It's March Madness time, and not even Gadfly is immune to the pleasures of a couple of weeks of serious college basketball. (We're taking Duke, with a revived Maryland as the potential sleeper, though Stanford remains the sentimental favorite of a few bleeding hearts in the office.) But we're not alone in one nagging worry: that high-stakes college sports have a tremendously bad effect on higher education. Gregg Easterbrook offers a deeply disturbing rundown of the graduation rates of major college basketball programs on his blog for The New Republic. Most major college basketball programs - the 25 or 30 programs with even an outside shot at the NCAA title - have such appalling graduation rates, especially for black scholarship recipients, that they have actually ceased to report such numbers (on highly specious privacy grounds, to be sure). Even otherwise stringent schools (such as Duke) graduate basketball scholarship recipients at half or less the rate of other students. And when athletes do graduate, their degrees are frequently shams, as demonstrated by the recent scandal over an absurdly easy final exam administered by assistant coach Jim Harrick, Jr. to a physical education class favored by scholarship recipients at the University of Georgia. (Question 5: How many halves are in a college basketball game?) Though today the NCAA has promised to crack down on programs with abysmal graduation rates, it's clear that high-stakes athletics has a deeply compromising effect on academics at schools that divert resources and emphasis into building a contending basketball program. St. Joe's, are you listening?
"NCAA Preparing to call penalties on schools," by Liz Clarke, Washington Post, March 18, 2004
"He's 6' 5," has a 17.3 PPG and a 8.2 RPG and don't you dare ask about his GPA," by Gregg Easterbrook, Easterblogg on TNR.com, March 15, 2004
"Three points, two credits, no net," The Smoking Gun, March 4, 2004
"Marching through madness," by Welch Suggs, Chronicle of Higher Education, March 14, 2004