A reader sends along stats on graduation rates for football players at various colleges. Notre Dame is #1 at 96%, followed by Duke, Northwestern, and Rice and most of the rest of the top ten are private colleges or military academies, with Rutgers the highest ranking public university. (Northwestern recently had a quarterback named Kafka, and it's good to know that at probably at least some of his teammates were amused by that.)
The bottom ten tend to be obscure public schools like San Jose St., along with football-crazed powerhouses Oklahoma and Texas.
The biggest gap between football players graduation rates and all students is at UCLA (52% v. 89%) -- and UCLA isn't even getting very good football players. (UCLA used to have a low graduation rate for regular students because it could take 5 or 6 years to get all the classed you needed to graduate. But I think the spread of Advanced Placement tests in high school, among other reasons, has made it easier to graduate in 4 years.)
The biggest gap between the graduation rates of white football players and black football players was at Auburn. The third biggest race gap was at Oregon. Auburn and Oregon played for the national championship in January, so maybe that's a clever strategy: recruit smart white kids and lower your standards for black athletes.
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9 comments:
"Northwestern recently had a quarterback named Kafka, and it's good to know that at probably at least some of his teammates were amused by that."
Does he mysteriously get penalized for fouls he didn't commit?
Everyone should take reported graduation rates with a huge grain of salt. Private schools and military academies are at the top because those schools do not accept junior college transfers but have many players who transfer from those schools.
Under the current NCAA graduation rate calculation, players who transfer out do not count but players who transfer in do count.
Everyone can go to Rivals.com and look up all of the high school players who were signed four years ago and then go look at the current Notre Dame roster. 96% of the players signed four years ago are not on the Notre Dame roster.
Did you never see this article Steve about why Jim Harbaugh didn't want to go to Michigan?
http://www.alternativeright.com/main/blogs/zeitgeist/auburn-and-the-opiate-of-america/
I actually worked on one of these reports at my work. The graduation rate is 150% of time needed, so bachelor graduation rates would be based on 6 years.
Have long been puzzled about how Stanford does so well at sports. How do they do it?
BTW I wonder how many football and basketball players take a real major like engineering, accounting, computer science etc. What does a communications major study anyway and what are their job prospects?
@JW Ogden, 6/1/11, 11:20am:
General Studies, Sociology, Phys Ed., Sports Management seem to also be popular fluff majors or athletes.
Who do they think they're fooling? What hiring managers are really going to give any consideration to these grads?
"so maybe that's a clever strategy: recruit smart white kids and lower your standards for black athletes."
Right that way you can tell the black mothers about that your high graduation rate without disclosing to them that most of your black atheletes don't graduate. Hey, race is a social construct, why would you mention that. Just send your son here...
"General Studies, Sociology, Phys Ed., Sports Management seem to also be popular fluff majors or athletes.
Who do they think they're fooling? What hiring managers are really going to give any consideration to these grads?"
Alumni and friends of the football program, DUH
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