<p>Hot off the press: <a href=“http://sports.yahoo.com/news/ncaa-graduation-rates-improve-critics-170953641--spt.html;_ylt=AwrSyCSv9k9UVXwAcIDQtDMD”>http://sports.yahoo.com/news/ncaa-graduation-rates-improve-critics-170953641--spt.html;_ylt=AwrSyCSv9k9UVXwAcIDQtDMD</a></p>
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Gimme a break… these football players are not victims. At the high schools they graduated from, non-athlete kids actually elected to pay attention, learn something, and legitimately graduate with higher than a 5th grade reading level. Basic level HS studies is not rocket science.</p>
<p>The only thing that is going to clean up the academic corruption is for colleges to give up their monopoly as the defacto minor league for the NFL and let a non-academic minor league develop, like baseball & NHL have. </p>
<p>Have we ever heard this suggested by anyone outside CC? This end of NCAA football?</p>
<p>Oh sure - I have heard it suggested in certain crowds for years, 40 years or more, but not as something that might actually happen… just a sort of utopian fantasy of a different kind of university.</p>
<p>adding: and with almost universal agreement that football and basketball players are victimized in several ways. No one suggests getting rid of football because players are taking advantage of the university. exact opposite.</p>
<p>I’ve never heard it. It has interested me since I got to this board. This idea. </p>
<p>It would be a loss to university life to lose the sports, I think. The way it would be a loss to lose the arts. </p>
<p>Yet college baseball is very fun as is college hockey. I see no reason, except logistics and expense, to not have a minor league nfl</p>
<p>There are very few athletes that are completely unprepared for college. Even if ALL 85 scholarship athletes on a football team and ALL 16 men’s and ALL 16 women’s basketball scholarship winners were illiterate, that’s only 117 athletes in the entire program that might have 500-900 scholarship athletes and many more who aren’t on scholarship. And ALL athletes at any school are not unprepared. Very few are totally unprepared, and no one is claiming the tennis and golf athletes can’t read or write, just the money sports. I do know personally a few lacrosse players who could never have gotten into UVa or Delaware or Syracuse without the athletic pull, but they weren’t illiterate and could add and subtract (most graduated from a Jesuit high school), had to pass the ACT/SAT minimums set by the NCAA, had to make academic progress at school.</p>
<p>Do some athletes choose ‘easy’ majors? What’s easy for someone might be hard for another, but sure, I’ll agree that for most college students, communications is an easier major than astrophysics. For others chemistry might be easier than journalism or performing arts because that student would rather not write a paper or have to talk to others (my daughter). Lots of other students are also taking these classes and earning these degrees. Future employers can decide if the history degree is more valuable than business.</p>
<p>I’m not saying whether it would be good or bad, just that people do discuss it and advocate it outside of CC. And some of those folks are pretty smart, imo. It made a pretty big impression on me to realize I now live in a place where folks who never attended college at all have bumper stickers for the state flagship or the local private university because they are basketball fans. They are bonded to the schools in a way I could not have anticipated because they are sports fans. I guess that was true in my childhood as well, I just wasn’t paying attention. </p>
<p>I actually think, when you look at the way a lot of these departments are run, if you lose the revenue sports, you lose sports. Jmo</p>
<p>If football and basketball are bonding experiences for the community, in a way poetry readings or art exhibits are not… then probably it makes a lot of sense to keep them at the university, imho. There has to be some reason for those not directly involved with local universities to support them, if they are to continue to exist. I think. Maybe that’s just nonsense though. I really have no idea.</p>
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<p>No need to throw out the baby w the bath water. </p>
<p>Lots of schools have above-the-board thriving sports programs. At D1 schools, you never hear about these kinds of academic scandals involving the women’s field hockey teams. </p>
<p>Schools can still have big revenue football, but there needs to be a viable path for athletically talented but academically disinclined kids to pursue a professional career in their sport, the way baseball & hockey players do.</p>
<p>I don’t have the “answers” either. I think the money has muddied the water significantly. </p>
