Nearly three years after the publication of "The Game of Life" challenged long-held assumptions about the place of athletics in the Ivy Group and at highly selective Division III institutions, a follow-up work published this week asserts that an "academic-athletic divide" continues to widen at those schools.

In "Reclaiming the Game: College Sports and Educational Values," Andrew W. Mellon Foundation President William G. Bowen and co-author Sarah A. Levin draw again from the foundation's expanded College and Beyond (C&B) data in pointing to a variety of factors -- including an "intensification and professionalization" of athletics competition -- that continue to fuel what they say is a growing divide between recruited student-athletes and other students.

Bowen also was a co-author of the 2001 book "The Game of Life," which generated extensive discussion following its publication, especially among Division III members who commented on the work during a 2002 NCAA Convention forum. That book focused on 30 highly selective universities in Divisions I (including the Ivy Group, as well as some Division I-A institutions) and III (including three research universities, seven coeducational liberal arts colleges, and three women's colleges).

The new book focuses more extensively on Division III schools, offering data from 25 members -- including all 11 members of the New England Small College Athletic Conference, as well as two additional research universities and four additional liberal arts colleges. It also again includes the eight members of the Ivy Group, but excludes the Division I-A members included in "The Game of Life."

Bowen and Levin say the most important innovation of "Reclaiming the Game" is that new data permitted researchers at The Mellon Foundation to distinguish between recruited student-athletes -- those included on coaches' lists presented to admissions deans -- and nonrecruited athletes, or "walk-ons." The authors say the data, expanded to include the 28,000 students who entered the institutions in 1995 and also including data for more than 132,000 applicants to colleges in 1999, permit analysis for the first time of the extent to which recruited athletes at the institutions perform differently than other students.

Among the findings:

Bowen and Levin also present data indicating less pronounced but substantial gaps in SAT scores for recruited male athletes in low-profile sports and for recruited female athletes.

The authors identify other substantial differences between recruited athletes and other students, including academic performance after enrollment, choices in fields of study, and tendencies to live and socialize together.

The book also features detailed discussion of what the authors identify as driving forces behind the widening divide, and offers a number of recommendations for reform at the institutional, conference and national levels.

Among those forces are increasing sp ecialization among athletes and professionalization of coaching, growing intensity in training and in competition leading to national championships, and an increasing concentration of academically talented students at elite schools during a time when athletes at those institutions increasingly are focusing more on their sports and less on academics.

The recommendations include reducing the number of recruited athletes, adjusting admissions criteria to require greater academic preparation of recruits, giving more attention during the admissions process to recruits' academic interests and motivations, monitoring recruits' academic performance, and holding both admissions offices and athletics departments accountable to underperformance.

Bowen and Levin also suggest that a new organizational option -- within the NCAA structure, if possible -- may be needed for institutions that would "self-select," or freely choose to adhere to the following principles:

The authors urge greater flexibility for institutions within conference alignments (encouraging schools to group themselves with compatible opponents on a sport-by-sport basis, especially in what Bowen and Levin term the "special case of football") and within membership divisions (by "loosening" restrictions that limit opportunities for competition with like-minded programs).

They also briefly review "reform" activities currently under way in Division III -- including the work of the Joint Subcommittee on the Future of Division III, which has resulted in a number of proposals for the 2004 NCAA Convention -- and advocate a "holistic" approach to achieve change, rather than "piecemeal" efforts that can be subverted and rendered ineffective.

The book officially is scheduled for publication by Princeton University Press on September 16. The publisher and The Mellon Foundation introduced the book September 9 during a "pre-publication panel discussion" in New York City featuring the co-authors and other researchers and contributors involved with the work.