March Madness: Keeping Score When it Counts
It’s March Madness time which means The Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sports (TIDES) at the University of Central Florida released it’s study, “Keeping Score When It Counts: Graduation Success and Academic Progress Rates for the 2011 NCAA Division 1 Men’s Basketball Tournament Teams.” Some key points from the study include:
- Only 7 teams had a 100% graduation rate for their basketball programs (Belmont, Illinois, Notre Dame, Utah State, Villanova, and Wofford). Notre Dame had the best overall student-athlete graduation rate (All sports included) with 99%. Alabama State had by far the worse score at 54%.
- UAB had the lowest Academic Progress Rate in the report, scoring only an 825. Only one other school, The University of Texas at San Antonio, scored under 900 with a score of 885. Texas, Kansas, Michigan State and Butler had the highest score, 1000. Interesting that not only was UAB considered the least deserving as a tournament at large bid by most, they wind up being considered the “least deserving” as far as academics are concerned.
Why is Princeton (The Ivy League representative) not on this report? Well it is because the school, like all other Ivy League schools, does not report graduation rates. Read on:
- Also notable from this study is that the graduation rate for white players is 91% versus 59% for black athletes (both increases from last year). However the gap between the rates of white and black players grew 4% to 32%. This number was called “Unacceptable” by Dr. Richard Lapchick, the studies main author.
This gap lead to a conclusion by Dr. Lapchick in which he said, “Presently, too many of our predominantly white campuses are not fully welcoming places for students of color, whether or not they are athletes. There are lessons that our campuses could learn from athletics. We have to find new ways to narrow this gap and that includes looking at the urban high schools which many of our African-American student-athletes graduate from…answers there must come from school systems themselves, perhaps with help from the Department of Education.”
Do you think this is true? Are the predominantly white campuses either not fully welcoming, or possibly not prepared to handle students of color? It is an interesting way to look at it. One more note: the rates for black student athletes were based off of 67 teams, while the rates for white student athletes were based off of 56 teams in the tournament. (Teams that did not have a white student athlete in the graduating class in the period under review were: Clemson, Temple, Missouri, Georgetown, St. Johns, Cincinnati, VCU, Memphis, Hampton, Long Island, and Alabama State)
The full report can be found in PDF format at : http://www.tidesport.org/Grad%20Rates/2011_Mens_Bball_FINAL.pdf
Oh and in case you were wondering, my prediction for the tourney is Kansas over Ohio State in the finals (Same prediction as President Obama). Good luck with your brackets!
[...] Burkhardt wrote about this for 99Problems a few weeks ago, highlighting the racial disparity on D1 teams in a recent study [...]