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Bowl Schools Show Significant Academic Achievement Gap

By Mark

Every year about this time UCF issues its annual report on the academic performance of the football teams that qualified for bowls that year. This year's teams' performances look remarkably like last year's and that is nothing to brag about. The significant academic achievement gap between white athletes and African-American athletes shows no signs of progress even as the performance of football players as a group continues to outpace the male student body as a whole.

For the six year period of the current report, 64% of white football players graduated compared to 50% of African-Americans. That 14% percent gap is up 1% from a year ago. 42% of bowl bound schools graduated less than half of their African-American football players, yet 88% of those schools reported a better than 50% graduation rate for their players. Do the math and see how many were reporting substantially higher than 50% of their white players graduating.

Four schools, Wake Forest, Boston College, Air Force and Navy, managed to graduate 90% or better of their players, and, of those four, only BC, with 90% managed to graduate 90% of its black players. The other three graduated 89%, 84% and 89%, respectively. At the other end of the spectrum, the lowest overall football team scores were reported by Georgia, Texas, Michigan State, and Oklahoma at 41%, 42%, 43% and 44%. African-American graduation rate was even sorrier, with Georgia at 29%, Texas at 30%, MSU at 35% and the Sooners at a relatively successful 40%.

The numbers involved in the study are not encouraging. Despite increased emphasis being placed on academic performance by the NCAA and substantially increased spending by schools on academic support, no discernible increase in academic performance is yet evident. It may be that it is too early to see the benefits of those investments as these numbers are still several seasons old. Nevertheless, it only adds fuel to the fire raging around the NCAA and the arms race now going on in collegiate athletics.

Full post as published by Sports Biz on December 07, 2007 (boomark / email).