Academic Madness in March

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.

A majority of players leave without a professional career (around one percent make it to the NBA), without a college degree (55 percent of Division I basketball players do not graduate), and without a future. Even those with degrees are tracked into jock majors and do not receive a quality education. Most of this year’s Sweet Sixteen teams—particularly the top-ranked powerhouses—fit this mold.

Last year, we compared the final sixteen teams on several factors, including basketball team graduation rates. Butler and Vanderbilt squared off in the championship game, and Butler’s 82 percent graduation rate prevailed over Vanderbilt’s 67 percent. We played out the Sweet Sixteen bracket again this year, first using the most recent federal graduation rates, for players entering college between 1997 and 2000 and graduating within six years of initial enrollment. The results of our Academic Sweet Sixteen bracket are almost certainly not what you will see on the court this weekend.

Davidson, a small “mid-major” school in North Carolina—with its first NCAA tournament wins this year since 1969—is the champion. Xavier and Stanford pull in at second place, and UNC is the only top-ranked team with a fairly strong showing. None of the other number one seeds graduate more than 40 percent of their players. The average graduation rate of the 16 teams is a dismal 44 percent—a slight uptick from last year’s Sweet Sixteen average of 38.5 percent.

One criticism of the graduation rate bracket is that we are judging this year’s teams based on the academic performance of previous teams. Well, the NCAA has an “Academic Progress Rate” (APR) measure that tracks how the current basketball players are progressing towards a degree. If we play out the bracket based on APRs, the results are almost exactly the same, except that Michigan State makes the Final Four instead of Stanford, but then loses to Xavier. With either measure, the teams that perform well in the classroom set themselves apart. It doesn’t appear that relative academic performance is changing much over time.

But in addition to looking at the team’s overall graduation rate, it’s also important to consider how these teams are supporting their black players. There are disturbing graduation rate disparities between black and white basketball players at many of the big-time sports programs. UCLA, for example, graduated only 20 percent of its black players, in comparison to 100 percent of its white players. Coaches often recruit black players who are athletically gifted but not prepared for the academic rigor of college, a sad result of K-12 achievement gaps.

Athletics represents a gateway to higher education for many black students. A disproportionate number of black undergraduates participate in athletics, in comparison to the white student population. But when athletics is used as an access tool for black students, and then those students are not given the tools to graduate, the purported educational opportunity becomes a farce. Schools have a responsibility to ensure that their black athletes are on track to get a degree; otherwise, they are using them, plain and simple.

Of the Sweet Sixteen teams, Stanford had the highest black basketball player graduation rate, at 71 percent, with Davidson in second at 67 percent. Tennessee, Washington State, Memphis, and West Virginia are at the bottom with UCLA—they all fail to graduate more than 30 percent of their black players. [Unfortunately, we cannot compare the teams’ black-white graduation rate disparities, because many schools have a small number of white scholarship basketball players and thus do not report their disaggregated graduation rate.]

As you watch the rest of the NCAA tournament, take a moment to think about the NCAA’s promotional tagline: “There are 380,000 NCAA student-athletes…and just about all of them will go pro in something other than sports.”

They aren’t referring to basketball players. In order to go pro in something other than sports, you need a college degree. You need to get a quality education and leave college with meaningful skills (tune in next week for more on this issue). Many basketball players aren’t going to be able to go pro in anything, sports or otherwise.