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Where
Will They Be After the Cheering Stops?
by Richard E. Lapchick
Special for the Sports Business Journal
Published in The Sports
Business Journal
Section: Article
Title: "What will it all mean in 10 or 15 Years?"
Date: 4/16/01
There was plenty of excitement as the men's and women's Final Four concluded. The schools that made it to Minneapolis and St. Louis fulfilled dreams, had their names in the brightest of college sports lights, and earned significant revenues for their schools as part of the NCAA's $6 billion contract with CBS. The coaches had their own already high level of prestige further enhanced. The student-athletes increased their chances to make the NBA, WNBA or the myriad on international pro leagues. For the men there is also the IBL and others national pro leagues.
What will it all mean in 10-15 years? The alumni will remember the good times. Some of the coaches will be comfortably retired. A few of the younger ones may be coaching at others schools or in the pros as not many stay in one place like Duke's Mike Krzyzewski and UCONN's Geno Auriemma.
Most of the student-athletes on the teams would not have made the pros. For those that did, their careers would likely be long since over as the average pro basketball career is less than five years.
What will they be doing? For institutions of higher education, that has to be a critical question. What were the graduation rates for the schools in the Final Fours? That is not the only question because so many elite players now leave school early for the pros. Others stay for their four years of eligibility but do not graduate "on time."
Those factors help formulate the next most important question: do the schools have a program to help the student-athletes finish their degrees after their eligibility has expired?
It has now become popular for the national press to look at graduation rates of tournament teams. That helps the public to at least think about such a critical issue. Nonetheless, most don�t go beyond graduation rates.
Among the best and most consistent of the writers looking at graduation rates is The Boston Globe's Derrick Jackson. In looking at this year's 64 men's teams by using the NCAA's own data, Jackson found that 20 schools had a graduation rate of less than 35 percent and that 26 schools had a graduation rate of less than 35 percent for African-American student-athletes.
While that is a sobering reality for university presidents, consider this: the overall graduation rate for all Division I African-American male basketball players was only 34 percent, 22 percent below that for all Division I white male basketball players who graduate at a rate of 56 percent. It was also 18 percent below the rate for African-American female basketball players in Division I who were themselves 19 percent below the rate for Division I white female basketball players. Thus, African-American male basketball players graduate at less than half of the rate of white female basketball players. Apples and oranges? If it is perceived this way, then the values of our educational system are really off course. Its humans and humans. But it is not really about basketball.
The picture for higher education in general is worse for African-American students than for African-American student-athletes who play basketball. African-American female basketball players graduate at a rate of 52 percent vs. 42 percent for African-American females in general. African-American male basketball players graduate at a rate of 34 percent vs. 32 percent for African-American males in general.
Our predominantly white campuses still have small percentages of African-American students and much smaller percentages of African-American faculty and administrators. Beyond the small number of people on campus who look like them, students of color face the frightening reality that nine percent of all hate crimes in American take place on our college campuses making them the nation's third biggest site for hate crimes! According to the FBI, a million bias incidents (not prosecutable as hate crimes are) take place annually on our campuses, poisoning the atmosphere among different cultures. Our campuses lack the all-encompassing diversity management programs that they so desperately need.
What about are the lessons of this year's tourneys? First, you did not have to cut corners to get to the Men's Final Four. Michigan State and Duke surely did not. Michigan State had a four year average combined rate of 80 percent with 67 percent of its African-Americans graduating and all of its whites in a six year period. Duke had a combined rate of 75 percent with 83 percent of its African-Americans graduating while 67 percent of its whites did so in the same six-year period.
A quick look at the others would raise your eyebrows. At Maryland, the four year average combined rate was only 20 percent with 11 percent of its African-Americans graduating and 50 percent of its whites. Arizona had a combined rate of only 17 percent with 11 percent of its African-Americans graduating and 33 percent of its whites.
However, all four were members of the National Consortium for Academics and Sports (NCAS). To be a member, the school had to agree to bring any student-athlete whose eligibility had expired back to complete their degree at the expense of the university. Since the average time to graduate for a regular student is five and a half years, such a program is not only fair but is imperative for many student-athletes to graduate.
Maryland has had one of the most active degree completion programs and has consistently brought up the graduation rates long after they can be reported in NCAA stats. Arizona joined last year and will be able to do the same.
It is not easy because student-athletes transfer and jump to the pros early. Both categories count against grad rates. Will this become a problem for the women? Time will tell.
In this year's Final Four, Notre Dame had a four year average combined rate of 85 percent with all of its African-Americans and 78 percent of its whites graduating in a six year period. UCONN had a combined rate of 62 percent with 50 percent of its African-Americans and 67 percent of its whites graduating.
During the same period, Purdue, which won a national championship under Carolyn Peck two years ago, had a combined rate of 50 percent with 38 percent of its African-Americans graduating along with 75 percent of its whites. At Southwest Missouri State, which has had mainly white players, the four-year average combined rate was 42 percent with no African-Americans graduating vs. 56 percent of its whites. Notre Dame and UCONN were NCAS members.
Both the men and the women who made it to the top clearly show that you can win at the elite level and still do right by your student-athletes. With low graduation rates for students of color in general, our universities should look to their sports models to see both how to make students of color feel more welcome and better able to succeed in the classroom. While that sports model still shows distinct flaws, it can still help the rest of those on our campuses better achieve a level playing field in the classroom.
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