Who Cares About the *Student* Part of NCAA Student Athletics?

According to many experts, a men’s Division I collegiate football or basketball player has about a two percent chance to emerge from the competition and play professionally. Of the remaining 98 percent on the field in exchange for their scholarships, the NCAA statistics reported in 2021, 40 percent fail to graduate within six academic years of their freshman campaign.

The end result is a sizable number of young people (many BIPOC) without an athletic career — or an college degree — while fans remain ignorant or indifferent to the problem.

When fans and alumni buy tickets to one of these Division I games, they don’t step through the turnstile to watch a spelling bee. That the athletes they cheer on are full-time students might occur to a few in the stands, but most supporters of college athletics are there for the action, without a second thought as to the players’ educations or futures beyond sports. Touchdowns and 3-pointers go better with beer and wings than a discussion of whether some top 25 football and basketball programs in the nation fail to set their stars up for success — so graduation-rate issues tend to hide on the sidelines. 

Some fans prefer to look the other way, rather than discover a 40 percent failure rate — or the reality that many top 25 teams graduate fewer Black athletes than white. According to the Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sport, among 82 bowl-participating teams in 2023, the average graduation rate for Black student-athletes was 79.3 percent, slightly down from 79.5 percent in 2022. The average rate for white student-athletes increased from 91 percent in 2022 to 92.5 percent in 2023. 

With a few exceptions, the most successful and powerful teams in college sports (especially in Division I football) come from the American South. Many of those same southern schools suffer from the lowest African American graduation rates under the governance of the seemingly unconcerned NCAA.

With a wink and a nod, these schools can become football and basketball factories — universities where every aspect of academic and financial life kneels to revenue-generating sports. Under that system, the schools in question make millions without demanding academic success from their student athletes. As long as they play on the field, they pass in the classroom.

A Modern Plantation

At least 19 percent of all Black players in Division I college football and basketball fail to graduate across all Division I programs, eight percentage points lower than their white teammates, according to NCAA Research. 

“People watching their favorite NCAA basketball or football teams — the revenue-earning squads — have to realize what they’re witnessing is a 21st century plantation,” says John Amaechi, a member of the Order of the British Empire. He is an English-American psychologist and a veteran of NCAA and NBA basketball who played between 1990 and 2003.

If a concern for academic standards and concern over the future of young people of any race could somehow register with fans seemingly more invested in their own entertainment, alumni, and season ticket holders, the pressure their combined financial force could bring to bear might fix many of the problems in short order. Yet little notice is taken of the educational prospects of players who depart the classroom without a degree. As a result, there remains a crisis among athletes, especially African American players, in the two major sports: Too many fail to graduate in relation to the general population across many top programs from the SEC, ACC, and Big Ten. 

“There are things that can be done to address [these] challenges … but they involve asking uncomfortable questions,” Amaechi adds. “Which of these universities actually realizes its duty of care for the athletes — including the issue of whether they can get a job after college?”

Graduation statistics bear out Amaechi’s contention, whether they emerge from the NCAA, the Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sports, or the National Jobs for All Coalition. More than 38 percent of SEC and ACC teams that played in bowl games in 2023 graduated 20 percent more white athletes than Black athletes. Athletics aside, in the U.S. more than 51 percent of Black males without a completed four-year college degree are underemployed or unemployed. Further daunting, athletes who fail to complete a single year of college are twice as likely to be incarcerated as employed.

Many of the most successful schools on the field reveal the most alarming graduation deficiencies. For example, the University of Georgia from the SEC — the NCAA Football National Champions for 2022 and 2023 — won those titles with the worst player graduation clip amongst Top 25 teams: 53 percent. 

In January, 2024, the Athens Banner-Herald set the university’s most recent football

program graduation rate at 41 percent. LSU, also a part of the SEC, posted a better number at 71 percent, still leaving a third of its players without a degree. Rival Alabama beat both schools in the classroom, self-reporting a 2023 athlete graduation rate of 91 percent, up from 72 percent 10 years prior.

Dropping the Ball

Other factors beyond greed distract decision-makers from correcting the educational shortcomings of big-time NCAA sports. This generation’s collegiate sports history includes multiple child sex-abuse incidents at Penn State with Jerry Sandusky and a massive rape scandal at Michigan State with Larry Nassar. Such cases draw the critical eye away from academic worries due to the sheer repugnant nature of such crimes.

Meanwhile, recent developments in NIL programs (name, image, likeness) defuse tensions by allowing some players to earn income while still in college, but that doesn’t aid all players on a given roster or provide financial or career security when an NCAA playing career comes to an end. According to Common Good’s own report, NIL operates as many markets do — with most of the money going to a small group of players at the top of the sport. 

Longtime NCAA and NBA basketball coach Kevin O’Neill has paced sidelines from Northwestern to Tennessee to Arizona. He still laughs when he hears the NCAA officials use the term “student-athlete.”

“If you ask any player, I guarantee he’ll call himself an athlete first, but — they can’t count on a pro career until it happens, and it won’t happen for most of them. When it doesn’t happen, they realize the real world won’t carry their bags for them without a degree,” O’Neill says via phone from retirement in San Diego.

“When those dreams are shattered, that’s when you need somebody to help you move your life forward. But too many schools have the attitude that the student who blew off classes, because he thought he was going pro, didn’t do what the scholarship paid him to do, so they don’t see a need to offer anything else.” 

