The issue of Division II graduation rates presents a classic NCAA dilemma.

On one hand, there is the documented national problem -- a federally mandated report showing that Division II student-athletes who receive athletically related financial aid graduate at a rate of only 49 percent. On the other is a potential solution -- an alternate NCAA study that would measure all athletics participants and produce a better indication of the academic outcomes of Division II student-athletes.

The dilemma: The alternate study can be accomplished only if the personnel-strapped Division II membership is willing to devote more time and effort beyond that which already is required by the federal study. While most administrators might agree that the whole of Division II is tarnished, perhaps unfairly, by the methodology of the federal report, the question is whether the issue is perceived as enough of a problem on individual campuses to generate the energy to develop the alternate report.

The answer to that question should come soon as the membership receives and completes the forms for a pilot study. Those forms and instructions were mailed in mid-May and are to be returned to the national office by July 1. Data should be available for analysis by October, and a report will be made to the 2003 Convention in January. For an explanation of how the pilot will work, see the March 4 issue of The NCAA News.

As the examination unfolds, the response rate will be a critical piece of information.

"If the rate of response is high or low, that will say something about the membership's enthusiasm for this project," said Mike L. Racy, Division II chief of staff. "If it's somewhere in the middle, that could lead to a discussion of whether an annual study should be conducted on a voluntary or involuntary basis."

Ease of use

Certainly the hope is that response will be high and that the program can be voluntary. To help that mindset along, the Division II Graduation Rates Project Team has worked hard to streamline the form and ease the reporting burden. Tony Capon, chair of the project team, participated in a test run of the study with other project team members and was encouraged by his experience.

"What I did seemed to work fairly easily," said Capon, faculty athletics representative at the University of Pittsburgh, Johnstown.

He asked the institution's compliance officer to provide squad lists, and he highlighted the names that fit in the appropriate cohort. He then provided that information to the registrar's office, asking it to identify the graduates (and when they graduated), along with academic histories for those who did not.

"It was pretty easy to look at the academic histories of the student-athletes who didn't graduate and figure out if they left in good academic standing," he said. "I didn't spend a lot of time -- probably two hours doing eight sports. I thought it was going to be a lot more burdensome than it really was."

More numbers

The project team's test run, which came to be known as the "pilot of the pilot," yielded several pieces of useful information and validated at least the potential of an alternate report.

Ten institutions participated and provided information on 184 entering freshmen and 61 incoming transfer students. Of the 184 entering freshmen, only 104 received athletically related financial aid and would be tracked by the federal study. That meant -- for a limited group of institutions providing information on a limited number of sports -- that the proposed approach would expand the number of students being tracked by 136 percent (the 104 on aid who are currently reported, plus an additional 141 not on aid and transferring in).

"That's interesting," said Todd A. Petr, NCAA director of research. "You see those additional 141 people, more than doubling the total number by the new calculations. We're adding a lot of people."

That figure is so striking that it adds another dimension to the examination. If more than half of Division II participants are transfers or are not receiving athletically related aid, isn't it in the best interests of the division to measure their academic success, regardless of whether it may help repair an image problem?

"This is not fluff," Racy said. "I think that there has to be a recognition that the outcome could be different than what we think it will be going in. But it looks like we'll be tracking twice as many student-athletes as before, so whether the results are 15 percent better or 15 percent worse, at least they will be more accurate."

Better rate?

If the pilot of the pilot is an indication, the results will be better, although it's too early to say how much better. In that limited study, the graduation rate was 60 percent when incoming transfers and student-athletes not receiving athletically related aid were included. When NCAA-eligible outgoing transfers who enrolled elsewhere within a year of departure were included, the figure went up to 65 percent.

However, Petr said the results of the larger study may vary substantially from the preliminary one. One potential distortion in the small study involves the purposeful selection of sports with large squad sizes. As a result, basketball -- the sport with the lowest graduation rate -- was underrepresented. Many other factors, among them the small sample size and a non-random selection of participants, also could skew the results. That is not surprising since the primary purpose of the preliminary pilot was to assess the utility of the form, not to collect representative data.

"The direction of the early study is probably right," Petr said, "but I would wait for the overall pilot before making any judgments on how much the rates might improve."

Transfers out

The preliminary study also revealed encouraging information about the academic performance of student-athletes who transfer out and about the ability to track those athletes through the National Student Loan Clearinghouse.

In all, 35 student-athletes in the preliminary study transferred out while NCAA-eligible. Under the federal approach, all of them would count against their original institution as not having graduated.

However, the membership has long contended that such an approach is unfair since an institution should not be penalized for student-athletes who were not academic liabilities at the time of their transfer. The question then becomes what constitutes the standard for exclusion: being NCAA-eligible upon departure or being NCAA-eligible and re-enrolling at another school within a year of leaving?

The NSLC database was able to track 33 of the 35 departing students -- all but two international students. Of those 33, 27 re-enrolled at another two-year or four-year institution, 21 of them within one year.

As the overall pilot is reviewed, the NSLC data will be analyzed closely to see if a high percentage of student-athletes who transfer out while NCAA-eligible subsequently enroll at another institution; if so, that could suggest any student-athlete who transfers out while NCAA-eligible should be excluded from the graduation-rate computation. (Those who transfer out while not eligible would be counted as having not graduated.)

Acknowledgement of problem

Add all of the benefits together, and the case for the alternate study seems persuasive.

However, the question remains whether the Division II membership regards its low graduation rate as a problem. An image survey of Division II conducted last year revealed that 61 percent of the membership believes Division II graduation rates are good to outstanding. No less than 92 percent of those surveyed believe that Division II rates are the same as or better than Division I, an amazing figure considering that the federal study has Division I scoring 9 percent higher (58 to 49 percent). When asked to name a Division II attribute, respondents cited graduation rates more than anything else.

Of course, all of that Division II pride in graduation rates may be totally justified. The problem is that the claims are not supported by one single piece of data.

"The way that Division II is treated in the current study does not truly represent our graduation rate," said Nancy Belck, chancellor of the University of Nebraska, Omaha, and a member of the project team. "We really do need to have the information from the pilot survey because tracking only scholarship students can definitely skew the graduation rate. We don't want to have the misrepresentation of very low graduation rates when in fact many of our student-athletes are graduating either as walk-ons or transfers."

But as vexing as the image problem is, Belck said the educational implications of the study are more important.

"Division II is known for its student-athletes," she said. "We want to do everything we can to emphasize the importance of getting our student-athletes graduated, and we want to reflect that we care as a division about students graduating."