Derrick Z. Jackson, Boston Globe, March 17, 2009
BACK IN the National Collegiate Athletic Association basketball tournament this year after just missing the title last year, Memphis coach John Calipari said, “We don’t feel we have anything to prove because we’re a different team.” One thing is not different. Memphis should not be in the tournament at all, with a 44 percent graduation success rate for its African-American basketball players.
{snip}
{snip} UConn also should not be in the tournament with a graduation rate of 22 percent for its African-American players and only 33 percent for the whole team.
{snip}
{snip} Missouri should not be in the tournament either, with a 25 percent graduation rate for black players and only 36 percent overall.
This continues to be the maddening part of March Madness, the part that keeps muddying up the very good news that has evolved over the last decade. In my 1999 comparisons of the graduation rates of the basketball teams in the NCAA Division I tournament, 41 of the 64 teams had a team graduation rate below 50 percent, the standard the Knight Commission on athletic reform recommended for a team to be eligible for post-season play.
In the 2009 tournament, 41 of the 65 teams are at 50 percent or higher. In the last six years, the graduation average of the entire field has grown from 42 percent to 61 percent. The graduation average for African-American players has grown from 43 percent to 53 percent. That improvement has dramatically percolated to some of the best teams in the country.
Ten years ago, the top 16 seeded men’s teams had an average graduation rate of 44 percent. This year, it is 64 percent. So statistically, all you critics out there of college athletic abuses, it is a moment to celebrate. North Carolina, Pittsburgh, Duke, Villanova, Xavier, and Wake Forest, a mixture of public and private universities and a blend of urban and college-town campuses, show that athletes can score three pointers and get a few 3.0s. The graduation rate for African-American players at those schools range from 70 percent to 100 percent.
The problem is that the statistics remain one of feast or famine, or rather, diploma or defacto dropout. It remains particularly true for African-American players. On paper, the top 16 seeds have an average graduation rate of 53 percent for black players. But eight of those 16 are so bad, their average graduation rate for black players is 32 percent. Those teams include five of the top eight seeds: UConn, Louisville, Oklahoma, Michigan State, and Memphis.
Such schools, one can optimistically say, are becoming isolated by the general improvement of many of their peers. For example, Temple and Syracuse made the tournament 10 years ago, graduating zero percent of black players. Purdue got in, graduating 11 percent of black players. All three schools made this year’s tournament, now graduating a respective 57, 50 and 83 percent of black players.
UConn, conversely, is frozen in a con game, its 22 percent graduation rate for black players barely different from 17 percent in 1999. {snip}
Original article
Email
Derrick Z. Jackson
at jackson@globe.com .
(Posted on March 17, 2009)
Comments
We get this same story every year at this time re basketball, and every early January re BCS in football. I’ve already stated my opinion, so no need to post it again here, you can read it if you want:
http://countenance.wordpress.com/2006/03/14/taken-to-school/ http://countenance.wordpress.com/2007/03/13/and-here-it-is/
All they have to do to graduate is show up for class. The ones that do graduate can barely read or write, and they can’t do basic math.
If it wasn’t for basketball jobs, they unemployable,just like a large portion of black males.
I’m wondering if this economic downturn, as it gets worse by next year, will cause spectator sports attendance to drop precipitously, causing many teams to go bankrupt.
You mean when you have people in college with six grade level educations they don’t graduate in large numbers? Who would have thought?
As long as the NCAA can’t or won’t outright prohibit teams below the graduation standard from postseason play, this sordid business will continue. Thank goodness for Division III, which has no athletic scholarships.
they should make this a criminal offense, and send all of these coaches and administrators to jail, even the officials of the league.
“’m wondering if this economic downturn, as it gets worse by next year, will cause spectator sports attendance to drop precipitously, causing many teams to go bankrupt.”
Posted by ice at 6:25 PM on March 17
It would be a good thing if people (White people) did not spend their money supporting Black criminals, i.e. Black athletes, by attending either college or professional sports where Black athletes predominate.
The majority of college basketball players are overwhelmingly black, they are therefore a protected species, the stats for graduation rates are much lower than reported, the class attendance rate for college atheletes is less than half of an average tuition paying student, the sad fact about the whole thing is that these “atheletes” are taking a space in colleges that could be filled by some student who could get an education and become a productive citizen.
I feel sorry for instructors who are bullied and threatened with termination if they do not give passing grades to students who are on a 3rd grade level mentally.
Higher education has become a farce, and the athletics end of it is simply organized crime.
These people need to get their priorities clear. Do they want to be basketball players or do they want a college education? It’s one or the other. I don’t believe most black athletes can do both.
Let me seeee…(theme of Jeopardy plays) 30million a year as a basketball player or 50 thou as an engineer! I’ll have to go with being a basketball player Alex.
NCAA needs to cut the hoax and let these athletes become professionals while in college. Either that or really enforce the minimum grade point averages for athletes.
I rememember waking up to the reality of college sports back in the early 80s when I saw the ‘Georgetown’ team play on tv. They were all black, yet the student body was almost all white….I had to ask myself what these ‘teams’ were truly representing…
==”Foul play on black athletes’ graduation rates”==
As always, the issue is framed dishonestly from the outset. We’re to observe that the graduation rate is low without considering that the academic achievement is low. And we’re to think that the low graduation rate is attributable to “foul play” and not to a cultural and/or IQ gap or any other factor.
