<p>Go, Georgetown
But when the tournament is over, the university should do more to graduate its players.</p>
<p>Saturday, March 31, 2007; Page A16</p>
<p>HEADED INTO the final weekend of March Madness, there's no doubt that the young men who play on the nation's top collegiate teams have served their schools well. What's questionable is how well the schools have served them. Too many college athletes are still leaving institutions of higher education without degrees, and that's nothing to cheer about.</p>
<p>A scorecard on graduation rates for the men's teams in the Sweet 16, published March 25 in The Post's Outlook section, showed a dismal graduation rate of 38.5 percent. Using NCAA data on players who entered college between 1996 and 1999, the researchers from the New America Foundation and Education Sector also showed that schools did a particularly poor job of graduating minority students. Georgetown University, which happily made the Final Four, posted poorly with a graduation rate for its basketball players of 47 percent. Contrast that with its overall graduation rate of 93.2 percent and one wonders about the university's priorities. Georgetown also showed some of the worst disparities between white and black men. Though a better picture of school performance emerges if estimates of transfer students are included in the numbers, the problem of poor achievement persists.</p>
<p>In recent years the NCAA, to its credit, has undertaken some academic reforms, such as threatening a loss of scholarships to schools that don't meet performance standards. It's also promised to take a look at the common practice of lowering admissions standards for athletes. It's clear, though, that more work is in order -- both by the schools, which need to show real commitment to academics, and by the athletes, who need to take responsibility for their own educations. There are examples to be emulated: Notre Dame, which makes academic performance part of the incentive-pay plan for its coaches, and the University of Florida, which provides enormous academic support to its players. Indeed, one measure of the Gator success is that five of its players taking the court this weekend opted to stay in school instead of leaving for a chance to play in the NBA.</p>
<p>The most distressing aspect of this issue is the gap between the performance of white and black players. Georgetown, for instance, graduated all of its white basketball players in 1996-99 but only 38 percent of its African American players. Worse than that is something that Richard Lapchick, director of the Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sport, has noticed: As bad as the graduation rate is for African American basketball players, at schools across the country it's better than that of African American men who aren't on athletic teams. Now that's madness.</p>