Temple Coach Baffled by Concerns About Athletes' Lower Graduation Rates
OVERLAND PARK, KS
For the first time in fourteen years, there
has been an overall drop in the graduation rates for college athletes.
So now there seems to be some concern about athletes falling behind in
the classroom, and at least one African American coach finds that
concern a little disingenuous.
"I think the discussion about graduation rates is much ado about nothing," said John Chaney, basketball coach for Temple University.
Earlier this month, the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) issued its latest report on the graduation rates of scholarship athletes attending its 308 Division I schools. The survey revealed the first overall annual decrease since 1984 -- the first year the NCAA started tracking the number of athletes who complete their degrees within six years.
The data for this latest report were compiled, for the first time, by the federal government instead of the NCAA. As a result, the criteria and reporting forms varied slightly from the past.
The report focused on the graduation rates of athletes who entered school as freshmen in the fall of 1991. They were counted as graduating only if they earned a degree by 1997 at the school they originally entered. In this study, transfers who graduated from other schools were not counted as having graduated from any school.
Graduation rates declined in fourteen of the fifteen gender-and-race categories tracked by the NCAA. The only category that did not see a decrease in graduation rates was White female basketball players, which remained unchanged at 70 percent -- the highest rate in the survey.
Yet even with the decreases, the report noted that athletes still graduated at a higher rate than the student body as a whole. According to the report, 57 percent of athletes graduated as compared to 56 percent of the entire student body.
"The fact of the matter is that [overall] graduation rates are down ... in a year we did something different, and frankly, we don't know what that means," NCAA spokesman Wally Renfro told The Washington Post.
