(B) the gap between the team's black-white player graduation rate disparity and the overall school's disparity (it’s important to expose and penalize teams with significant achievement gaps);

Why is it always a race issue?

I found your article to be extemely interesting reading, even if it only confirms what most think about how much of a priority education is to most major football programs.  Hopefully articles such as these and the growing focus of the NCAA will help to change things for the students who will not be able to rely on football after their time is up.  My question is this: How are you publicizing these results to create an awareness among those who matter within each college community?  Having a link to an ESPN writer is great (and how I saw this), but the group who needs to receive this information are influential people at each college outside of the football program.  As a lifelong Michigan fan, I am concerned about the black/white disparity you mentioned, and wonder how long this has been going on, and has it been brought to light within the community? My suggestion would be for you to send this article (or even just how the specific college ranks with the best, worst, and average) to each college newspaper staff, along with the school president and the local paper.  Hopefully, this would lead to greater pressure within the community and not allow the results to be sequestered within the sports and academic departments to be swept under the rug.  Thank you for bringing this to everyone's attention.

-Scott A. Mitchell

BYU is doing pretty good for having the majority of their players leave school after having been there for 1 year or less to serve a church mission.  Then coming back to school and completing their degree in only 4 years of school.

Thanks for doing this.  I'm a Texas fan, but I do care about the academics, and I think that the more this gets publicized, and the more people are paying attention to it, the more likely it is to improve. 

My question concerns estimating the problems with quality that you highlight.  I have asked about these types of data at Longhorn Booster meetings, and the response is usually about how Texas doesn't have what you called "jock majors", doesn't accept junior college transfers, etc.  I don't know how much of that is valid and how much is hand-waving, and I'm wondering whether there exist statistics or attempts to develop data looking at those issues.  I know that certain fields (such as Medicine, Law, and Business) routinely rank schools on the quality of their training for those fields, and I wonder if there's a way to do that more broadly, or to rank the non-sports success of former athletes from the various institutions.  (One of Texas' most famous and successful "alumni", Michael Dell, was only in school for three semesters).

If athletic programs are supposed to represent the schools, why are you rewarding programs at schools that perform poorly overall?

Boise State ranks fourth with a below-average graduation rate and a huge race gap, just because the school has an overall 26% graduation rate. That doesn't make sense, nor does Auburn ranking third with a 51% graduation rate for football players.  Also, the math doesn't work for the claim that you are giving APR a lower weight than graduation percentage. The APR range in the BCS top 25 is 74 points - BC to Hawaii. The range of graduation percentages is 55 points.

Interesting article, however, truth be told, not completely accurate. In the case of Brigham Young University, it seems like many of the young men are being penalized for volunteering two years of missionary service. Nearly seventy percent of the BYU football team are returned missionaries, which in most cases, puts a huge roadblock on them graduating within six years. If researchers didn't take into account the two years of church missionary service, I'm sure BYU would rank much higher, probably right up there with BC and others.

I agree that college athletes should do their work in the classroom as well, but the flipside is that the only VIABLE path to the NFL is to go to college, even though not all people are college level students. So until the NFL gives up its free minor league system and invests real money in an alternate path to reach the NFL, we all have to accept that some football players will be pushed through.

Just out of curiousity, how much was BYU hurt in these rankings by the fact that many of their players leave school for 2 years to go on LDS missions?

I'm interested to know if the methodology was purely graduation rates, or something more. Just saying this because I knew a couple of Illinois football players and they had a required study session like every freaking day, to the point where they literally had no free time during the season.

I'd just like to comment on and pose the question "Why is your Academic BCS data applied to the current top 25?"

If I understand your criteria for ranking these teams, you are basing your rankings mostly on data from the graduation rates of classes entering school in the 1997-2000 academic years.  These rate are essentially the graduation rates of the football teams at these schools for the 2000 football season (not including the 5th year seniors), yet you are generalizing your results to the current football teams at these schools, of which none of the student athletes are represented by the data.

I could be a little rusty on my statistics, but last I checked, I don't think that it was credible to generalize the parameters of one population to be the parameters of another population with no common observational units.

