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NCAA News Archive - 2007
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Centerpiece - What is the NCAA's jurisdiction on academic standards
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By Gary T. Brown
The NCAA News
The NCAA News
DOES IT INCLUDE the pre-collegiate environment?
YES. Not only does the NCAA have a responsibility to establish initial-eligibility standards, but the Association also is right to verify core courses and validate institutions in which student-athletes prepare for the academic rigors of higher education.
NO. While initial eligibility is the NCAA’s purview, the Association is not the accrediting agency for secondary schools.
Does it extend beyond college enrollment?
NO. Once prospects become student-athletes, the colleges and universities at which they enroll are responsible for their academic success. Though colleges and universities compose the membership of the NCAA, the Association as a rules-making entity should not meddle with academic practices at individual institutions.
YES. If intercollegiate athletics is to be an integral part of the educational experience, then the NCAA has a say in that experience. The NCAA should track student-athlete curriculum choices and take corrective action when suspicious patterns are identified.
• • • •
While the answers probably aren’t that black or white, the NCAA as a membership entity certainly attracts the spotlight when they’re gray. The question of NCAA jurisdiction in setting academic standards and expectations may in fact depend on who’s answering.
For example, when reports last year from a few universities pointed to academic fraud in the secondary-school environment, and when the press subsequently blew the whistle on so-called “diploma mills,” several pundits called for the NCAA, which they viewed as a cause of the problem, to take swift and significant action. When the NCAA did establish a rigorous review process, though, some critics — along with many of the institutions being reviewed — said the NCAA was sticking its nose beyond its academic authority.
Similarly, when a faculty member at a high-profile Division I school publicly questioned a colleague’s course that benefited an unusually high number of students, including some student-athletes, people again called for NCAA intervention. Others, though, said such cases are a school curriculum issue, and that the NCAA can’t legislate academic morality at individual campuses.
On the pre-collegiate end, the NCAA in setting initial-eligibility requirements has to walk a fine line between affording access to a broad and diverse student population and raising the bar high enough so that incoming athletes aren’t unnecessarily denied the opportunity for practice and competition. As a result, most academic leaders would agree that standards are not outlandish; almost all high school graduates ought to be able to meet them, they say.
Yet, state accrediting agencies, local law enforcement and the colleges themselves don’t always regard it as their responsibility when those prospective student-athletes who meet the NCAA standards through fraudulent means are exposed.
If no one has the authority to back those standards up, why does the NCAA take the blame when something goes wrong?
On the post-enrollment end, NCAA progress-toward-degree standards are based on research-driven benchmarks that put student-athletes on track to graduate. Some people believe those standards, particularly in the first two years, are too rigorous and thus tempt universities to devote more energy to keeping athletes eligible than acting in their best academic interests. Critics point to less-strenuous majors or bending institutional policy to favor student-athletes as behavior the NCAA ought to control.
But others argue that the curriculum is the faculty’s purview, not the NCAA’s.
On both ends, the NCAA attracts blame, appropriately or not.
The diploma-mill issue is a good case study. While the NCAA did not create the environment — nor was it populated solely by athletes — NCAA coaches recruited from it, and those practices raised questions.
What surfaced were cases in which prospects who weren’t making the academic grade at their high school transferred to another institution and made a miraculous recovery or passed an improbable progression of core courses, such as algebra, geometry and calculus, in just one term. Those cases and others were getting through the NCAA Initial-Eligibility Clearinghouse and institutional admissions gauntlets without triggering further scrutiny.
Were college coaches directing their recruits to quit their high schools in their senior year to better their academic prospects at a more academically forgiving institution? Were universities being “forced” to admit students simply because they met initial-eligibility standards without having had an independent evaluation of their academic credentials?
A “yes” answer in either case makes the NCAA culpable, said NCAA Vice President for Membership Services Kevin Lennon. “Those are instances in which the Association has to step in and assume some responsibility and suggest change,” he said.
Though the NCAA wasn’t the only organization affected by the diploma-mill revelation, it was the only entity to act. Lennon chaired a working group composed of representatives from the collegiate and secondary-school environments that within three months presented corrective legislation that demanded tighter processes and a shared responsibility among institutions to correct behavior. The new procedures shut down a number of the identified diploma mills and discouraged others from opening. The rules also called for college admissions officers who might not have been performing an independent assessment of admissibility to begin doing so.
