NCAA's heroes, life's zeros
MY GLOBE WEB column yesterday was about how the majority of men's college basketball teams in this year's national tournament now hide their African-American graduation rates behind new interpretations of federal privacy rules. The schools doing the most hiding just happen to be the worst offenders.
A further look at the numbers makes the National Collegiate Athletic Association look even worse. Last September, the NCAA proudly announced that the rate of all Division 1 athletes who entered school in 1996 and graduated within six years reached a record 62 percent. The NCAA said the African-American male basketball graduation rate zoomed from 35 percent for the 1995 freshman class to 41 percent for the 1996 class.
Never mind that the black male graduation rate was only 36 percent in the broader four-class average that also included the 1993, '94, and '95 freshman classes. The NCAA's president, Myles Brand, said, "This shows that student-athletes will rise to the occasion and meet the challenges for academic success."
In the very same report that Brand held up as proof that student athletes rose to the occasion, many top powers sunk to new levels of secrecy we used to stereotype the Kremlin for.
Of the 65 teams in the men's tournament, 49 published graduation statistics. Of those 49 schools, the graduation average was 49.7 percent, higher than the overall NCAA average of 42 percent.
The 16 schools that did not publish overall graduation statistics for 2003 had an overall graduation rate last year of 16 percent and an African-American graduation rate of 15 percent. The schools that hid their graduation rates as if they were weapons of mass destruction were Alabama, Alabama-Birmingham, Alabama State, Cincinnati, DePaul, Illinois-Chicago, Kentucky, Louisiana-Lafayette, Louisville, Memphis, Murray State, Nevada, Oklahoma State, Pittsburgh, Southern Illinois, and Virginia Commonwealth. Six of the 16 ended the regular season in the Associated Press Top 25: Kentucky, Oklahoma State, Pitt, Cincinnati, Memphis, and Southern Illinois.
The same 16 schools did not use privacy laws to hide the overall graduation rates of their women's basketball teams. Some of the schools did hide their black rates, but the overall rate was 64 percent, right at the 65 percent average for Division 1 women.
That is bad, but the real story is that 37 of the 65 teams refused to publish their black graduation rates. If this were collegiate hockey, which has few black players, no one would care. But this is basketball, where African-American men are 57 percent of the Division 1 players and 80 percent of first-team All-Americans selected by coaches the last four seasons.
The disproportionate dribbling and dunking of black players helps bring the NCAA $6 billion from CBS over the next 11 years. To get its money back, CBS charges corporations $600,000 for 30-second commercials in late rounds of the tournament and $900,000 for a 30-second spot in the championship game. For that, viewers and alumni deserve open disclosure of what the players get out of it. A handful of highly publicized players might get pro contracts. The vast majority leave school empty-handed.
The 28 men's schools that published 2003 graduation rates for their black players had an average of 63 percent.
The 37 schools that did not publish 2003 black graduation rates had a 2002 black average of 19.7 percent.
The 2002 graduation rate of the 37 cowards was not much better: 29 percent.
Using the AP Top 25 as a guide to the most powerful teams in the country (there were actually 26, since there was a tie for 25th), exactly half published their black graduation rates. The average rate for those schools was 59.8 percent. Most of the best schools for black rates were cited in my Web column (add to that list North Carolina, which is 67 percent).
Of the half that did not publish black graduation rates for 2003, nine of them had rates in 2002 of between 0 and 14 percent. Those schools were Utah State, Memphis, Syracuse, Georgia Tech, Cincinnati (all zero), Arizona (9 percent), Maryland (11), Kentucky (13) and Southern Illinois (14). Their overall black average was 16.8 percent.
That is a 43-point percentage gap between the top 13 schools that report their black graduation rates and the top 13 that do not. The NCAA claims that colleges are making progress. At the same moment, schools are erasing any proof that they are. The Knight Commission on college sports proposed that schools that do not graduate 50 percent of their players should be banned from tournaments and bowl games. On that basis, you would wipe out more than half of the NCAA men's tournament field.
Instead, colleges are wiping out graduation records. For all of its talk about reform, the missing numbers betray the fact that privacy is a cover for profit. Too many colleges do not care whether today's heroes become tomorrow's zeros. The proof: Thirteen of the 37 colleges that did not report black graduation rates in 2003 had a 2002 black rate of zero.
Derrick Z. Jackson's e-mail address is jackson@globe.com.
