HigherEdWatch just issued its first “Acadamic Bowl Championship Series” poll ranking the current top teams in college football using academic instead of athletic indicators.
According to the results, Boston College is the clear winner, followed by Cincinnati, Auburn, Boise State, and Virginia.
But that’s the good news. The article makes it very clear that although there are plenty of stats used to assess players’ athletic performance, there are very few measures available to assess their academic progress.
They had to go by the numbers they can get. The academic rankings are based on graduation rates and the NCAA’s “Academic Progress Rate” (APR) for each team. Half of each school’s APR score is based on student-athletes just being enrolled as students. The other half is derived from the number of student-athletes completing 20 percent of their courses toward a degree each year, with no minimum GPA required.
According to the report:
Only 56 percent of Division I-A football players entering college between 1997 and 2000 graduated within six years of initial enrollment. And it’s likely that many of those players who left with a degree did not gain workforce-ready skills, because they were tracked into “jock majors” or were required to meet informal, deflated academic standards for student-athletes.
The ranking simply reinforces the fact that the all-American pursuit of college athletics rarely leads to a great education–scholoarship or not. No surprise there.
Best quote from this article by the always excellent Lindsey Luebchow:
Without better data and more transparency, athletes and colleges can continue to game the system, and we’ll never really know whether athletes who graduate are better-educated than those who don’t.
