Division II institutions soon will have an opportunity to participate in a pilot program to explore whether the division should develop a "graduation-success" report to supplement the graduation-rate report currently required by the federal Student Right-to-Know Act.

The Graduation Rates Project Team will mail forms to all Division II athletics directors in early May, with returns requested by late June or early July. The pilot program will be voluntary, and results will be compiled in a way so that one institution is not compared against another.

Institutions will be asked to provide information on participants in randomly selected sports. In most cases, data will be requested for two sports, although institutions chosen for football will be limited to that sport to reduce the reporting burden. The pilot report should be complete by early fall.

Benefits outweigh burden

The Division II Management and Presidents Councils have been concerned that the current method of reporting graduation rates misrepresents Division II because it measures only student-athletes who receive athletically related financial aid. Because so many Division II student-athletes do not receive such aid and because of the inability of the federally mandated study to account for transfer students, the Presidents Council believes that a supplemental report may be desirable.

While the division appears to support the concept of a supplemental report, the key question is whether the burden on Division II administrators would outweigh the benefits that would come from acquiring the additional information.

Tony Capon, faculty athletics representative at the University of Pittsburgh, Johnstown, and chair of the project team, said the pilot should help answer that question.

"We don't want to impose a new set of requirements that's going to require institutions to spend an inordinate amount of time compiling those figures because most of our institutions don't have the kind of staffs that can do this sort of thing," he said.

Yet, much of the information that the institution will need to complete the form already is available. The compilation of entering students for the new report would rely on data already required by the Student Right-to-Know Act, squad lists as of the first date of competition, and incoming two- and four-year transfer student-athletes (see the accompanying description of the process).

The bigger concern potentially rests with tracking student-athletes who have left an institution. Schools historically have bristled at having a student-athlete who left in good academic standing counted against their graduation totals, especially if that student subsequently graduated from another school. To address those concerns, the pilot form will provide an opportunity to track student-athletes who left while academically eligible under NCAA legislation. The Social Security numbers of such student-athletes would be provided to the National Student Loan Clearinghouse; if those students were found to have successfully enrolled at another institution within one academic year, they would be excluded from the originating institution.

Intent not self-serving

The process for determining the exclusions would be both inexpensive (about 10 cents a request, paid for by the NCAA) and effective (the clearinghouse covers between 85 and 90 percent of all two- and four-year institutions).

As positive as it all seems, Mike L. Racy, Division II chief of staff, acknowledged that the report might not achieve universal approval.

"We know there will be criticism if the membership chooses to develop a supplemental report because some people will think it's self-serving," Racy said. "But that's not the case at all. We would just be calling the federal report what it is, which is a report for student-athletes who receive athletically related financial aid."

Capon agreed, saying that the information would be useful for Division II, but not necessarily superior.

"I want to be very careful with the word 'better' because that implies the federal report is somehow unsatisfactory," he said. "We're saying that the federal report, essentially because of its criteria, is not reflecting the experience of most Division II athletes because most Division II student-athletes are not receiving financial aid."

The project team is actually going to "pilot the pilot" by asking each member to complete the report before the overall pilot is sent to the membership in May. That should help identify areas where improvement can be made before the form is widely distributed.

Capon said he hopes for the ease of use to translate into a good response rate for the pilot -- perhaps something akin to the quadrennial drug-use study, which has a 75 percent response rate.

"Again, we don't think this should be a tremendous burden," he said. "For a typical basketball team, for example, in a really heavily recruited year, you might have brought in five basketball players as freshmen. Most of the time, you're bringing in three or four. Even in other sports like baseball, you might be bringing in seven or eight incoming freshmen. Football might be a little different, but then we're going to ask schools doing football to do no other sport."

Ultimately, the information should enable Division II leaders to get a better grip on graduation rates and help address the second part of the project team's mission, which is to improve graduation rates.

"We certainly want to improve our graduation rates in Division II," Capon said, "and this will give us a better grasp on where we are strong and where we need to put more effort."

An alternative way of measuring Division II graduation rates

The recommendation of the Division II Graduation-Rate Project Team for calculating a supplemental graduation rate:

a. The pilot form developed by the Division II Graduation Rates Project Team will ask participating institutions to provide the number of first-time, full-time degree-seeking students who entered the institution and received athletically related aid for a particular sport in fall 1995. This is the same information currently required by the federal Student Right-to-Know Act.

b. The institution then will be asked to provide the number of student-athletes in that sport who enrolled for the first time in fall 1995 but received no athletically related aid (included on the institution's squad list as of the first date of competition).

c. Next, the institution will be asked to provide separately the number of two- and four-year college transfers who enrolled for the first time during the 1995-96 academic year.

Add a, b and c to determine student-athletes who will be defined as entering.

d. After that, the institution will enumerate exclusions that are provided in the federal report (death, disability, church missions, etc.).

e. The institution next will provide the number of student-athletes appearing on the squad list in 1995-96 who left the institution while academically eligible to compete according to NCAA legislation. The institution will be asked to provide the NCAA with those students' Social Security numbers so the Association can attempt to verify the transfer status through the National Student Loan Clearinghouse. If a student successfully enrolled at another two- or four-year institution as a full-time student within one academic year, then he or she may be excluded from the previous institution's graduation-rates calculation. If the clearinghouse cannot make that determination, the institution will have up to two weeks to make the transfer verification on its own (it also may choose not to pursue the matter).

Add d and e to determine student-athletes who will be subtracted from the entering numbers.

Divide that figure into the number of student-athletes who graduated with their baccalaureate degree within six years (in this case, by August 2001) to determine the graduation rate for that sport for that class.