There is nothing wrong by ranking schools by these graduation rates, but please keep them in context to what they are.  Rankings of these team's academics in the 2000 football season, not the current 2007 football season.

Some of the schools near the bottom of your list have likely taken action to improve upon these ratings, and, academically, their programs are in much better shape now than they were in 2000.  For example, John Cooper was terminated from his position of head coach at Ohio State following the 2000 football season partially for, among other reasons, the poor academics of his team (a report had surfaced prior to the bowl game that year that a player had a 0.0 gpa for fall quarter).  Jim tressel was hired to take over the program, and has since made major improvements to the academics of the football team, and OSU has lead the Big Ten in the number of Academic All-Big Ten football player for a couple years in a row now. 

The use of team APR score is more recent, but even that data is out of date for the current teams as the data given is from the 03'-04', 04'-05', and 05'-06' seasons.  This means that there is no data in the APR score that is representative of the 1st, and 2nd year players on current teams, a significant proportion of the current teams that you are using these statistics to represent.

I applaud you in your focus on the academic side of major college sports, but please report your results in the context that they should be.  Most of the data you used is reflective of the academcis of these football programs seven years ago, not of the current teams. 

Everything about this is interesting until you find out you are using data from 1997-2000....which makes it completely uninteresting.  I realize you need to wait 5 years or so for a class to go through and then a year for data.  So at least use the period like 2002-2005.  Then it might be somewhat interesting.  Heck, a lot of these coaches at these schools who have been there like 7 or 8 years (like Jim Tressel or Pete Carroll) were not even there when your data was taken.

It’s also not surprising that five of the six teams who played in the last four National Championship games (Texas, Ohio State, LSU, Oklahoma, and Florida) are pulling up the rear of Higher Ed Watch's Academic BCS poll.

I fail to see why the gap between the team's graduation rate and the school's overall rate is relevant.  You're basically penalizing the schools for being exceptional academically and rewarding others for being bad academically.  For instance, if a school has a terrible 35% overall graduation rate and a 32% rate for their football team they are in better shape for the purposes of this ranking than a school with a 85% overall graduation rate and a 70% team graduation rate. 

 This just doesn't make sense to me...

I realize that it was probably easier to just apply this to the current top 25 teams, but what about the rest of the field?  I think it would be interesting to see how all 119 teams stack up against each other, so we can see who truly would be in the top 25 of the ABCS.  Personally, I think it would be nice to see how my alma mater would do, being myself a graduate (and ex-football player) of the U.S. Air Force Academy.  Also, I would be interested to see how the other service academies do as well, because all of the student-athletes at those schools deserve a lot of respect for what they do.

My only question on the results deals with what weight is placed on graduation rates. The reason I raise it is because many players leave after 3 years, without graduating, but move on to the NFL through the draft system (where they will likely make more money than in any other possible profession open to them). Of course, the best teams experience a significant amount of attrition due to having more talented players who leave for the NFL as soon as they are eligible. Could this be a part of the explanation to the low numbers attributed to the best teams?

Additionally, some schools, like UF, see several players transfer out of the program to attend a lesser team so that they can play at the new school. I believe that this attrition is counted against the school's performance rate as well. Again, the best teams may have less playing time available to the lesser players, so the players leave in order to play.

 Just some suggestions.

You note that traditional power houses have lower graduation rates. Might this be because the traditional power houses recruit more NFL prospects and, thus, they are more likely to enter the NFL before completing their degree? You should consider the number of players currently in the NFL that did not graduate, but came from power houses. It seems likely a far greater percentage of players came from the power houses (granted, I have no empirical verification) and did not graduate, precisely because they were more talented. 

Just out of curiosity, Michigan and Cal are said to be two of the top 5 public academic institutions in the country... how would they compare to Virginia (also one of the 5 best)? I know that neither are ranked in the top 25 right now, but regularly are. If you used a month ago's rankings (when both were ranked) I wonder how they'd stack up.

