Let’s see…where to start.
The NCAA is happy to trot out self-congratulatory statistics “proving” that Division I athletes graduate at rates that are – let’s say – surprisingly good.
But knowing that the NCAA is not exactly an objective source, let’s dig a little deeper into the numbers.
First of all, to compare athletes with “everyone else,” and say that the athletes graduate in slightly higher proportion is meaningless on its face. You are comparing one group most of whom PAY NOTHING, and another group that must suffer the financial burden of paying tuition etc at a Division 1 school. OF COURSE the people who don’t have to pay anything are going to graduate at a higher rate than those who have to pay! Are you kidding? And one might note that the metric they use is whether they graduate in SIX YEARS. That says a lot about the quality of time spent in school while playing their sport. And one might also mention that the NCAA statistics count also those who transfer to other schools to graduate. How’s that 79% looking now?
Next, let’s consider who is included in that “79%.” When you think of Div I student-athletes, you immediately think of football, basketball, and baseball players, but remember Title IX. That perverse law essentially requires that for every jock playing football or basketball, the school has to reserve an athletic scholarship for a woman. These women are statistically included in the 79%, and as we can infer, will be less inclined to devote ALL of the attention at school to their sport. And there are many other sports where male and female athletes must contend with the fact that there is no chance that they will ever support themselves playing professionally, and thus will devote more of their attention to school work.
Now let’s look at who else sneaks into that statistic. By including all Division I athletes, you are also grabbing those athletes who are not on scholarship (e.g., “RUDY”
. The ones who (OH MY GOD) are actual STUDENTS at those schools. Again, you this sub-group to graduate at significantly higher rates than scholarship jocks.
When you cut through all the bullshit – and although the NCAA would NEVER publish this particular statistic – less than half of the SCHOLARSHIP football, basketball, and baseball players manage to graduate in six years, even though everything is provided for free. And it’s much lower than that in many specific cases, for example, men's basketball teams at the Universities of Connecticut and Maryland at College Park (both 31 percent), Georgia Tech (36 percent), Kansas State (40 percent), and Kentucky (44 percent); and the football team at the University of Oklahoma (44 percent) (enrolled in 2003). Twenty-nine teams at 27 institutions—including such sports as women's tennis, men's golf, and women's skiing—had graduation-success rates of zero.
This whole discussion reminds me of the current (and perpetual) debate in Pennsylvania about whether the State should be monopolizing the sales of wine and liquor through “State Stores,” or conversely whether the whole thing could be privatized with the State only regulating and collecting taxes. The pro-State Store camp, keeps telling us that if we were to privatize liquor sales in Pennsylvania, the state would be filled with drunks, highway death tolls would skyrocket, high school kids would form drinking leagues and so forth. And to believe this line of bullshit we must totally ignore the 30-some other states (some on our immediate borders) which long ago privatized wine and liquor sales, where the rates of alcoholism, traffic deaths, and other alcohol related problems are no worse than in Pennsylvania right now.
As for the NCAA, to believe that the status quo is sane, you have to ignore THE REST OF THE CIVILIZED WORLD, where they do not have this quasi-educational circus of intercollegiate sports competition, and they do just fine. Their student bodies are not tainted with thousands of marginally-qualified jocks who require remedial education, watered down majors, student tutors, and so on. And I dare say, none of them are envious of our pageantry. And their college degrees actually mean something.
The idiots in the audience will counter with, “But if our schools are so BAD, why do so many foreigners pay a king’s ransom to come to the U.S. and Study?” I assure you, it’s not to watch the football team. Ask the thousands of Indians and Chinese in our graduate schools and medical schools whether they were inclined to come here because of NCAA sports. Not bloody likely.
Parenthetically I will add, I have spent a lot of time on US college campuses. Enough time to collect BA, JD, and MBA degrees (in that order). But none of it was in conventional "day" school. All at night, while working full time. And despite having to pay thousands in "student activities" fees, I never had any inclination to buy any of the discounted sports event tickets to which I was perennially entitled. My loss, I guess.
