A couple of weeks ago I noted an editorial in the Boston Globe about the abysmal rate of graduation amongst college basketball players, especially amongst black basketball players. Thanks to William for bringing to my attention another article on the subject in the Cincinnati Enquirer, which reports, "... that 10 of the schools in this week's round of 16 have failed to graduate even half of their players in recent years." A snapshot of graduation rates at major NCAA basketball programs can be seen here, the story it tells is not nice.
The Enquirer quotes the author of the study, Richard Lapchick, on the opportunity that the graduation scandal provides for Myles Brand, President of the NCAA, "I think he's got a moment in time, where there have been enough scandals happening, to try to mobilize college presidents to say this is an embarrassment to us as a group. We have this window here, let's use it to do something real."
Brand apparently hopes to "... reward or punish schools by tying the number of scholarships to graduation rates." But Lapchick warns, "The challenge is that there are going to be a lot of powerful coaches who will argue that this would deny opportunities, particularly to African-American students who wouldn't be able to come to their schools under a system like that."
I recall John Thompson, when he was basketball coach at Georgetown, making the same argument in favor of athletic scholarships for black students. Then as now this argument is fallacious. To do away with athletic scholarships does not mean that the money saved may not be applied in the form of academic scholarships for black students. It does mean that athletic ability will not drive the award of scholarships.
Allen Iverson attended Georgetown on an athletic scholarship and left college to join the NBA before graduating. Would Thompson or any other coach really argue that developing Iverson's NBA potential was a good use of scholarship money. Could not Georgetown have found an academically gifted, or even a struggling but academically motivated black student who would have graduated into a better life with scholarship assistance?
The ability to make three point shots does not correlate with the ability to maintain a 3.0 grade average. In fact, the statistics behind the scandal point to the opposite conclusion, that athletic scholarships are usually given to students with little academic inclination, and that those students are not pushed by coaches, teachers or administrators to complete school.
Students competing for public scholarships should have confidence that the overiding factor in their award is academic inclination. More importantly, society should have confidence that dollars invested in scholarships (by the public as a whole, or by individuals) will be used to educate future doctors, writers, thinkers, and businessmen- not to exploit would be athletes.
Posted by publius at March 24, 2004 08:02 PM