Don’t you think it’s likely they already do? I think the advantage of the AI system (or something like it) is that it reduces the risk of an enormous gap in academic ability between revenue athletes and other students. If you just adjust the minimums, there still could be big gaps of this kind at many schools. Of course, at some less selective schools, the floors might not be that different from the lower end of regular admits.</p>
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Let me say that as a Yale alumnus, this is fine with me. While I certainly would like to see Yale beat Harvard at The Game, I really don’t care very much.</p>
<p>I was referring to the fact that under an Academic Index system other sports would be forced to increase their Academic Index so football could have a lower Academic index. Espendshade’s data, which shows that there is similar (and slightly higher) admission boost given to an recruited athletes as legacies, was likely drawn from the Ivy League Academic Index dataset. Calculation of the academic Index requires a dataset which contains the individual high school GPA and ACT/SAT/SAT II scores for each student at all of the D1 schools. The non-athletes at these schools would not want this data sent to the NCAA, the university presidents would not want this data released to the NCAA, and the NCAA would not want to retain and process the non-athlete data. Using an AI band system for football would cause mass chaos during National Signing Day.</p>
<p>Using the Academic Index would be unnecessary. If one looks at the current NCAA Academic Progress Rate (APR, <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) , which shows how well each school does in keeping their athletes enrolled in school, it shows that Davidson college is the top ranked school. This should surprise no one who is familiar with student-athletes who have graduated from Davidson. Many of the Ivy League schools are at the top of this list, however several schools including Duke, Stanford, Georgia Tech, Northwestern , Wisconsin, and South Carolina have APRs which are higher than Harvard. By studing these schools (including an academic fraud investigation) it should be possible to work out policies which help retain student athletes.</p>
<p>What the heck is APR, according to the definition in the article, basically if you create an entire curriculum of UNC fluff courses and their entire number of student/athletes in a school takes such courses, its APR would be through the roof, and every one of these students will have not received any sort of education in the process. Something better needs to be implemented than this APR. Having a system that keeps athletes in school without getting an education is unacceptable.</p>
<p>Retention is not the problem. Retention via very low (or nonexistent) academic standards is the problem. Graduating does a student no good if someone else did the academic work for him, or if the courses don’t exist.</p>
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<p>They could turn to the National Student Clearinghouse. <a href=“http://www.studentclearinghouse.org/about/[/url]”>http://www.studentclearinghouse.org/about/</a> I’m sure they could receive anonymized data about student-body academic performance, divided by subgroup. After all, the data is likely already there–they claim, “Participants enroll 98% of all students in public and private U.S. institutions.”</p>
<p>Right, but here’s my problem with a lot of the way people want to address this.</p>
<p>A student at any university has a right to believe that any class they take is valid. The athletic department is not in charge of academics. It is up to the administration and academic departments in any school to make sure their classes are up to par.</p>
<p>We keep somehow managing to punish students for the failure of the schools. I have an issue with this, particularly in the case of football, and to a lesser degree basketball, where there are no other paths to the pros.</p>
<p>Now, that said, “par” at school A is different than par at school Q. What to do about that I do not know.</p>
<p>I don’t think we should do anything about “par” being different at school A and school B. But a student at any university has a right to believe that any class they take is valid, and they also have a right to believe that every class the other students at their school (the ones competing with them for awards and jobs) take is valid.</p>
<p>The accreditation agency is responsible for making sure that the course content for all degrees taught at a member institution meets minimum standards. UNC paper courses were not taught according to SACs guidelines. I would think that it would be unlikely that there is widespread systemic academic fraud at Duke, Stanford, Georgia Tech, and Northwestern and all of these schools have a higher Academic Progress Rate than Harvard. This indicates that the Academic Index is not a magic bullet that will solve the problem of keeping student athletes from dropping out.</p>
