A few weeks ago, the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) released their annual Academic Progress Rate (APR) scores for each Division I team. While the annual announcement of these scores typically generates headlines that APR scores are improving, these headlines are disturbingly misleading. Without fail, each year historically Black colleges & universities (HBCUs) and other low-resourced schools are the primary recipients of low APR scores and are disproportionately penalized. With the latest release of APR scores, 75 percent of the penalized teams with low APR scores are HBCU teams. While the NCAA may have had good intentions when it established the APR metric 15 years ago, the standard is discriminatory because it rewards student athletes at wealthy colleges and universities and punishes those at less wealthy schools.
The discriminatory effects of APR scores are obvious when looking at the distribution of penalties. The NCAA penalizes teams with low APR scores by reducing the number of athletic scholarships available to their athletes, banning teams from participating in post-season competition, reducing the amount of days and hours teams can practice, reducing the competition season to fewer in-season games, suspending coaches and potentially stripping teams of their NCAA membership status for the upcoming academic year. Although low-scoring teams can receive waivers and adjustments to avoid these penalties, I found, while writing a dissertation on the topic, statistical significance showing that when HBCU teams and non-HBCU teams have comparably low APR scores, HBCU teams are far more likely to receive a penalty.
Instead of reporting breathlessly on the “increased” APR scores that are masked by the high scores of major athletic programs, journalists should focus on the following question: Why does the NCAA continue to use this unfair penalty-driven metric to determine athletes’ academic progress, when it disproportionately penalizes athletes attending HBCUs and other low-resourced institutions?
APR is a multi-year metric based on the cumulative academic progress of athletes from the previous four years. The metric is calculated using a point-based system that monitors whether student athletes continue to enroll at the same institution and whether they continue to progress towards a degree. However, APR monitors only student athletes who receive athletic scholarships.
The NCAA prides itself on APR serving as a “real-time” metric. But that simply is not true. The APR metric uses data from the previous four years to determine current academic progress. As a result, the metric uses the outcomes of former athletes to potentially penalize incoming freshmen who are undeserving of the penalty.
Compounding the discriminatory effects, the metric is easily manipulated, especially by wealthy institutions that have large financial aid budgets. Because the metric monitors the academic progress of only athletes receiving athletic scholarships, universities with large endowments can easily get around that stipulation.
Wealthy institutions with generous endowments, and an overflowing amount of financial support from their booster clubs, can provide institutional scholarships, rather than athletic ones, to exceptional athletes who are academically at-risk. By intentionally omitting athletes who are struggling academically from team APR calculations, they can artificially increase their teams’ APR scores and create a false sense of academic progress.
