The second year of Division II's Academic Success Rate calculation shows that student-athletes in fact graduate at a much higher rate than the federal methodology reveals.

The Division II ASR, developed two years ago at the request of presidents who thought the federal rate was flawed, is on average about 14 percentage points higher than the federal rate. The overall averages for the entering class of 2000 are 69 percent for the ASR and 55 percent for the federal rate.

By gender, the ASR shows male student-athletes graduating at a 62 percent rate as opposed to 48 percent per the federal methodology. For women, the percentages are 79 percent ASR and 64 percent federal rate.

The ASR is similar to the Division I Graduation Success Rate that takes transfer students into account but goes one step further by including all nonscholarship student-athletes who were recruited by Division II institutions to compete in athletics. The result is that the ASR captures more than twice the enrolled student-athletes as the federal rate, largely because of about 16,000 nonscholarship athletes being included in the NCAA calculation.

"The ASR cohort includes more than twice as many student-athletes as the federal cohort. This is one of the major reasons that we believe that the ASR is a more accurate rate than the federal rate," said Division II Presidents Council Chair Charles Ambrose, president at Pfeiffer University. "Even after removing all student-athletes who left eligible, the cohort is still two-thirds larger than the total federal cohort.'

Participation in the Division II ASR is an obligation of membership, though a penalty structure created for noncompliance will not be activated until 2011 so that schools have plenty of advance notice. That structure requires institutions failing to provide ASR data to forfeit Division II enhancement funds the next year. Further, schools that do not submit data during any two years of a five-year period will have to forgo funds for three consecutive years.

About 95 percent of Division II institutions submitted ASR data from the 2000 entering class, up from 86 percent last year. The NCAA research staff eventually will build a four-year rolling average as is done with the GSR in Division I.

Trend data are minimal since the ASR has been in effect for just two years, but for the sake of comparison, the rates from 1999 to 2000 were generally flat.

A by-sport comparison reveals anywhere from a 10- to 20-percentage-point difference in the ASR to the federal rate. In the major men?s sports, for example, baseball's ASR was 68 percent (50 percent federal rate), basketball was 56 percent to 45 percent and football was 55 percent to 45 percent. The latter two sports showed the lowest ASR among men?s sports.

In women's sports, basketball student-athletes graduated at a 74 percent rate in the ASR compared with 60 percent in the federal rate. In soccer, the disparity was 80 percent to 64 percent, and in volleyball it was 78 percent to 61 percent.

The NCAA still uses the federally mandated rate to compare student-athlete success with the student body, since to date neither the GSR nor the ASR has a corresponding metric for the student population. But even using the federal methodology, Division II student-athletes in the 2000 entering class outperformed their student-body counterparts by nine percentage points (55 percent to 46 percent). Breakdowns by gender and race also favored student-athletes by at least six percentage points in each demographic.

By sport in the federal rate, male basketball and football student-athletes graduated at a rate of 45 percent compared with 42 percent for the male student body. In women?s basketball, the gap was 10 percentage points (60 percent for student-athletes; 50 for female students).