“We need to own what’s ours,” Lennon said of the pre-collegiate environment. “If NCAA policies encourage inappropriate behaviors, or if the behavior of our own membership encourages inappropriate outcomes, then the NCAA has a collective responsibility to act. The previous policy seemed to work in some quarters to actually discourage timely high school graduation. That’s a bad policy.”
It’s not the first time NCAA members have run counter to the spirit of the rules for competitive gain, which helps explain the NCAA Manual’s girth. But while the NCAA took some blame for casting a wide net in the secondary-school environment for its new review process, the diploma-mill issue was one the Association couldn’t simply ignore, even though most of the students attending the fraudulent schools were not athletes.
Amy Perko, the executive director of the Knight Foundation Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics and a former member of the NCAA membership services staff, said the NCAA can’t be responsible for the secondary-school curriculum, but it can set the standards by which coaches recruit.
“The NCAA owns the right to set national policy and standards for participation to achieve the ultimate goal that athletics is fully integrated into the university mission,” she said. “However, institutions themselves have an even greater responsibility from a recruiting and admissions standpoint to ensure that they are recruiting athletes capable of doing work at that school.”
Lennon agreed that the diploma-mill review fortified the need for a shared responsibility among NCAA member schools. “In setting eligibility standards,” he said, “the NCAA relies on the judgment of independent local evaluators, such as the admissions officers on campus and the recruiters who decide which prospects can be successful at the institution as an athlete and a student. As for accountability, if those people fall short, then yes, the NCAA as a whole has some accountability.”
NCAA, institutional floors
It may logically follow then that NCAA initial-eligibility standards should not be the baseline standard for admission at a particular institution.
University of Hartford President Walter Harrison, who chairs both the NCAA Executive Committee and the Division I Committee on Academic Performance, said most presidents understand the fact that the NCAA merely establishes an academic floor.
“Presidents get that concept,” he said. “But there is some confusion among athletics directors and coaches who somehow think that whatever the NCAA determines becomes institutional policy as well.”
In the diploma-mill case, Harrison said the NCAA had to act to correct behavior that was beneath even the NCAA floor. He said while the Association is not an accrediting body, “we have legitimate interests in making sure that students who come to us have been adequately prepared, and we do that through core-course requirements and standardized test scores.”
It’s also a legitimate concern, he said, to ensure that the schools prospects come from truly are functioning as high schools. “So the investigation of diploma mills,” Harrison said, “did a responsible job of looking into the problem and identifying schools that didn’t even on a cursory fashion do that.”
Harrison believes most of the critics of the NCAA review process misunderstand its intent.
“We’re not trying to say there are certain types of schools that function better as high schools than others,” he said. “We’re simply trying to say that in the most blatant cases where something is called a high school but it really exists to provide a cover for people, we have a legitimate reason to investigate and make a call. I give the NCAA a lot of credit for saying it will take responsibility to ensure that students who are deemed NCAA qualifiers are minimally prepared for the rigors of athletics and academics as freshmen.”
“The NCAA and the conferences had the responsibility to act because of how ill-served the kids in those diploma mills were,” said University of Georgia President Michael Adams, who also is a Knight Commission member and the Southeastern Conference’s representative on the Division I Board of Directors. SEC presidents in fact were the first to alert NCAA officials to the miraculous academic recoveries at certain prep schools.
“It was clear that those prep schools were looking only at athletics skills rather than academics,” Adams said. “In that case, the NCAA and its members had a responsibility to act. In my opinion, a year-long English course from an accredited high school is quite different than a three-week correspondence course. The NCAA has a right to distinguish the two.”
Robert Kanaby, the executive director of the National Federation of State High School Associations, also credited the NCAA for its involvement.
“NCAA actions in the diploma-mill issue were right on point,” he said. “The NCAA took positive steps to correct the situation in a way that upheld the educational purpose and mission of the organization.
“I give the NCAA credit for realizing situations that need to be addressed, and for saying that it may have had a role in developing processes that have produced a system that has deterred these kinds of behaviors. Given that realization, though, the NCAA was prepared to take the steps necessary to correct the problem.”