<p>Of course the locals support the teams. I went the Holy Cross games when I was 6 years old because it was in the next town. We moved and I went to the local college team’s games because the stadium was 3 blocks from my house and I could walk over. The college kids came to the high school games too. If you’ve ever seen the movie ‘Rudy’ you’ll know that his father supported Notre Dame even though the family was from Chicago and the father never went to college.</p>
<p>We also went to the art shows, movies, concerts, special programs at the college in our town, not just sports. Just not as often.</p>
<p>Hunt, with all due respect, it appears that you have never had any direct dealing with the NCAA. The NCAA almost always enforces its own rules, the biggest exception is when one of these rules conflicts with a local, state, or federal law.</p>
<p>From the NCAA D1 manual:</p>
<p>“Academic Progress Rate – Disclosure. An institution shall not be eligible to enter a team or individual competitor in postseason competition (including NCAA championships and bowl games) unless it has submitted, by the applicable deadline, its academic progress rate (APR) in a form approved and administered by the Committee on Academic Performance.”</p>
<p>The Academic Progress Rate is used by the NCAA to track how well a college does in graduating its athletes. The APR rule is currently enforced by the NCAA and the NCAA has publishes the APR for 241 D1 football programs. Of those programs 12 were penalized by the NCAA:</p>
<p><a href=“http://www.sbnation.com/college-football/2014/5/14/5717872/new-2013-apr-scores-ncaa-football”>All 245 2012-2013 NCAA football APR scores ranked: 12 teams penalized - SBNation.com;
<p>It is interesting to note that Duke was ranked #4 while Harvard was ranked #26. The APR will probably be considered when the College Football Playoff selection committee makes its selection. In addition the APR appears to be causing an increase in graduation rates. This is from the article from post #240:</p>
<p>“Those who question the NCAA’s stats contend the higher numbers are skewed because athletes have more access to tutors, learning specialists and multimillion-dollar academic centers - all of which are intended to keep players academically eligible and on track to graduate.”</p>
<p>This seem like a positive thing to me. </p>
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<p>you never hear about field hockey at all.</p>
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<p>If the tutors are actually tutors… fine. If the tutors are doing school work… not fine.</p>
<p>My daughter has no more access to tutors than any other student at her school. Help is extra study sessions with the TA’s, the writing lab, office hours. She has to go to mandatory study tables 8 hours per week, and if her grades are good, the number drops in half and then is gone. Bad grades, back to study tables (but there are no tutors there). Her coach pulls their grades every week and wants to know why if there is a problem.</p>
<p>She’s working like crazy, both on the field and in the classroom. The school/coach likes the deal they made with her and she likes the deal too.</p>
<p>That’s nice, twoin, but at many schools (like UNC) athletes DO have access to special tutors.</p>
<p>If you look at that list of schools with the best Academic Progress Rates, you’ll see a lot of schools that require more than the NCAA minimums for admission. I don’t want to hold up the Ivy League schools as a paragon, but their academic index approach pretty much guarantees that they aren’t enrolling athletes who can’t read, and at least most of them can do good-quality college work. It would be interesting to know what the other leaders in this metric are doing.</p>
<p>Didn’t UNC show decent academic progress because of the paper classes?</p>
<p>Yes and no, Hunt. Keep in mind this has been investigated for the last there years. Also, the total nber of students involved over 18 years was not massive. <1%. Grades of .1%. 56% of students taking these classes were not athletes, though athletes did make up a higher percentage of those taking more than one. </p>
<p>I’m not too impressed by the fact that a bunch of frat guys also found out about these courses and took them; they were clearly created for the benefit of athletes. (Indeed, didn’t one of the organizers of the scheme complain about the non-athletes?)</p>
<p>Perhaps it would be better to have separate more-or-less-remedial classes for athletes that could be directly monitored for quality, rather than a system that allows shadow classes to hide among all the vast offerings of the university.</p>
<p>What’s an athletically talented Division 1 football player supposed to do if he can’t do the work at the college where he was recruited? Is the only way to get onto an NFL team to graduate as a Division 1 football player? (Sincere question, I have no idea.)</p>