ncaa reform

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The NCAA Board of Directors yesterday approved the centerpiece of an academic reform package designed to improve graduation rates and punish schools whose players underperform in the classroom, though details of the academic standards remain uncertain.

 

 

The plan, which the NCAA hailed as historic, will impose penalties such as the loss of scholarships and even postseason bans on programs that continually fail to meet specific academic standards.

After collecting data through the current academic year, the NCAA will establish a minimum standard Academic Progress Rate (APR), a figure that takes into account the number of student-athletes academically eligible each semester. To be eligible, student-athletes must have made 20 percent progress toward a degree for every year they have been in school.

Beginning in the 2006-07 academic year, schools that fail to meet the required APR will receive a warning from the NCAA. Those who fail to heed the warning and fall below the standards the following year will then face a reduction in the number of their athletic scholarships. Offenders who continue to miss the mark after losing scholarships face bans from postseason tournaments.

Beginning this fall, if a student-athlete leaves school in poor academic standing, the school will not be able to fill the scholarship for at least the following year. Also this fall, the NCAA will begin notifying all schools regarding their risk had the penalty phase for failing to meet the APR standard been in place.

The plan's adoption comes after a year in which a spate of scandals occurred on campuses around the nation and the two NCAA tournament men's basketball finalists -- Connecticut and Georgia Tech -- each had graduation rates of 27 percent over the most recent six-year period.

"This is the beginning of a sea change in college sports," NCAA President Myles Brand said.

Some critics of the academic reform said colleges could start designing majors that would require fewer credits for completion, making it easier for athletes to meet eligibility requirements. The academic reform plan could also discourage athletes from declaring more difficult majors.

"Walking in the door, if your desire is to find what computer science of engineering is all about," Georgia Tech men's basketball coach Paul Hewitt said yesterday, "and you decide after a year to change majors then you are going to lose credits and there would be no way for you to meet the percentages. . . . Instead of improving the opportunity for a kid to get an education, we are going to absolutely dumb down college athletics."

Attaching graduation rates to a program's success also raises concerns among others that academic fraud, like that which sprouted in 2003 at St. Bonaventure, Fresno State and Georgia, will increase. While Brand rejects that notion, he said he has increased the enforcement staff by 50 percent (from 12 to 18 employees) in part to fight potential academic fraud.

"Am I worried about stronger standards producing unintended consequences and academic fraud? Not at all," Brand said. "The fact of the matter is that we have to stamp out academic fraud wherever we find it. We find it now in some cases when the standards are at this level. If we were to lower standards, we'd still find it."

If the plan does not increase cheating in the form of blatant academic fraud cases, it will undoubtedly create more tension between a school's athletic arm and its faculty, others believe. Faculty could lose "autonomy" in how professors teach courses, according to Linda Bensel-Meyers, a professor of English at the University of Denver.

"It could, sadly, perpetuate a system that is going to increasingly corrupt itself rather than lead to reform . . . ," said Bensel-Meyers, who also is director of the Drake Group, an association of faculty concerned with the perceived imbalance between athletics and academics. "What it's going to lead to is more of the academic administration's pressure on the faculty themselves to give leeway to athletes who are not prepared to be students."

In passing the reform package, the board also rescinded the 5/8 rule, which has limited men's basketball programs to offering no more than five scholarships in a given year or eight over two consecutive seasons. The 5/8 rule has drawn considerable criticism from college coaches who have not been able to replenish rosters decimated by non-seniors declaring for the NBA draft or a rash of players transferring. The rule, Brand said, was not sensitive to the reasons why players left or their academic status at the time of departure.

"We discovered there were unintended consequences to the 5/8 rule," said Robert Hemenway, chairman of the Board of Directors and chancellor of the University of Kansas.

The board already had voted to increase the number of core courses required for freshman eligibility and mandate that student-athletes complete 20 percent of their degree requirements each year to remain eligible.

Coaches and the NCAA are not on the same page, said Hewitt, pointing to a July meeting in Indianapolis between NCAA administrators and coaches regarding the academic reform proposal. There, he said, an NCAA administrator said: "It's simple, guys. All you have to do is start recruiting guys that look like graduates."

"I was offended by it, but I didn't take it personally," Hewitt said. "It reaffirmed in my mind that there is a major disconnect between what we're doing as coaches, what students are trying to achieve and what [NCAA administrators'] perception is of us."