounds: Both the Noles and the Gators made Higher Ed Watch's top 25 list of teams based on academic achievement, ...

In a few weeks, the Florida Gators and Oklahoma Sooners will face off on college football's biggest stage in the Bowl Championship Series (BCS) National Championship game. Unfortunately, many of the college seniors playing in this game will not be walking across the graduation stage next May. Instead, their schools will revel in the short-term glory of gridiron success, while the players will have to face the long-term consequences of joining the workforce without a college degree.

Higher Ed Watch's second annual Academic BCS rankings show that Florida and Oklahoma are not the only elite football schools doing a dismal job of graduating their players. Only 55 percent of Division I-A football players leave college in six years with a degree -- and that number drops precipitously at most big-time programs that solely focus on counting Ws and Ls instead of As and Bs. It also doesn't take into account the poor quality of the education many are receiving to begin with. Jock majors don't provide job-ready skills.

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Big-time college sports teams are not only skilled on the field, they are also talented at keeping their off-the-field activities in the dark. Athletics programs, for example, are experts at keeping their budgets under wraps. As spending on college sports soars to towering new heights, faculty members, students, taxpayers, and policymakers are often clueless about how the money is being spent.

The first step toward genuine college sports reform must be greater transparency -- in academic outcomes, as I argued last week -- and also in athletics budgets and expenditure decisions. While we have anecdotes about extravagant spending, the lack of transparency makes it difficult to know the extent of the problem. In addition, the NCAA's revenue distribution and scholarship rules encourage the professionalization of sports teams by emphasizing the value of athletic performance over academic achievement.

The NCAA -- or Congress if necessary -- must require the disclosure of more detailed information about athletic spending. The NCAA must also modify its own spending rules in order to slow down the college sports arms race and ensure that all athletes have the financial support they need to finish a degree.

It is a sad reality that many colleges do not treat their athletes as students, but rather as semi-professionals, for four years before dropping them into the real world without a meaningful degree or workforce-ready skills. Particularly at Division I basketball and football schools, colleges use their athletes to win championships and gain national prominence but too often leave them woefully unprepared for life away from the gridiron and hoops.

As I argued last week, the commercialization of college sports has gone too far. In this post, I will lay out the steps that I believe the NCAA and Congress should take to make sure that colleges aren’t allowed to lose touch with what really matters in higher education: graduating students with meaningful degrees.The first step toward reforming college sports is requiring greater transparency about the academic outcomes of athletes. Without better information, neither the NCAA nor Congress will be able to isolate and target academic abuses. The NCAA must also step up to the plate and fix flaws with its current academic monitoring and penalty system, as well as with its eligibility rules.

I've been a huge fan of college sports for as long as I can remember. If I had to pick my all-time favorite activity for a Saturday afternoon, it would be attending a college football or basketball game. But in recent years, I started to realize that college athletics is not exactly the idealized extracurricular activity of talented students that I had imagined as a child.

When I entered the higher education policy world as a writer for Higher Ed Watch two years ago, I wanted to learn more. What I found was not pretty, and I was soon struggling to figure out how college sports had lost its way, and how policymakers could steer it back in the right direction.

Now, my time on the sports beat at Higher Ed Watch is drawing to a close. Before departing the higher education blog world, I wanted to revisit my recommendations for reforming college athletics. I understand that change will not come quickly or easily, but I do believe that demanding greater accountability from colleges for the academic performance of their athletes could significantly improve the way sports programs currently do business.

My Changing View of College Sports

When I set out to investigate the nexus between college athletics and academics, I quickly found myself immersed in appalling graduation rates and stories of academic corruption. It wasn't difficult to lay bare the dirty, profit-driven side of the college athletics world. But as visible as the problems were, few people seemed to care. Outside of isolated exposés and a few dedicated professors, there weren't very many serious efforts at reform.