Another harsh reality states that even players who find their way into that narrow two percent who end up playing pro ball can find themselves with bleak long-term prospects. If they’re injured or cut and unable to last in a league for more than a season or two, whatever their brief rookie contracts paid won’t last long in the absence of a professional career alternative.

Jim McIlvaine, also a college and pro-basketball veteran, served as secretary treasurer of the NBA Player’s Association during his playing years from 1994 to 2001. He agrees with O’Neill that graduation rates would improve if more schools encouraged former athletes who left school early to return and complete their degrees on their original scholarships.

“That support is not required by the NCAA, and there’s no reason why it can’t be,” McIlvaine explains  from his Florida home. “If there were incentives in place for schools to bring these former players back, more programs would do it.

“I don’t think fans give a lot of thought to the lives of these players after they finish playing football or basketball. New faces come along, and it’s more fun to watch the new guys than worry about whether yesterday’s guys are struggling.”

Protecting Programs, Not Players

Some responsibility falls on the boosters, season-ticket holders, and alumni rooting for these athletes. If they took any notice of the problem or resolved to show concern for the young people they claim to care about so desperately on game day, they could withhold financial support — essentially seizing the offending school by the ears. The problem could in that case be solved in short order under such pressure, even if initially embarrassing for the program under scrutiny.

Of course, that might mean losing a game or two. While many fans don’t seem to mind if their alma mater looks like an academic joke, they can certainly struggle with the humiliation of a failure on game day.

Walter Robinson is an editor-at-large at the Boston Globe and ran the Spotlight team featured in the Academy Award-winning film of the same name. Robinson and his squad of reporters exposed more than 500 cases of sexual abuse within the city’s Catholic Archdiocese. While that’s a far throw from the issue of abandoning the education of student-athletes, he does understand the mindset of supporters of any organization turning a blind eye to its failures.

“Members of any institution that has problems look first to protect its reputation,” Robinson says. “There’s still this strong pull for people to defend an institution they revere, whether it’s a church or a football team. In such cases, people don’t want their comfort or entertainment threatened.”

The headquarters for the NCAA, SEC, and ACC were contacted for comment. Only ACC representatives responded, recommending contact with each of its member schools individually. Requests for information went out to every ACC and SEC school, and only three — the ACC’s Virginia Tech and the SEC’s University of Mississippi and University of South Carolina — responded. Of those three, Virginia Tech and South Carolina are exceptions to the football factory stats; both schools rank at the top of their conferences with athlete graduation rates of 90 percent.

It Can Be Done

Successful college programs that are looking after player educations do exist, and their priorities and policies beg the question as to why other schools place so little emphasis on the future success of their young people. Some of those leading institutions include Duke, Vanderbilt, Boston College, Northwestern, and the University of Notre Dame — all with athlete graduation rates at 80 percent or higher across their major sports.

As of March, 2024, the Marquette Golden Eagles men’s basketball program out of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, was 22-7, sitting in second place in the elite Big East Conference and ranked eighth in the AP Top 25 Poll. While the crowd at the consistently packed home arena of Fiserv Forum stood and cheered the on-court victories, the university reported in late 2023 that the team recorded an overall average grade point average of 3.0 with all players on course to graduate on time. One starter, Stevie Mitchell, held a 4.0 GPA in courses such as Advanced Financial Management, Legal Ethical Environment, and Management Human Resources. 

Marquette Head Coach Shaka Smart says the key element in athletic and academic success is a commitment to making that progress a program-wide priority.

“You want to grow and advance the whole person,” Smart says from his office at Marquette basketball HQ, “These guys come here as student-athletes. Some would say many of them come here first and foremost for basketball reasons, but they know they’re going to work toward that degree if they come here.”

Those concerned with the bottom line of wins and losses of their university’s teams might fear genuine academic demands could be a detriment to recruiting, potentially driving some prized freshman away to a school where they can coast through the classrooms without breaking a sweat. Smart insists a solid education is a genuine selling point.

“We make sure our guys understand that (academic priorities) are for them,” he explains. “It’s for their growth and benefit. It’s not just, ‘You have to do well grade-wise to be eligible,’ or ‘You have to do well so the team GPA looks good.’ Instead, we have a group of guys here that take school seriously because they knew that was part of coming here.”

Smart acknowledges that recent years saw negatives throughout college athletics as academic pretense gave way to an overall pursuit of money — weakening the connections between sports and academia. Still, he insists NCAA athletics can lead to a young person’s life changing for the better, because they played while pursuing a degree or even multiple degrees, not in spite of their role as an athlete. “It’s important to ask guys, ‘What are you passionate about or what excites you? What are you curious about beyond basketball?’ We’ve got our guys here in a variety of majors because we invite them to look beyond the sport.”

While much of the focus concerning major college sports and graduation rates falls on universities, coaches, and players themselves, Smart takes a moment to acknowledge the role students’ families can play in steering their young people toward institutions that value education as much as scoreboard victories.

“I think most of the families we recruit from really value education,” he says. “Most families still really value the degree and everything that comes along with an education. It’s just that a lot of other factors come into play with student athlete payments and NIL. Those new factors are positive, but it’s important we don’t lose sight of the life-long educational benefits and advantages these young people have in front of them.”

Note: Written requests for responses from the NCAA, the University of Georgia, the University of Alabama, and Louisiana State University did not receive a reply.