Athletic Education

As an ex-athlete, I liked reading this article. It talks about graduation rates of college athletes. There is some good numerically-based analysis included: If you look at the numbers for Maryland, for example, the overall graduation rate for all students is about 75% (I'll compare only four-class average numbers here), while the graduation rate for black male athletes is only 52%. That looks pretty damning, but the proper comparison isn't between the subset of black male athletes and all students at the university (three-fifths of whom are white), but between black male athletes and black male non-athletes, who graduate at a rate of only 54%. This pattern repeats through all the schools I looked at: Duke has 93% overall, 78% for black male athletes, and 83% for black male non-athletes; Syracuse 80/47/64; Stanford 95/87/86; UNC 83/56/63; LSU 56/36/42. Other than Syracuse, which is doing a rotten job, the male athletes graduate at rates that are not too far below those of their non-athletic classmates. (The same basic pattern holds for white male athletes, who graduate at rates very slightly lower than their non-athlete classmates... This might not seem to be much of anything to cheer about-- big-time athletes are only slightly worse than regular students-- but that overlooks the additional handicaps faced by the athletes, namely the large amount of time they spend in practice and on road trips, and the fact that many of them come into college with less academic preparation than their less athletically gifted classmates. The fact that these rates are comparable at all is kind of impressive. Read the whole article, it's pretty good. Just for a flavor, it ends like this: ...it's easy to write self-righteous editorials blasting high-profile sports programs for their academic failings, while fixing the class and race problems of American education will cost real money, and require actual work. And nobody wants that. Indeed.