When the University of Connecticut beat Butler on Monday night to win
the NCAA championship, they brought down the curtain on an unusually
exciting men’s college basketball tournament. But one aspect of the
tournament was entirely predictable: The handwringing about the
low-graduation rates for many basketball programs. While graduation
rates for student athletes are improving, poor outcomes remain a serious
problem. In this year’s tournament, only 42 of the 68 teams graduated at
least 60 percent of their players, according to the Institute for
Diversity and Ethics in Sport at the University of Central Florida. The
winning Connecticut Huskies have a 31 percent graduation rate for
basketball players.
The attention to low-graduation rates among some athletic programs
should not distract us from the more systemic problem of low graduation
rates for college students overall. President Obama has challenged us
to “win the future” in part by improving college completion and more
students are going to college now than did a few decades ago.
Unfortunately only about 57 percent complete a degree within six years.
Among those choosing two-year colleges the completion rate is only about
30 percent. Most stunning are gaps in completion by income. In 1972
thirty-eight percent of high-income Americans earned a bachelor’s degree
by age 24. Now, 82 percent do. Among low-income students, however,
that figure was 7 percent in 1972 and it’s 8 percent now. Of course, college is not for everyone and there are plenty of worthy
and fulfilling pursuits that do not require a college education. But as
research by Ron Haskins of the Brookings Institution illustrates,
college does remain the most powerful way to increase class mobility in
this country. Overall, low-income students who go to college are very
unlikely to remain low-income, while those who don’t will struggle
mightily to do better than their parents economically.
While college athletic programs have their share of problems, they also
offer some ideas about how to improve college completion—especially
among those who are the first in their families to attend college.
While the low-graduation rates for some basketball and football programs
grab headlines, actually student athletes graduate at higher rates than
students in general—at the University of Connecticut, athletes have an
83 percent graduation rate. More telling, colleges know how to support
athletes in order to keep them academically eligible to play
intercollegiate sports for the four years they can under NCAA rules. How? The stereotype is that athletes just take easy classes, if they
show up at all. And while some of that goes on, the more instructive
reality is that athletes enjoy a much different level of support than
your average student. They often live in special dormitories, eat in
special dining halls, have special study centers and tutors, and receive
counseling and financial advice to help them navigate college life.
So what happens when colleges start to do some of those things for
at-risk students? Not surprisingly you see better results. Middlebury
College in Vermont, for instance, pays special attention to at-risk
students and bucks the curve. The highly successful Posse Foundation
incorporates these ideas in its efforts to help diverse students succeed
in college. Trinity College in Washington, D.C., makes helping such
students a core part of its mission. Trinity’s President Patricia
McGuire told me that her school uses what they call “intrusive advising”
to ensure that students are not falling through the cracks. Trinity
also intensively supports students in the first year and provides not
only financial aid, as most schools do, but financial counseling as
well. It’s not just small schools that can do this—Florida State, for
instance, takes steps to help prospective students as early as middle
school.
Still, in general students are much more likely to see this kind of
support if they happen to excel at one sport or another. Most college
presidents, meanwhile, act as though they’re powerless to really help
at-risk students succeed. They’re not. Despite the problems, a look at
what is working in athletic programs around the country offers some
promising practices that could be used more generally. Don’t begrudge
athletes for getting extra, they earn it with the time they put in.
Let’s just give some of the same support to more students who would also
benefit from it, even if the closest they come to college sports is a
ticket window.Andrew J. Rotherham, who writes the blog Eduwonk, is a co-founder and partner at Bellwether Education, a nonprofit working to improve educational outcomes for low-income students. School of Thought, his education column for TIME.com, appears every Thursday. See the 2011 TIME 100 Poll.
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