Should the percentage of black or white students that make up both the school and its football team be considered in formulating these rankings? Since the formula relies on percentages, It seems that if the school or team's ratio of black to white students is significantly uneven in either direction it could have a skewing effect. For instance, at a school where black students make up less than 5% of its student body (as I suspect is the case at my school), information on its graduation rate is not as useful because its such a small sample size. Also, should some sort of weight be given to a significant difference between the ratio of white to black students on the football team and the ratio of the school as a whole?

I'm pretty sure that if you put Air Force, or any military academy in this list (I use AF because I go there and we're the only academy with a decent record this season) that they would smoke almost all of the competition in any academic category you can come up with. So what gives?

At football factories like Auburn, they have easy majors set aside for athletes. Schools like Virginia don't do that. But your poll doesn't measure anything in terms of quality of education. Instead, it looks solely at graduation rates.

Let me ask you: All of those Virginia recruits from the late '90s that transferred to other schools for athletic reasons, and then graduated from those schools, did you count them? Of course not. If you look at the grad rates of the players who complete their eligibility at Virginia, you'll find that your supporting data is grossly misleading. Then look at how well Virginia does at graduating its black student-athletes -- something it is renowned for -- and tell me again how some joke of a program like Auburn deserves a higher academic ranking than Virginia.

I appreciate the intent of this poll, but I think you need to put a little more effort into it to make it useful. Some suggestions:

1) Penalize for declared major concentration. That way, when half of the Virginia Tech football team is in Apparel or Residential Property Management majors -- obvious football factory majors -- they don't wind up one space away from Virginia.

2) Look beyond the NCAA's flawed numbers and account for the transferred players that show up as "didn't graduate" in the graduation rate data. Think about it: 25 kids a year equals 100 kids in four years. If five kids from each class transfer at some point, then your max grad rate is already down to 80%. When you have a rash of transfers, even a strong academic program might end up with something like, oh I don't know, a 65% graduation rate.

There doesn't seem to be an awareness that some colleges are more difficult (academically) than others.  Academically, some of those institutions at the top of your list are not much more difficult than community colleges.  Isn't BC a private school, which like most private schools pampers and provides the sort of hand holding which keeps students in school?  Also, larger institutions do much less of this and expect students to be adults and learn to cope with the world.

 

Frank

There seems to be a lot of controversy about the Academic BCS, judging from the comments on this page.

I think an eight-team Higher Ed Watch Academic Playoff would clear things up nicely.

Good luck getting the College Bowl people to go along with it, though. There's too much money at stake.

 

It seems interesting that if we were to do a bell curve or to look at what should be the standard in that 10 of the 25 schools rank with eight points.  Ten schools are in the 32 to 39 point range.  Should that be the standard?  The point variation seems to be way out of wack.  It is hard to believe that schools can lose scholarships based on the APR.  It seems somewhat arbitary in that it does not consider the majors of the atheletes and the difficulty of the school.  While I am definitely not a Texas fan (OU graduate), I know that Texas U. is a relatively tough school and ranks extremely high as a public institution.  While I don't know much about many of the top acedemic rankings of the schools that rank in the top 10, I have read some about South Florida since their rise to prominence this year.  They rank 13th in this ranking.  However, I would suggest that their overall graduation rate does not compare to UT's in that they have historically been a "commuter school."  It will take the general student at South Florida longer to get their degree than the average student at UT, if they complete their studies at all.  Therefore, the general student population graduation success rate should be lower at USF than at UT.  (Interesting digression - little known fact is that U of Central Florida and U of Southern Florida are both in the top ten in total number of students enrolled in the country.)   

This seems to make this arbitary and does not consider key factors in determining the success of the college athlete at a given school.

As a Virginia Tech fan, it pains me to agree with Mark, the UVA fan. When I see the majors of the football players at VaTech it embarrasses me. They should, at the very least, be able to walk away with some sort of generic business degree.

Sure, many schools have majors that athletes tend to go to but also many of the players from Auburn have had some very impressive degrees over the  years. Coach Tuberville has recruited guys of great character and it has been the norm for his guys to go to class and get their degrees. I sure hope it continues, along with the winning on the field. War Eagle.

This is great! Thanks!! What can we do to help you do this every week next season?