Interestingly, the NCAA rowed the diploma-mill boat largely alone. Since many of the suspect schools fly under the state accrediting radar, and local law enforcement was slow to react, the Association addressed the issue at least as it related to student-athletes.
“Many of the prep schools aren’t public schools, so the states don’t have any oversight,” Lennon said. “Well, somebody has to do something…and complicating the fact is that some of our schools were complicit in this, so yes, we had to own that part of it. But we didn’t have a natural ally in the solution other than the high school federation.” Lennon also noted the Florida state attorney’s general pursued a specific diploma mill that had been exposed in the press.
“But few others out there by law seem to be able to provide any level of oversight, so the NCAA had to step in on a national scale,” he said.
Post-enrollment expectations
Just as NCAA rules inadvertently contributed to inappropriate behavior in the secondary-school environment, the NCAA — while it can’t set institutional curriculum standards — must have the same jurisdiction over its rules that have unintended post-enrollment consequences.
The NCAA has upped the ante in that regard over the past two years, implementing academic-reform measures in Division I that hold institutions accountable for their student-athletes’ academic success. Not only are the standards more thorough, but for the first time a penalty structure carries consequences for a team’s academic under-performance.
Hailed by most people, the reforms nonetheless raised concern from some that institutions would find ways around the new system so that the behavior it was meant to modify would remain unchanged.
“NCAA academic-reform measures can be effective if the universities buy into the spirit of them and avoid looking for loopholes,” the Knight Commission’s Perko said. “The NCAA is a diverse membership, and through a series of different measures and legal challenges, the Association arrived at initial-eligibility standards that are more liberal than previous standards. However, reforms have made progress-toward-degree rules tougher than ever. Everyone from the president to the admissions office to the recruiting coordinator must understand that they are responsible for recruiting athletes who are capable of succeeding academically.”
When that envelope is pushed, the NCAA is limited in its authority to act. Obviously, in egregious cases, the NCAA has its enforcement program, and now the academic-reform structure backs up its bark with scholarship reductions and other sanctions. But what if athletes at an institution flock to a so-called easy major or a friendly faculty member?
“There are limits to what the NCAA can do in those situations,” Harrison said, “but the real premise is that we are an association of higher-education institutions. We recognize that in our governance structure by putting presidents in charge. That is intentional, purposeful and important. Given all of that, the NCAA has the appropriate responsibility to assure that students who are admitted to college as student-athletes are held to certain academic standards, and then once they are in college they are held to certain academic standards to remain eligible to compete. We should hold our institutions responsible for providing those student-athletes with the support, encouragement and an environment in which they can succeed both academically and athletically.”
“The concept of shared responsibility is key,” said NCAA President Myles Brand. “What happens to the curriculum, including the grading at institutions, is the institutions’ role. The NCAA as a collective entity has no role in that; it cannot substitute itself for the authority of any of its members. They have the authority to set grades and academic standards; the NCAA will never review that. We are not a higher-education accrediting agency. We’re neither the accrediting agency for higher education nor the prep schools. What we worry about is once students are student-athletes.”
That’s what institutions must worry about, too. But enforcing the accountability is tricky. As Georgia President Adams said, “We believe in front-end standards consistent with NCAA policy, but no one wants to sit in judgment on another institution’s academic operation.”
Harrison said the situation the NCAA often finds itself in is that the Association is a policy-making body, but also a policy-enforcing body.
“So some of the criticism in these cases comes from members who say, ‘Gee, we just don’t like to have somebody enforcing the policies we approved,’” Harrison said. “That’s natural to blame somebody else, and the NCAA often is that somebody. But the best you can do is to be responsive to concerns, and I think the NCAA is doing a good job of that.”
To Lennon, the post-enrollment environment is no different that the pre-collegiate arena — the NCAA has to own those policies that influence inappropriate behavior.
“What is ours? Ours are NCAA rules that may have unintended consequences that discourage appropriate academic behavior,” he said. “Ours are rules that encourage the pursuit of eligibility over a quality education. Ours are behaviors among our coaches that may send the wrong message that eligibility is more important than preparation for success on campus. When we find that NCAA policies play a role, we appropriately need to step in.”