<p>If athletes aren’t capable of doing college-level work, they should drop out. If they aren’t willing to do college-level work, they should drop out. In part, the problems of the current system are unintended consequences of setting goals such as graduation for a segment of the student body for which admissions standards may be lowered. </p>
<p>Would I want student athletes to graduate? Yes. However, I would not accept watering down academic standards in exchange for better graduation rates for athletes. </p>
<p>It is bizarre to require athletes who want to play in professional leagues to enroll in college. It would be more honest for colleges to hire athletes to represent them, rather than go through the fiction that all athletes are students as well. Many are–but in the big time, spectator-pleasing sports, quite a few are not.</p>
<p>The NCAA has plenty of academic rules. But all rules need to be enforced and all rules can be evaded.</p>
<p>NCAA has minimum academic standards for kids coming out of high school. Google up Derek Rose/SAT to see how those requirements can be dishonestly worked around.</p>
<p>Once kids get to school, the schools and the kids have big incentives for them to “major in eligibility.” In the Northwestern union case, there’s testimony that football players were steered into easier majors and out of pre-med and engineering. At Florida State, the football program VERY aggressively pursues diagnoses of learning disabilities for players. That way those players can get extra assistance and time. All schools have massive tutoring programs designed to keep the players eligible.</p>
<p>Then schools maintain gut courses and gut programs. Google up University of Georgia basketball final exam for laughs. Then there’s this UNC situation.</p>
<p>Every single school with athletics, from Stanford to Northwestern to Harvard to Williams to Bohonk State, dials back its academic standards in order to field better teams. They just differ by degree. They don’t do that for glee club because, well, you don’t keep score in glee club and you don’t sell that many tickets and you don’t pay the glee club coach very much. </p>
<p>Being shocked about this is like how Capt. Renault is shocked in Casablanca that gambling is going on in the casino.</p>
<p>The big time schools (see recent Pac 12 announcements) are actually going in the right direction. Kids earn their education by working at athletics. Including being able to come back to school on scholarship (if they want) after they are done playing. More changes like that would help clean up college sports a lot. I’d also be OK with the players getting paid something (which is starting to happen per the OBannon case). Regular scholarship students get paid to work in the library. Multiple pending lawsuits are forcing/helping the big time schools to move in the right direction. </p>
<p>Football and mens hoops are the two biggest college sports. I love them both. Those two also happen to be the ones where no minor leagues exist. It is what it is.</p>
<p>With the exception of maybe two dozen D1 BCS schools, football and mens hoops don’t pay for all the other sports. In some places football and mens hoops pay for a portion of the other sports. In some other places, football and mens hoops mostly fund themselves. Most commonly, football and mens hoops actually consume money – they just offset a portion of their own expenses.</p>
<p>At UNC for example, football costs $15 million and brings in $22. Mens basketball costs $7 million and brings in $20. But then $9.2 million (11% of the athletic department budget) comes from a subsidy from the academic side of the house. So UNC tuition dollars pay for more of the other sports than UNC football does. UNC basketball, though, is pretty profitable.</p>
<p>Query, though, why those profitable UNC hoopsters can’t get paid. The courts will be taking care of that piece soon enough.</p>
<p>According to University of Memphis’ legal counsel Sheri Lipman, shortly after Memphis’ 2007–08 season ended, the NCAA sent a letter to the school stating that Derek Rose had “an invalidated standardized test score the previous year at Chicago’s Simeon High School”. On August 20, 2009, the NCAA vacated Memphis’ 2007–08 season and declared Rose retroactively ineligible.</p>
<p>The NCAA Academic Progress Rate (APR) system has encouraged schools to offer scholarships so that student-athletes can return to school. The following is from the NCAA:
<p>In terms of the economics of football the way money is being spent on it to one up the competition I’m not sure many programs are going to be able to remain profitable. One example - an assistant coach at Clemson(not the head coach) is paid $1.3million a year. Nothing is enough to meet the demands of big time college coaches. </p>