Just 10 percent of The Ohio State University’s men’s basketball players received degrees at the school, according to a study that examined the freshman classes entering from 1996-1999.
Taking into account players who transfer, enter from junior colleges and are graduated late, only 38 percent of Buckeyes basketball players earned degrees during that period, Richard Lapchick, director of the University of Central Florida’s Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sports, said Monday.
Ohio State enters this year’s NCAA tournament as the nation’s top-ranked team.
“The supposed Final Four, the top seeds, are a real disparity there. Two of the schools, Florida and North Carolina, have really good graduation rates, and Kansas and Ohio State don’t have such good graduation rates,” Lapchick said. “That’s certainly an issue.”
John Bruno, Ohio State’s faculty representative for athletics, says there has been substantial turnover of staff, support personnel and coaches since Randy Ayers (1990-1997) and Jim O’Brien (1998-2004) coached the team. Bruno says player academic support has improved.
“My intent is not to apologize for numbers that I as a faculty member think are not high enough,” he says. “We’re not happy with these numbers, but we’ve got programs in place that are going to ensure that those numbers rise over time.”
Under the formula of Federal Graduation Rates, no basketball player from NCAA-bound Florida A&M University, Eastern Kentucky University or the University of Oregon received a degree from those four freshman classes, Lapchick’s study said.