YES. Not only does the NCAA have a responsibility to establish initial-eligibility standards, but the Association also is right to verify core courses and validate institutions in which student-athletes prepare for the academic rigors of higher education.
NO. While initial eligibility is the NCAA’s purview, the Association is not the accrediting agency for secondary schools.
Does it extend beyond college enrollment?
NO. Once prospects become student-athletes, the colleges and universities at which they enroll are responsible for their academic success. Though colleges and universities compose the membership of the NCAA, the Association as a rules-making entity should not meddle with academic practices at individual institutions.
YES. If intercollegiate athletics is to be an integral part of the educational experience, then the NCAA has a say in that experience. The NCAA should track student-athlete curriculum choices and take corrective action when suspicious patterns are identified.
• • • •
While the answers probably aren’t that black or white, the NCAA as a membership entity certainly attracts the spotlight when they’re gray. The question of NCAA jurisdiction in setting academic standards and expectations may in fact depend on who’s answering.
For example, when reports last year from a few universities pointed to academic fraud in the secondary-school environment, and when the press subsequently blew the whistle on so-called “diploma mills,” several pundits called for the NCAA, which they viewed as a cause of the problem, to take swift and significant action. When the NCAA did establish a rigorous review process, though, some critics — along with many of the institutions being reviewed — said the NCAA was sticking its nose beyond its academic authority.
Similarly, when a faculty member at a high-profile Division I school publicly questioned a colleague’s course that benefited an unusually high number of students, including some student-athletes, people again called for NCAA intervention. Others, though, said such cases are a school curriculum issue, and that the NCAA can’t legislate academic morality at individual campuses.
On the pre-collegiate end, the NCAA in setting initial-eligibility requirements has to walk a fine line between affording access to a broad and diverse student population and raising the bar high enough so that incoming athletes aren’t unnecessarily denied the opportunity for practice and competition. As a result, most academic leaders would agree that standards are not outlandish; almost all high school graduates ought to be able to meet them, they say.
Yet, state accrediting agencies, local law enforcement and the colleges themselves don’t always regard it as their responsibility when those prospective student-athletes who meet the NCAA standards through fraudulent means are exposed.
If no one has the authority to back those standards up, why does the NCAA take the blame when something goes wrong?
On the post-enrollment end, NCAA progress-toward-degree standards are based on research-driven benchmarks that put student-athletes on track to graduate. Some people believe those standards, particularly in the first two years, are too rigorous and thus tempt universities to devote more energy to keeping athletes eligible than acting in their best academic interests. Critics point to less-strenuous majors or bending institutional policy to favor student-athletes as behavior the NCAA ought to control.
But others argue that the curriculum is the faculty’s purview, not the NCAA’s.
On both ends, the NCAA attracts blame, appropriately or not.
The diploma-mill issue is a good case study. While the NCAA did not create the environment — nor was it populated solely by athletes — NCAA coaches recruited from it, and those practices raised questions.
What surfaced were cases in which prospects who weren’t making the academic grade at their high school transferred to another institution and made a miraculous recovery or passed an improbable progression of core courses, such as algebra, geometry and calculus, in just one term. Those cases and others were getting through the NCAA Initial-Eligibility Clearinghouse and institutional admissions gauntlets without triggering further scrutiny.
Were college coaches directing their recruits to quit their high schools in their senior year to better their academic prospects at a more academically forgiving institution? Were universities being “forced” to admit students simply because they met initial-eligibility standards without having had an independent evaluation of their academic credentials?
A “yes” answer in either case makes the NCAA culpable, said NCAA Vice President for Membership Services Kevin Lennon. “Those are instances in which the Association has to step in and assume some responsibility and suggest change,” he said.
Though the NCAA wasn’t the only organization affected by the diploma-mill revelation, it was the only entity to act. Lennon chaired a working group composed of representatives from the collegiate and secondary-school environments that within three months presented corrective legislation that demanded tighter processes and a shared responsibility among institutions to correct behavior. The new procedures shut down a number of the identified diploma mills and discouraged others from opening. The rules also called for college admissions officers who might not have been performing an independent assessment of admissibility to begin doing so.
