An unjustified criticism?

Day 1 of a dialogue between Derrick Z. Jackson and Victor Matheson, an economist at Holy Cross, on graduation rates and college athletics. Read Derrick's column on graduation rates here.

Derrick,

We seem to read the same discouraging story every year during March Madness. These big-time basketball programs appear to do a whole lot better with the ''athlete'' part of ''student-athlete'' than they do with the ''student'' part.

I just read the University of Central Florida's Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sport annual report on the graduation rates of teams in the NCAA's Division I men's basketball tournament. Like your column last week, the study grimly notes that only 30 of the 65 teams in this year's NCAA men's basketball tournament graduated at least 50 percent of their athletes within six years, and not a single team managed to graduate all of their recent players. (Although I might add that local Patriot League champion Holy Cross lead all participating teams this year with an 86 percent graduation rate.)

As you noted as well, the situation among African-American players is even worse. Seven teams failed to graduate a single black player over the most recent three seasons, and overall African-American basketball graduation rates trailed the graduation rates of white players by 14 percentage points, 40 percent to 54 percent.

I did a little more digging, however, and it looks like these statistics do not tell the whole story. They neglect to mention the fact that nationwide, graduation rates for male nonathletes are a mere 57 percent. While basketball players do perform relatively worse than the general student body with a 44 percent graduation rate, the difference is not nearly as large as one might suspect given the level of attention athletic graduation rates receive.

Among African-American males who are not athletes, the overall graduation rate is just 36 percent. Despite the contention that athletic departments fail to educate their minority students, African-American basketball players at division 1 schools actually graduate at a higher rate than their nonathlete peers.

Doesn't that make the criticism leveled on college sports a bit unjustified?

VICTOR MATHESON
Department of Economics
College of the Holy Cross