Should teams with graduation rates below 40 percent be excluded from the NCAA Tournament? U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan is suggesting precisely that. In a national news media teleconference held Wednesday afternoon, Duncan proposed that men’s and women’s teams that fail to graduate 40 percent of their players should be ineligible for post-season play.
“I predict you’ll see men’s basketball teams suddenly improve their academic outcome,” said Duncan, who played college basketball.
On the eve of the NCAA tournaments for Division I men’s and women’s basketball, Dr. Richard Lapchick, director of The Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sport at the University of Central Florida, issued his annual study examining academic progress and graduation rates for Division I NCAA women’s and men’s basketball tournament teams. He was quick to note there was some good news.
Nineteen women’s teams in the tournament have 100 percent graduation rates. Ninety percent of White female players graduate, an increase of 1 percent from last year. Seventy-eight percent of African-American female players graduate, an increase of 3 percent. Among the men, 84 percent of White players graduate, up 6 percent from a year ago, and 56 percent of African-Americans graduate, a 2-percent increase. Players who transfer or leave prior to graduation to play in the NBA do not count against the graduation rate.
There is, however, a continuing persistent gap between White and African-American basketball student-athletes. Lapchick, Duncan, and Benjamin Jealous, president and CEO of the NAACP, all stated that the bar must be raised across the board.
“This is really about putting a spotlight on the books,” Jealous said. “There is a spotlight on the court. We all know how these teams perform on the court and how they’ll do in this competition. What we tend not to pay attention to is what they do with these athletes, whether or not they actually graduate.”
“Let’s stop for a second,” Jealous added. “Let’s focus on the books to make sure we set the same sort of high expectations the fans have for the teams’ performances on the court for the players in the classroom.”
