By: Chris Lewitzke
In 2014, over 600,000 fans will pack into Sanford Stadium to watch dozens of 18 to 23-year-olds play a football game. These so-called “student-athletes” will generate the majority of the $100 million the UGA Athletic Association expects in revenue for fiscal year 2014. Across the country, college football and basketball programs generate billions of dollars for collegiate athletic departments. The March Madness basketball tournament alone provides over $800 million for the NCAA. Amidst all the money, fanfare, and media coverage of major college athletics in the 21st century, it is far too common that dollar signs drive decision making, and the student aspect of being a student-athlete is left in the dust.
Beginning in 2011, the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill (UNC) became infamous in national headlines after the Raleigh News & Observer reported that during the summer of 2011, 19 football players were given permission to take the course AFAM 280: Blacks in North Carolina. Every student was given credit for the course without ever actually meeting or completing any coursework over the summer.
The lack of academic substance for basketball and football players at UNC goes far beyond fake classes. Mary Willingham, a former learning specialist for student-athletes, researched the reading levels of 183 basketball and football players at UNC from 2004 to 2012. In January, Willingham reported that among these players, 60 percent were reading between a fourth and eighth grade level and 8 percent were reading at a third grade level (UNC officials say Willingham’s study was flawed but have admitted some institutional shortcomings). Of the student-athletes admitted to the fifth-best public university in the country, according to U.S. News and World Report, many were clearly not up to the academic admissions standards set by UNC.
Universities across the country have yet another weapon at their disposal to boost the strength of their athletic recruiting classes: “special admits.” Under NCAA guidelines, a recruit is eligible for admittance at a Division I school if he or she maintains a high school GPA above 2.0 and earns a combined SAT or ACT score that matches his or her GPA on a sliding scale. For test scores, the sliding scale lowers the required score a recruit must earn if that recruit has a higher GPA. For example, someone who has a high school GPA of 2.4 must earn a combined 860 on the SAT (critical reading and math) or 18 on the ACT. A recruit with a GPA of 2.8, though, only needs a 700 on the SAT or 14 on the ACT to be eligible for admission and athletic participation. Whether or not a recruit meets the general admission standards set by the university, he or she will be allowed to enroll under this “special admit” status.
While this pathway to easier admittance may have initially been designed to provide higher education opportunities to those who struggled in high school and to standardize recruiting among all NCAA Division I programs, the implications of special admittance simply set student-athletes up for failure. The University of North Carolina is not an anomaly in that a high percentage of its athletes in revenue-generating sports (generally football and basketball) still read at an elementary or middle school level. It is unreasonable to expect these students who enter their first year so far behind other students to be able to keep up and succeed in the classroom while also spending several hours each day dedicated to their sport. The fact of the matter is that there are student-athletes who are not reading at a college level upon entering university and who struggle to maintain their eligibility every semester.
Universities do not, however, reserve special admittance for a few top recruits each year. According to a CNN study conducted earlier this year with data gathered through open records access, the University of Georgia admitted 317 football, men’s basketball, and women’s basketball players between 2007 and 2012. Of those 317 students, 24 players, or 7.5 percent, did not meet the generally accepted level of college literacy, which is a 400 on the SAT critical reading section or a 16 on the ACT’s reading component. Compared to the other 20 schools CNN was able to collect data from, an illiteracy rate of 7.5 percent is on the low end. Based on all the data collected, between 7 and 18 percent of athletes in revenue-generating sports enrolled at public Division I schools are reading at an elementary school level. There are success stories in which student-athletes make up this gap and graduate with meaningful degrees, but the majority of special admits struggle to maintain the requirements to keep playing and are pushed toward “majoring in eligibility.”
Nearly every college has a few majors that are disproportionately filled with student-athletes from revenue-generating sports. These majors vary from school to school and change over time, but they generally have no entrance requirements and greater scheduling flexibility. Whether or not athletes actually want to pursue a degree in these fields, academic advisors strongly encourage them to major in areas such as general studies, sociology, or social sciences. Advisors will also tell athletes to take specific classes they know to be easy, such as AFAM 280 at the University of North Carolina. According to a USA Today survey of 142 universities with major athletic departments, “83 percent of the schools (118 of 142) had at least one team in which at least 25 percent of the juniors and seniors majored in the same thing. Thirty-four percent of the teams had at least one such cluster of student-athletes.”
Because these students enter their first year at such disadvantaged reading and writing levels, they are forced to choose majors that don’t interest them and don’t have good career prospects, but do allow them to maintain their eligibility. Clearly, schools are choosing the short-term benefits of keeping players eligible for the season over the long-term benefits of actually nurturing them academically, so they can succeed later in life. As UGA Sport Management Professor Billy Hawkins said in a CNN article, “They’re graduating them. UGA is graduating No. 2 in the SEC, so they’re able to graduate athletes, but have they learned anything? Are they productive citizens now? That’s a thing I worry about. To get a degree is one thing, to be functional with that degree is totally different.”
Implementing several key institutional changes could keep student-athletes from being forced into this no-win situation of majoring in “eligibility.” First, by putting a cap on the number of special admits a school can offer per year, each of those student-athletes would be much more likely to be successful. Those students would have better access to tutors and other academic resources. While helping dozens is unrealistic, a school can work to close the gap for a handful of students. Iowa State University currently has a policy in place that requires all special admits to enroll in classes during the summer following their high school graduations. Allowing the students extra time in the classroom when their sport isn’t in season gives them an opportunity to catch up to other students before the general student body sets foot on campus. NCAA institutions could drastically benefit from Iowa State’s policy. Finally, student-athletes should be given the option to take less than the required 12 credit hours to stay eligible during the semester they are in season. Student-athletes will be better off taking three more difficult but practical classes than taking four easy classes in an area they aren’t interested in pursuing as a career.
While these changes may seem relatively small, they are steps in the right direction toward refocusing NCAA policy on benefitting the student-athlete inside the classroom. Big-time college basketball and football will never go away and the revenues and commercialization will only keep growing, so it is important that student-athletes are actually given the opportunity to succeed in this climate, rather than being exploited for their talents.