“We need to own what’s ours,” Lennon said of the pre-collegiate environment. “If NCAA policies encourage inappropriate behaviors, or if the behavior of our own membership encourages inappropriate outcomes, then the NCAA has a collective responsibility to act. The previous policy seemed to work in some quarters to actually discourage timely high school graduation. That’s a bad policy.”
It’s not the first time NCAA members have run counter to the spirit of the rules for competitive gain, which helps explain the NCAA Manual’s girth. But while the NCAA took some blame for casting a wide net in the secondary-school environment for its new review process, the diploma-mill issue was one the Association couldn’t simply ignore, even though most of the students attending the fraudulent schools were not athletes.
Amy Perko, the executive director of the Knight Foundation Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics and a former member of the NCAA membership services staff, said the NCAA can’t be responsible for the secondary-school curriculum, but it can set the standards by which coaches recruit.
“The NCAA owns the right to set national policy and standards for participation to achieve the ultimate goal that athletics is fully integrated into the university mission,” she said. “However, institutions themselves have an even greater responsibility from a recruiting and admissions standpoint to ensure that they are recruiting athletes capable of doing work at that school.”
Lennon agreed that the diploma-mill review fortified the need for a shared responsibility among NCAA member schools. “In setting eligibility standards,” he said, “the NCAA relies on the judgment of independent local evaluators, such as the admissions officers on campus and the recruiters who decide which prospects can be successful at the institution as an athlete and a student. As for accountability, if those people fall short, then yes, the NCAA as a whole has some accountability.”
NCAA, institutional floors
It may logically follow then that NCAA initial-eligibility standards should not be the baseline standard for admission at a particular institution.
University of Hartford President Walter Harrison, who chairs both the NCAA Executive Committee and the Division I Committee on Academic Performance, said most presidents understand the fact that the NCAA merely establishes an academic floor.
“Presidents get that concept,” he said. “But there is some confusion among athletics directors and coaches who somehow think that whatever the NCAA determines becomes institutional policy as well.”
In the diploma-mill case, Harrison said the NCAA had to act to correct behavior that was beneath even the NCAA floor. He said while the Association is not an accrediting body, “we have legitimate interests in making sure that students who come to us have been adequately prepared, and we do that through core-course requirements and standardized test scores.”
It’s also a legitimate concern, he said, to ensure that the schools prospects come from truly are functioning as high schools. “So the investigation of diploma mills,” Harrison said, “did a responsible job of looking into the problem and identifying schools that didn’t even on a cursory fashion do that.”
Harrison believes most of the critics of the NCAA review process misunderstand its intent.
“We’re not trying to say there are certain types of schools that function better as high schools than others,” he said. “We’re simply trying to say that in the most blatant cases where something is called a high school but it really exists to provide a cover for people, we have a legitimate reason to investigate and make a call. I give the NCAA a lot of credit for saying it will take responsibility to ensure that students who are deemed NCAA qualifiers are minimally prepared for the rigors of athletics and academics as freshmen.”
“The NCAA and the conferences had the responsibility to act because of how ill-served the kids in those diploma mills were,” said University of Georgia President Michael Adams, who also is a Knight Commission member and the Southeastern Conference’s representative on the Division I Board of Directors. SEC presidents in fact were the first to alert NCAA officials to the miraculous academic recoveries at certain prep schools.
“It was clear that those prep schools were looking only at athletics skills rather than academics,” Adams said. “In that case, the NCAA and its members had a responsibility to act. In my opinion, a year-long English course from an accredited high school is quite different than a three-week correspondence course. The NCAA has a right to distinguish the two.”
Robert Kanaby, the executive director of the National Federation of State High School Associations, also credited the NCAA for its involvement.
“NCAA actions in the diploma-mill issue were right on point,” he said. “The NCAA took positive steps to correct the situation in a way that upheld the educational purpose and mission of the organization.
“I give the NCAA credit for realizing situations that need to be addressed, and for saying that it may have had a role in developing processes that have produced a system that has deterred these kinds of behaviors. Given that realization, though, the NCAA was prepared to take the steps necessary to correct the problem.”
