Role models for greed?

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

Hi again, Victor,
Thank you for the ''catch'' on Southern Illinois! The Salukis should have been in my doghouse - pun intended!

I was too bedazzled by their being tied for first place with Winthrop for graduating black basketball players to remember to register the 49-point percentage gap from all black men on campus. On the bright side of oversight, no one can accuse me of always seeing the cup half empty (smile).

I agree with you that in sheer numbers, the national graduation gap for all African-American students, particularly men, is a scandal. I agree with you that it is reassuring that on average, Division 1 athletes graduate as well as, or even better than, nonplaying students. I recently gave a speech at Curry College titled ''The Student Athlete: A Lost Ideal?'' I said that the answer is no. I cited the many New England schools, such as yours and Boston College, where the ideal is alive and well.

To help you make your point (this is an outer-body experience to help a semi-critic!), 62 percent of athletes graduate, compared with 60 percent of the student body, in the older federal statistics. In newer statistics kept by the NCAA that allow for colleges to claim credit for transfers who graduate from their school and does not penalize them for players who leave early in good academic standing (such as those who go pro), the Division 1 graduation rate is 77 percent. There is not yet a comparable figure for the general student body.

But I will keep doing my Final Four brackets and my football Graduation Gap Bowl for these

reasons:

1: College basketball and football at the very top is insane. I am often told by critics things that can be summed up as, ''Dude, stop whining. Whose responsibility is it for a student to graduate, anyway? Nobody helped ME graduate when I was bustin' my fanny at 7-11 and drivin' a '67 Chevy to class.''

The problem is, the root reason we entrust our children to colleges is that they are not fully learned, fully mature people we wish to unleash to the ''real'' world. How can we expect athletes at the top to take school seriously when, in too many cases college presidents,

athletic directors, and coaches are role models for greed?

The world of schools fighting for the Top 25 in basketball and football is one of a $6 billion Final Four television rights contract between the NCAA and CBS until 2013, an estimated $3.2 billion in advertising for the tournament since 2000, and college football coaches now cracking the $4 million-a-year barrier (the average for college presidents is $360,000).

Coaches are making serious noise about expanding the 65-team basketball tournament, and the football bowl season has exploded from the Rose, Orange, Sugar, and Cotton bowls of my childhood to 32 games and payouts estimated to reach $2.2 billion in the coming years.

Nick Saban is surely not being paid $32 million for the next eight years to jack up the graduation rate of Alabama's football team. The 20 coaches in the men's 65-team tournament who make at least $1 million a year are surely not getting paid for grade points,

but points on the scoreboard. For everyone but the athletes, this has become a professional bonanza.

Too many schools, under fan and alumni pressures that sometimes exceed those of the NBA and NFL, exploit athletes, particularly heavily-recruited African-American athletes, on the relatively cheap labor of scholarships with no serious commitment to graduation (the Globe reported this week that Ohio State freshman star Greg Oden took only two courses

last semester).

African-American athletes respectively make up 63 percent and 55 percent of Division 1 basketball and football scholarship players, even though African-Americans are 13 percent of the nation's population. Their performance is disproportionately and vastly responsible for these billions of dollars passing between the networks, Madison Avenue, the NCAA, and

down to the colleges and their multi-million-dollar coaches.

Do athletes bear significant responsibility to graduate? Sure. But the appalling gaps of most of the top-ranked teams, not just between black players and white players, but black players and other black students, make this a sophisticated segregation that rots from the university president down. If the NCAA does not soon start banning chronic offenders, the coddling of the top teams may very well corrupt the rest of Division 1.

Thank you for the back-and-forth, Victor. It has allowed me to more fully explain why I do the

brackets. I hope to keep you as a reader of my column.

All the best and I will always root for Holy Cross (unless they play the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee!).