Diversity

Planning committee assembled to tackle issues in membership

The NCAA office for diversity and inclusion has assembled a group of about 40 athletics administrators, coaches and representatives of key coaching organizations to examine diversity issues within the membership, including the lack of ethnic minorities in coaching and other leadership positions in athletics.

NCAA Vice President for Diversity and Inclusion Charlotte Westerhaus will chair the group called the NCAA Diversity Leadership Strategic Planning Committee. Former Ohio State University Athletics Director Andy Geiger was named as vice chair.

The group already has met once — at the NCAA Convention in Indianapolis — where NCAA President Myles Brand told members to set an aggressive agenda and be an action-oriented body.

The committee will conduct three more in-person meetings before delivering a final report at the 2007 NCAA Convention.

Members will focus on four general areas embedded in the NCAA strategic plan:

• Fostering diversity among student-athletes;
•  Promoting a climate of inclusion within intercollegiate athletics;
•  Enhancing equitable career opportunities for under-represented coaches, officials and administrators; and
•  Strengthening the support, integration and promotion of women’s sports.

Graduation rates

Student-athletes still posting higher rates than student body

The most recent graduation-rates data collected by the federal government and released by the NCAA show that student-athletes continue to graduate at a rate higher than college students nationally.

The 1998-99 class (the most recent cohort) shows student-athlete graduating at a rate of 62 percent, two percentage points higher than the student-body rate. That gap is unchanged from the 1997-98 cohort. Graduation-rate data mandated through the Student Right-to-Know Act began being compiled with the 1984 entering class. Every class since 1986 has demonstrated that student-athletes graduate at rates higher than those of the general student body.

In addition to the federal graduation rates, the NCAA also released more results from its newly created Graduation/Success Rate (GSR).

The most recent GSR release includes aggregate scores for Division I institutions. The NCAA released team-by-team and sport-by sport GSRs in December. Those data showed that 76 percent of Division I student-athletes graduate. There are no comparative GSR data for the overall student body at a national level.

Basketball

Committees agree to release RPI publicly for first time

The NCAA Division I Men’s and Women’s Basketball Committees will make public for the first time the official Ratings Percentage Index (RPI) for their championships. 

The RPI is one of many tools the committees use to select their championship fields. The first RPI rankings will be released February 2 and include games through January 30.

The RPI, developed in 1981 to provide supplemental data in evaluating teams for at-large selection and seeding of the bracket, is only one of many resources available to the committees. Qualitative factors such as games missed by student-athletes or a coach and a team’s performance in the latter portion of the season cannot be reliably measured by a statistical model. However, such factors are among the details of each team considered by the committees.

With most of the 31 conferences that receive automatic bids to the men’s and women’s championships beginning league play in early January, the committees decided that releasing the RPIs later in the month would make for a more meaningful reflection of each team’s season.