Interestingly, the NCAA rowed the diploma-mill boat largely alone. Since many of the suspect schools fly under the state accrediting radar, and local law enforcement was slow to react, the Association addressed the issue at least as it related to student-athletes.
“Many of the prep schools aren’t public schools, so the states don’t have any oversight,” Lennon said. “Well, somebody has to do something…and complicating the fact is that some of our schools were complicit in this, so yes, we had to own that part of it. But we didn’t have a natural ally in the solution other than the high school federation.” Lennon also noted the Florida state attorney’s general pursued a specific diploma mill that had been exposed in the press.
“But few others out there by law seem to be able to provide any level of oversight, so the NCAA had to step in on a national scale,” he said.
Post-enrollment expectations
Just as NCAA rules inadvertently contributed to inappropriate behavior in the secondary-school environment, the NCAA — while it can’t set institutional curriculum standards — must have the same jurisdiction over its rules that have unintended post-enrollment consequences.
The NCAA has upped the ante in that regard over the past two years, implementing academic-reform measures in Division I that hold institutions accountable for their student-athletes’ academic success. Not only are the standards more thorough, but for the first time a penalty structure carries consequences for a team’s academic under-performance.
Hailed by most people, the reforms nonetheless raised concern from some that institutions would find ways around the new system so that the behavior it was meant to modify would remain unchanged.
“NCAA academic-reform measures can be effective if the universities buy into the spirit of them and avoid looking for loopholes,” the Knight Commission’s Perko said. “The NCAA is a diverse membership, and through a series of different measures and legal challenges, the Association arrived at initial-eligibility standards that are more liberal than previous standards. However, reforms have made progress-toward-degree rules tougher than ever. Everyone from the president to the admissions office to the recruiting coordinator must understand that they are responsible for recruiting athletes who are capable of succeeding academically.”
When that envelope is pushed, the NCAA is limited in its authority to act. Obviously, in egregious cases, the NCAA has its enforcement program, and now the academic-reform structure backs up its bark with scholarship reductions and other sanctions. But what if athletes at an institution flock to a so-called easy major or a friendly faculty member?
“There are limits to what the NCAA can do in those situations,” Harrison said, “but the real premise is that we are an association of higher-education institutions. We recognize that in our governance structure by putting presidents in charge. That is intentional, purposeful and important. Given all of that, the NCAA has the appropriate responsibility to assure that students who are admitted to college as student-athletes are held to certain academic standards, and then once they are in college they are held to certain academic standards to remain eligible to compete. We should hold our institutions responsible for providing those student-athletes with the support, encouragement and an environment in which they can succeed both academically and athletically.”
“The concept of shared responsibility is key,” said NCAA President Myles Brand. “What happens to the curriculum, including the grading at institutions, is the institutions’ role. The NCAA as a collective entity has no role in that; it cannot substitute itself for the authority of any of its members. They have the authority to set grades and academic standards; the NCAA will never review that. We are not a higher-education accrediting agency. We’re neither the accrediting agency for higher education nor the prep schools. What we worry about is once students are student-athletes.”
That’s what institutions must worry about, too. But enforcing the accountability is tricky. As Georgia President Adams said, “We believe in front-end standards consistent with NCAA policy, but no one wants to sit in judgment on another institution’s academic operation.”
Harrison said the situation the NCAA often finds itself in is that the Association is a policy-making body, but also a policy-enforcing body.
“So some of the criticism in these cases comes from members who say, ‘Gee, we just don’t like to have somebody enforcing the policies we approved,’” Harrison said. “That’s natural to blame somebody else, and the NCAA often is that somebody. But the best you can do is to be responsive to concerns, and I think the NCAA is doing a good job of that.”
To Lennon, the post-enrollment environment is no different that the pre-collegiate arena — the NCAA has to own those policies that influence inappropriate behavior.
“What is ours? Ours are NCAA rules that may have unintended consequences that discourage appropriate academic behavior,” he said. “Ours are rules that encourage the pursuit of eligibility over a quality education. Ours are behaviors among our coaches that may send the wrong message that eligibility is more important than preparation for success on campus. When we find that NCAA policies play a role, we appropriately need to step in.”
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