The NCAA News - News and Features

The NCAA News -- December 20, 1999

Opportunity vs. exploitation?

Concerns over standards and higher-education access sparked debates in '90s

BY KAY HAWES
STAFF WRITER

Many of the most embarrassing moments for intercollegiate athletics in the 1980s revolved around the academic progress, or lack thereof, of some student-athletes.

The public learned about professional athletes who could not read or write, despite having completed their eligibility at well-known colleges.

Student-athletes were practicing longer hours and competing in longer playing seasons. Little was being done in many places to treat student-athletes as complete individuals, with academic goals and other needs.

Higher academic standards clearly would result in higher graduation rates and presumably less exploitation of young people. But as the decade advanced, vocal constituencies inside and outside the NCAA questioned whether such rules deny the opportunity of higher education to youth who have been educationally and economically disadvantaged since birth.

Four years of ball, but no degree

In July 1991, NCAA research verified the fears of many people: just because student-athletes received a scholarship and played ball did not mean they graduated.

Football and men's basketball student-athletes graduated at a 42.1 percent rate, compared to 45.7 for the rest of student-athletes. For minority students, the problem was more alarming: only 26.6 percent of black student-athletes graduated, compared to 52.3 percent for whites.

New federal legislation was passed requiring institutions to compile and release graduation rates, which prompted the Association to adopt a similar measure.

Individual school's graduation rates then became public knowledge, and by the end of the 1990s, some coaching contracts even included bonuses for higher graduation rates.

The debate over academic standards is as old as the NCAA, but the modern version began with the adoption of Proposition 48 in 1983. That legislation established a core curriculum for which a prospective student-athlete must post a minimum grade-point average and standardized-test score.

While few could argue against the desirability of student-athletes emerging from college with a college-level education, many did argue that penalizing prospective student-athletes for doing poorly in high school was denying them the opportunity to get the education in the first place.

The debate became more visible in 1989 when the NCAA passed Proposition 42, which prevented partial qualifiers (those with either a sub 2.000 grade-point average or a sub-700 SAT) from receiving financial aid. Soon thereafter, Georgetown University men's basketball coach John Thompson staged a widely publicized protest by walking off the floor before two of his team's games.

"What is being exploited when talking about (Proposition) 42 is a normal, natural, and healthy inclination by the public to want people to establish standards," Thompson said.

"Every sensible person wants standards, including John Thompson. But you don't establish standards at the risk of totally disregarding and misusing an instrument (standardized tests) as it was intended to be used. You can establish standards in a lot of incorrect ways in our society and say this solves the problem."

In 1990, the NCAA rescinded Proposition 42. However, reform-minded presidents were not finished with academic issues.

In 1992, the Presidents Commission's legislative package included expansion of the number of required core courses (from 11 to 13) and the creation of an "initial-eligibility index" that matched required test scores with grade-point averages (Proposition 16).

The new standards were met with praise by some who thought they put the "student" back in student-athlete, but many criticized the effect the standards would have on minority student-athletes.

The threat of boycott

Questions about minority access to higher education were not limited to academic standards. In 1993, the 3,000-member Black Coaches Association (BCA) threatened to boycott the basketball season because the NCAA Convention defeated a proposal to reinstate a 14th men's basketball grant-in-aid.

The BCA believed that failing to reinstate the grant-in-aid symbolized many actions the Association had taken that were insensitive to African-American student-athletes. Besides the academic concerns, the coaches cited legislation that they said prevented them from helping at-risk high-school students in their communities.

"Anyone who thinks this is about one scholarship, that's an insult," said University of Wisconsin, Madison, men's basketball coach Stu Jackson. "It's about a number of issues and philosophies held by the NCAA, and how they deal with student-athletes across the board."

"We want to send the NCAA back to the drawing board for ideas on how to deal with youngsters from disadvantaged backgrounds," said John Chaney, Temple University's men's basketball coach.

Prominent white basketball coaches, such as Duke University's Mike Krzyzewski and Roy Williams of the University of Kansas, publicly supported the BCA.

"The main ingredient in this whole thing is the student-athlete," Krzyzewski said. "We need to take care of the student-athlete."

After a meeting between representatives of the BCA and the Congressional Black Caucus, the boycott was canceled.

As the decade passed, stronger initial- and continuing-eligibility legislation took effect. To help student-athletes cope with the increasing demands, many institutions enhanced their academic-support operations. In the mid '90s, the NCAA and the National Association of Collegiate Directors of Athletics assisted by developing the CHAMPS Life Skills Program, which features a curriculum that helps student-athletes become more well-rounded individuals. An offshoot of that effort -- the NCAA Foundation Student-Athlete Leadership Conference -- was initiated in 1997.

Indeed, in many tangible ways, student-athletes have a better life now than they did 10 years ago.

However, the debate over where to draw the line between providing an opportunity and preventing exploitation continues unabated.

Prop 16 has been ruled illegal and is on appeal (see related story, page A1). The NCAA's use of standardized test scores continues to be a source of controversy, just as it was when Proposition 48 was approved in 1983.

And although student-athlete graduation rates are higher than they were at the beginning of the decade, many of the same comparisons that were troubling then are troubling now: Blacks graduate at a lower rate than whites and student-athletes in revenue sports graduate at lower rates than their nonrevenue peers.