Paper raises “clustering” question, but critics dismiss it as too superficial

A talented football player heads to college with a dream to play professionally. He believes if he shows his best on the field, by the time he completes his NCAA eligibility, he will be drafted into the NFL. But the reality is that only 1.8 percent of college football players make it to the pros.

While the NCAA has put reforms in place to help ensure college athletes graduate and are as academically prepared for life as they are physically, two researchers question whether this goal is really being met, finding that college football players tend to take certain classes that do not benefit them in the long run. Meanwhile, other experts say the researchers’ work might not go far enough.

The NCAA uses a formula based on peer-group comparisons, called the Academic Progress Rate (APR), to measure academic success among scholarship student athletes.

“While the goal of the APR, to increase graduation rates of athletes, is admirable, the means utilized by schools to avoid loss of scholarship could prove to be dubious,” Jeffrey J. Fountain and Peter S. Finley wrote in “Academic Majors of Upperclassmen Football Players in the Atlantic Coast Conference: An Analysis of Academic Clustering Comparing White and Minority Players.”

“A couple of years ago, I just happened to be looking at the media guide for the University of Miami [football team] and noticed as I was going through it that every minority player I saw had liberal arts as his major,” says Fountain, an assistant professor of sports management at Nova Southeastern University in Ft. Lauderdale, Fla.

“Of the 23 majors in liberal arts at the University of Miami, all of them were minority. Not a single white player,” Fountain says. “Some of these athletes are either selecting or being pushed toward something that doesn’t really have any value.”