Thursday, March 18, 2010

Graduation Rates, Noted...

Bradley Center is one of the sites of the NCAA basketball tournament in which the Minnesota Gophers will be playing.

Xavier is a 6th seed and the U 11th. But the Musketeers have already bested us in an important metric, graduation rate. In fact our graduation rate is an embarrassment; only Georgia Tech of the Milwaukee group is worse.

From the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel:

On Wednesday, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan repeated a proposal he first brought up in January - that schools should be banned from the NCAA men's basketball tournament if they fail to graduate 40% of their players.

By that measure, one of the teams competing at the Bradley Center Friday would not be playing. Georgia Tech graduated 38% of its players, according to the Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sport at the University of Central Florida, based on the most recent data.

The other graduation rates for the basketball players on the other seven teams playing in Milwaukee are: Xavier (89%), UC Santa Barbara, Oakland and Oklahoma State (82%), Pittsburgh (75%), Ohio State (60%) and Minnesota (44%).

The NCAA responded to Duncan's remarks by saying it shares his concern about low graduation rates for some programs, but said it did not make sense to ban teams now based on evidence gathered years ago. The most recent graduation rate data is based on the class that entered college for 2002-'03.

2 comments:

Inside the Philosophy Factory said...

Hmmm... graduation data that's 8 years old. Clearly, the NCAA subscribes to the old lawyer adage.. you shouldn't ask questions you don't want to know the answers to.

Oddly enough, most of the colleges that beat us are, overall, less selective in their admissions.

Mr. B. said...

Including Xavier?

I'd be a little careful in making claims about selectivity, especially with respect to athletes playing the money sports.