<p>A sort of comglomeration of a school's USNews rank, academics and student/athlete graduation rate. You can also access by division or the overall combined ranking:</p>
<p><a href="http://www.ncsapowerrankings.org/%5B/url%5D">http://www.ncsapowerrankings.org/</a></p>
<p>Interesting, but at the Division II and III levels, this is a hodge-podge mess. The ranking take into account U.S. News rankings, but they fail to take into account different categories. So you end up with the same formula being applied to National Universities, Liberal Arts Colleges, Masters, and Baccalaureate schools. Bleah.</p>
<p>That's sort of what makes it interesting. :)</p>
<p>So, richmond will drop in next year's rankings.</p>
<p>Regardless, I like the concept. Though I think they need to work on the methodology. Here are a few thoughts of what to work in:</p>
<ul>
<li><p>Overall varsity opportunities per student. Or maybe number of supported varsity sports. How to differentiate Div 1A and Div 1AA football programs. The Director's Cup needs to improve how this should work.</p></li>
<li><p>A way to normalize between National, Liberal Arts, etc. classification</p></li>
</ul>
<p>What else would everyone include in putting together this broader ranking?</p>
<p>BTW, it is not just the Div II and II rankings that become a hodge-podge, it is also the Div I rankings. For example, there are many schools that are Div I but are classified as Masters or Comprehensive, i.e. Villanova.</p>
<p>It was fascinating to see the comparably poor graduation rates of such academic strongholds as Duke, Stanford, Northwestern, Virginia, and Rice (none on the top 20), vs their academic peers of Harvard, Princeton, Yale, Dartmouth and Brown (all in the top 7). The price they pay for fielding competitive teams?</p>
<p>Why no Colgate? Did they refuse to submit stats? I would think most of it would be available throught the common data set surveys.</p>
<p>This is definitely something we considered when S was looking at schools. The next question we asked is, "and how well have the graduating student-athletes done?" So looking at GPAs for the school and team is also important. </p>
<p>From what we learned, Div III schools had an advantage (over non-Ivy Div I) by this measure. Here's one of the reasons my S chose Washington and Lee:</p>
<p>W&L CLAIMS 214 ODAC SCHOLAR-ATHLETE CITATIONS
Nearly 49 Percent of W&L Student-Athletes Garner Recognition</p>
<p>SALEM, Va. -- The Old Dominion Athletic Conference has announced that 214 Washington and Lee student-athletes have been cited as ODAC Scholar-Athletes for the 2005-06 school year.</p>
<p>The criteria states that the honoree must be an athlete on a varsity athletic team and carry a 3.2 minimum grade-point average (GPA) for the 2005-06 school year.</p>
<p>Eight athletes posted a GPA in excess of 4.0 for the year . . . . Washington and Lee finished the 2005-06 school year with a 194-103-6 (.650) overall mark and a school-record 10 conference championships.</p>
<p>
[QUOTE]
It was fascinating to see the comparably poor graduation rates of such academic strongholds as Duke, Stanford, Northwestern, Virginia, and Rice (none on the top 20), vs their academic peers of Harvard, Princeton, Yale, Dartmouth and Brown (all in the top 7). The price they pay for fielding competitive teams?
[/QUOTE]
I haven't analyzed the data and I don't specialize in athletics (meaning don't read this as the absolute reason behind UVA's ranking), but I imagine that the big difference is that certain schools/divisions/conferences are more likely to have students leaving to go into a professional draft than others. While I wish all student athletes finished their degrees, I hear about a few of ours leaving each year to "go pro".</p>
<p>Interesting point, but I doubt more than a handful of students leave early to go pro. This is of course rare in football- very few are strong and experienced enough to skip part of college ball. More common, percentage wise, in basketball, but there are so few basketball players that they cannot have a big impact on the overall grad rate of student athletes. I seriously doubt each of those schools I have listed has had as many as two basketball players a year leave early.</p>
<p>What other sports are there where students leave to turn pro? Tennis- handful nationally if that many. Golf? hockey? baseball? in some cases (tennis, baseball) those headed for pro careers rarely go to college at all. So the vast majority of student athletes cannot turn pro because there is no pro career to go to. I suspect it is these scholarship school enrolling athletes who do not meet the academic standards to which the other students are held. By carefully selecting courses they manage to keep eligibility, but not to graduate.</p>
<p>a couple points:</p>
<p>ivy league institutions are not required to report graduation statistics to the ncaa because they do not offer athletic aid. not surprisingly, they dont publish their numbers willingly, either, meaning those in the ranking are estimates. so far as i can tell, the schools overall six-year graduation rates were used;</p>
<p>only schools that finished the season in the top 100 in their respective directors cup standings were eligible to be ranked. some schools that would have faired very well in the overall rankings (columbia, bucknell, colgate, etc) did not meet this criteria and therefore were not included.</p>
<p>Worth finding out whether the association listed the overall 6-year rates for Ivies, but only ncaa-reported athletic rates for schools that give athletic scholarships. Since athletes make up ~15-20% of student body at the Ivies, and overall grad rates are in the 95-97% range, it would be difficult for their grad rates to be much lower than those of student body as a whole.</p>
<p>I had assumed these were really the NCAA Academic Progress Rates, which are computed for each team, independent of whether students receive athletic scholarships, therefore a fair comparison. But perhaps not, and they really are grad rates.</p>