Staff Report
The National Collegiate Athletic Association this week proposed a new way to measure graduation rates in response to claims from universities nationwide that the current federal standard system is creating inaccurate results.
The NCAA also moved a step closer to enacting reforms that would use a second new measure, a "real time" annual assessment of academic progress to better monitor Division I institutions that aren't adequately educating their athletes, said Myles Brand, the NCAA's president, in a news release.
The association's board of directors will vote on the proposed changes as early as April 2004.
Kevin Lennon, the NCAA's vice president for membership services, said the new "graduation rate standard" was created because the association believes the federal measure is flawed.
The new system would not punish colleges that lose transfers who are in good academic standing, and it would allow colleges that enroll transfers to count those athletes in their graduation statistics, Lennon said.
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The new way of calculating graduation percentages could have a drastic effect on certain sports, including men's basketball and baseball. In those sports, 30 percent to 40 percent of Division I rosters are made up of players who transferred from other institutions, according to NCAA records.
"Our members and our board believe the new graduation success rate will provide a more accurate measure of what's going on on our campuses," Lennon said.
Even though the new graduation standard will help fix what the NCAA sees as flaws in the federal measure, both standards measure graduation rates over six years and are only a temporary look at an institution's success. The problem, Lennon said, is that the athletes are long gone by the time the data are published.
That's why NCAA officials are proposing the new system; it would gauge how well each institution is doing in three areas: retaining athletes, keeping them eligible for competition and graduating them.
