Poor performance not limited to athlethes

Day 3 of a dialogue between Derrick Z. Jackson and Victor Matheson, an economist at Holy Cross, on graduation rates and college athletics.

Derrick,
I'm certainly not going to defend the Marylands and Oregons of the world that haven't managed to graduate even a single black basketball player over the past few years. These schools undoubtedly deserve all the criticism that you and the rest of your colleagues can heap on them. Still, I have two big concerns about the annual emphasis placed on the low graduation rates of the March Madness teams.

First, I worry that these reports, intentionally or not, tend to tar all athletes with the same brush. Basketball graduation rates, especially those at some of the highest-profile schools, clearly trail those of the regular student body. In other sports, however, the average graduation rate for white male athletes is within 1 percent of the graduation rate for the general student population, and among African-American males the graduation rate is over 10 percent higher for athletes than non-athletes. As you note, a few of the worst offenders in basketball risk ruining collegiate sports' entire image, and it is all too easy to unfairly saddle any player with the label of ''dumb jock'' when, in fact, most scholarship athletes are ''student-athletes'' in the truest sense of the term.

Second, with the attention placed on athletic graduation rates, the general public may believe that the problem of poor academic performance by African-Americans in higher education is confined to athletes. Here we are debating whether top basketball programs fail their black players when the real story is how often these schools fail the other 99 percent of their black students who don't play hoops.

Southern Illinois (and I'm not picking on them just because they knocked my Holy Cross Crusaders out of the tournament!) made your ''good guys'' list by graduating 75 percent of their black players compared with a 26 percent graduation rate for the rest of their black students. I think we would both agree that it is a bit absurd to give any school a ''good'' rating

that manages to graduate only one in four of their African-American students even if their basketball team does relatively better. Similarly, we shouldn't be outraged at the 29 percent graduation rate among black players at fifth-ranked Memphis or the 17 percent graduation rate at 16th-ranked Louisville, but instead we should save our criticism for the 22 percent graduation rate that blacks in the general student population have at these two schools.

Cheers,
Victor