This fall will begin the fourth year in Division I in which a comprehensive academic-reform effort is underway. Planning for it began even before I became president of the NCAA almost five years ago. Led by a determined group of campus presidents and informed by extensive, reliable data on student-athletes, the initiative is on firm ground and is making a difference.

To be clear from the outset, I have every confidence that the same determination among presidents that inaugurated this effort will continue to see academic reform to conclusion. Our target is a level of graduation success that makes clear intercollegiate athletics pursues the same mission as higher education — to educate students. Although it came as no surprise, it was pleasing to see the Division I Board of Directors unanimously issue a statement during its August meeting that “makes clear it will stay the course in its initiative to improve graduation rates.”

The idea from the beginning was to change the behavior of those engaged in Division I intercollegiate athletics. First, we wanted to ensure that student-athletes were entering as freshmen better prepared to do university-level work. We increased the number of high school core courses and improved access for everyone prepared to be a college student. We also set benchmarks for year-by-year progress toward a degree based on what nearly two decades of data told us would put student-athletes in a position to graduate.

Second, we developed a new metric to better calculate who was graduating when transfer students were included (the Graduation Success Rate, or GSR). As a result, nearly 36 percent more student-athletes are tracked to graduation than were included in the old Department of Education rates. But we also knew we had to have a real-time measure of how student-athletes were doing so adjustments could be made while a cohort was still enrolled. The Academic Progress Rate  now informs us term by term how well a team is doing in the classroom.

Finally, we put sanctions in place to make compliance and accountability real. In fact, over the last two years, about 190 teams have experienced reduced scholarships because they did not perform to a standard designed to realize a 60 percent Graduation Success Rate. At the same time, we’ve encouraged high performance through public recognition.

In addition to the term-by-term measurement and sanctions, we also have collected data that will lead to more serious penalties over time if teams develop a pattern of under-performance. These “historic penalties” will begin to come into play during the 2007-08 academic year as we accumulate sufficient data to determine how a team is doing over time.

In common parlance, the rubber is about to meet the road in academic reform.

As teams report their APRs this fall, it will be clear which teams are in jeopardy.  Generally, the news has been good. Over the last three years, APRs have been up in every sport on average except for men’s basketball, and a concerted effort is underway to improve scores in that sport. That is the type of behavior change those who have worked so hard in this reform effort have hoped to see. Most sports teams are making the kind of adjustments necessary to avoid historic penalties.

But not all the news is good. If there are no improvements from last year, the final year for the so-called “small squad adjustment” in the rates that served for three years as a margin of error in the data collection, 15 percent of football, 17 percent of baseball and 22 percent of men’s basketball teams in Division I will not have made sufficient progress to avoid the more serious historic penalties. Even worse, as the small squad-size adjustments (or margin-of-error adjustment for the size of data fields) are removed this year, the percentage of teams receiving either contemporaneous or historical penalties are 40 percent for football, 35 percent for baseball and 44 percent for men’s basketball.

College and university presidents may encounter pressure from coaches and fans, and others associated with those sports, to roll back the academic reform effort. You can anticipate hearing that this reform effort is:

• Too complicated;
• A flawed process because retention of student-athletes is outside the purview of coaches;
• Too general because it doesn’t accommodate local circumstances;
• Hurts student-athletes from low-income backgrounds; and
• Too punitive.
• Here are some key points to keep in mind as those arguments are being made.
• Intercollegiate athletics shares with the rest of higher education the primary mission to educate student-athletes, and the data-driven APR, which measures academic eligibility and retention each term, is the best metric available anywhere to measure whether teams are meeting that mission. It is based on the simple principle that to graduate you must meet a minimum academic threshold and you must stay enrolled.
• No one is in a better position to influence whether student-athletes stay enrolled than coaches. Retention is critical to achieving a reasonable graduation success rate, and coaches should use their influence to keep student-athletes enrolled.
• Local circumstances are important to consider when evaluating how well a team is doing, and the development of improvement plans will be critical for teams that find themselves below the APR cut score for historic penalties. The significance of these improvement plans cannot be over-emphasized. The NCAA national office will work with coaches and athletics directors to develop these improvement plans.
• Higher education has an obligation to address the academic well-being of all student-athletes, but especially those from under-resourced high school backgrounds. Intercollegiate athletics often provides access for such students, and their education may require special attention.
• The goal of academic reform is to change behavior, not to punish. But standards without accountability have historically resulted in little or no improvement.
• We owe it to all student-athletes to ensure a system is in place that demands academic progress and has an ultimate goal of graduation.
• All of us in higher education can be proud of the progress that has been made over the last several years. The goal now, especially in this critical first year without the safety net of squad-size adjustments, is to stay the course.

Myles Brand is president of the NCAA.