The NCAA has announced it will collect graduation rates of student-athletes who should be part of the 2003 graduation-rate cohort so that it can publish the rates suppressed in the 2002 cohort reported by the U.S. Department of Education (DOE) last August.

The change in NCAA bylaws authorizing the Association to collect the data was adopted by the governance bodies of all three NCAA divisions earlier this year. This will mark the first time the NCAA has collected the data directly from its membership since 1997.

The DOE informed the Association before publication last August of the graduation rates of student-athletes who entered in 1996 that rates must be suppressed for programs in which there are fewer than three student-athletes on scholarship or fewer than three in a specific cohort who graduate.

"There is no question that the publishing of graduation rates, especially those of programs where academic success has been lacking, has been an important impetus to the academic reform efforts of the last 15 years," said NCAA President Myles Brand. "We cannot allow this decision by the DOE to blot the sunshine from how intercollegiate athletics is doing with its most important objective -- educating student-athletes."

Brand said that the DOE decision tends inadvertently to assist those programs that would prefer to remain in the shadows. For example, it is impossible to tell from the data published this year that four institutions selected to the 2004 Division I Men's Basketball Championship had graduation rates of zero, and 16 had rates of 25 percent or less.

"Academic reform has been successful with the overall Division I student-athlete population," Brand said. "We saw a rate of 62 percent for student-athletes -- an all-time high. But we continue to have problems in football and especially men's basketball, and the DOE's suppression decision makes it more difficult to identify the problem programs."

Ironically, the DOE decision runs counter to the intent of the 1990 Student Right-to-Know Act that mandated the collection and publication of graduation rates.

Brand noted that the NCAA had been collecting and reporting this data for almost a decade before the inception of the federal collection system, and he said that the graduation-rates reports have been an important management tool for university presidents in their efforts to improve the academic success of student-athletes.

"We have new academic standards in place for student-athletes, and we are about to finalize our incentives/disincentives structure that will hold institutions and individual sports programs accountable," he said. "Without continued full publication of the graduation rates -- especially those at the low end -- we will lose the ability to expose those athletics programs that are failing to educate their student-athletes."

The data collection that will occur this spring will mirror the collection that is made by the federal government. However, by collecting the data directly from member institutions, the NCAA will not be subject to federal restrictions that have led to the current level of suppression.

Additionally, the NCAA will add supplemental academic measurements to the reporting of graduation rates in years to come. Those measurements will take into account transfers into and out of NCAA institutions in the calculation of graduation rates and academic success. Brand noted that the NCAA membership has long believed that the exclusion of transfer data has been a significant shortcoming of current federal methodology.

Graduation rates collected by the NCAA and including the adjusted rates for transfers for the 2003 graduation rates cohort will likely be published in late summer of 2004.