==The graduation average for African-American players has grown from 43 percent to 53 percent. ==
The improved percentage is due to “African-American” players really buckling down; devoting themselves to scholastic pursuits; staying up late into the night studying their textbooks, highlighters in hand; attending academically challenging classes and taking notes, asking probing questions of their professors, dramatically increasing their test scores, and writing papers that reflect keen intelligence and insight. Right?
No. The already low standards are being lowered still further.
The truth is (and long has been):
Basketball pays the rent for these colleges. The players pretend to be students to comply with rules keeping them on the court, and college administrators pretend the player’s academics are sufficient to justify them playing.
The rulemakers should allow colleges to finally end this farce and simply own and play professional teams.
It never ceases to amaze me when I watch an arena filled with white students cheering on black basketball players.
It would be one thing if the players were actually students. Almost without exception the players are covered with tattoos, shaved heads, sullen attitudes and mugging for the crowd over plays they are expected to make.
Do you think black people will ever pay money and cheer for white athletes?
I don’t either.
The term “student athlete” is an oxymoron. These black players should not be allowed to set foot on a basketball court until they show performance in the classroom - which, sadly, is an impossibility. The whole NCAA is an absolute disgrace to higher education when many real students cannot afford to attend.
I no longer watch, or support, any NCAA event so long as this travesty continues. That means no buying of tickets or merchandise or appeals for donations.
Who cares?
I myself work for a university. I think the athletes should be University employees instead of students. Pay them about $20,000 per year to start and give them free rent in apartments, not the dorms.
As they advance from the freshman teams to the varsity, give them raises in pay if they play extremely well, just as sales people get commissions. Create a 6 year contract. They leave after 6 years to make room for the next group of 18 year olds.
If they haven’t been recruited by a professional team by then, let them get another job or whatever.
These “student”-athletes were raised from birth with the idea that athletics would get them into college, not academics. How could anyone possibly expect that after 18 years with that mentality, they would suddenly shift their focus back to academics? When they are given full scholarships to schools they couldn’t possibly attend as regular students, how could anyone expect them to compete acadenically?
It’s a bad situation for both the regular students and the athletes, and it’s led to a dumbing-down of college academics. Let’s face reality here. Which one do you hear about more regularly, CalTech or USC? Would Americans even know which one is a more rigorous program?
The improved percentage is due to “African-American” players really buckling down; devoting themselves to scholastic pursuits;
Or as I know from the past, having silly white girlfriends doing their work for them!
This is just a game. It does not matter. Who cares how many basketball players pass or fail? Most of them should not be on a college campus in the first place. I went to a very expensive Southern school. The athletes were a huge problem. Most of the rapes, almost all of the robberies, all of the worst intimidation, and all of the lewd comments directed at coeds…were perpetrated by athletes brought onto campus because they were exceptionally adept at activities involving balls. They were out of their league in intelligence, in preparation for college, and in socio-economic background.
Among the real students, even the poorest came from families with a lot of pluck: people who had struggled to be upwardly mobile, and who had struggled to make their kids superior students.
If not for the athletic programs, there would not have been a single stupid student at my school. There would have been no black football players bashing gays, no blacks raping coeds…
Virtually all of the substandard behavior I witnessed in my college years was the result of our athletic programs. To this day, I have contributed zero to the school. And I never will, unless the athletic programs are dropped. Schools think athletics bring in the alum bucks: but I wonder how many potential donors leave school irreparably alienated because of the mercenary squads called athletes.
Just a quick story: We jog at an elevated track here at SUNY in upstate New York and, over the past semester, often encountered the polite all-white male staff who routinely assemble and disassemble the some-10,000 seat bleachers surrounding the B-ball court on which minority black “students” perform for their adoring white fans. Well, half the time all that white labor goes for naught because the games never come close to half-full. Not an easy job, that. In fact, it requires some visuo-spatial intelligence, not to mention risk. Charged with securing the side railings, one unlucky guy tethers into a harness each time, dangling precariously some 100-feet above the wooden floor. Perhaps you all undertand what I am trying to say.
When a university needs something done right, they don’t “run it through the Diversity Office,” before commissioning/contracting the labor. But be careful if there’s any whiff of a symbolic/figure-head element to the position. By the way, my white brother, a one-time academic advisor at same university, was vocationally displaced ten years prior, by just such a Diversity panel. While misleading him on for months about a prospective tenured gig, they made frequent use of his inate articulateness in countless orientations and school functions.
But after performing beyond expectation the entire school year, under TA-type remuneration I might ad, the powers-that-be in the department said those fateful words: You’re great, but we’re going to have to run the tenured position through the Office of Affirmative action.
Funny while strolling campus myself a few years later, I noticed the all-white male contractors replacing the windows on the very building in which he once toiled so naively. Why didn’t they run the contract for dangerous window replacement through an all-black male firm, I wondered? Did an all black engineering firm design the black, ugly-as-hell, female President’s new office? Do they hire all black male accounting firms?
