Rates on the Rise

Whichever way you choose to count, athletes in the National Collegiate Athletic Association's Division I and II are graduating at higher rates.

The NCAA on Wednesday published its annual graduation rates reports, in which the association is increasingly focusing on its measure of choice, the NCAA-created Graduation Success Rate, which association officials say more accurately portrays the actual performance of athletes than does the federal graduation rate, because it includes students who transfer in to a particular institution and excludes those who transfer out of that college in good academic standing.

Not unimportantly, though, in almost all cases the Graduation Success Rates for given universities are higher than their federal graduation rates.

The latest data, which look at how many athletes who entered college in 2002 had earned degrees within six years, produce a Graduation Success Rate of 79 percent for all Division I athletes, the same as the previous class reported last year. The equivalent federal graduation rate for Division I for this year is 64 percent, also the same as in 2008. All students at NCAA Division I colleges graduated at a six-year federal rate of 62 percent, the NCAA said; there is no comparable figure for all students to the Graduation Success Rate.

Division II athletes, meanwhile, had an Academic Success Rate (the division's equivalent of the GSR, which includes non-scholarship athletes) of 71 percent, comparable to last year and up from 70 percent the previous two years. The federal graduation rate for Division II was 55 percent.

NCAA officials heralded the continued improvement in graduation rates, which they attributed at least in part to the emphasis the association has placed in recent years -- especially under the leadership of the late Myles Brand -- on changing the rules and the culture to focus on athletes' classroom performance.

Academic success is "a far more important priority for our coaches, our staffs, and our athletes than ever before," and the improving graduation outcomes reinforce that, said Walt Harrison, president of the University of Hartford and chair of the NCAA's Committee on Academic Performance, which helped craft the academic rules.

Harrison said he expected the improvement to continue next year because the 2003 class will be the first that will have entered with the NCAA's new academic rules formally in place -- rules that toughened the requirements athletes must meet to stay eligible to compete in sports.

Harrison and Jim Isch, who became the NCAA's acting president after Brand's death, said they were particularly heartened that the association has managed to move the needle on graduation rates for baseball and men's basketball players, which have historically lagged to the point that the NCAA created special panels to focus on those sports' academic outcomes.

As seen in the table below, athletes in both of those sports have shown sizable gains in their Graduation Success Rate since 1995, when the NCAA began using that statistic. Association officials expressed mild concern about a slight decline in the Graduation Success Rate in the Football Bowl Subdivision, the most competitive playing level, where the federal rate dropped to 54.8 percent this year from 56 last year.

The NCAA's Web site provides databases containing college-by-college data for Division I and for Division II.

The tables below show those institutions that had the biggest gaps between their federal graduation rates for athletes and for all students. This first one shows those institutions where the rate for athletes in 2002 was at least 20 points higher than for all students; colleges on this list tend to admit most or all of the students who apply, and athletes are less likely to drop out for financial reasons than their student bodies at large:

This table shows those colleges at which the rates for all students exceeded those for athletes by at least 10 points. This list tends to be dominated by academically competitive colleges at which athletes often enter with lesser academic credentials than the student body at large:

Source: NCAA