The possibility of creating a pilot academic-reporting program to compare graduation rates of participating institutions’ student-athletes with the broader student body was raised during last week’s Division III Management Council meeting.

The idea of academic reporting, first suggested in one of the Division III President Council’s recent series of “white papers” on membership issues, gained more shape during the Management Council discussion as members considered the possibility of setting up a voluntary reporting program, possibly in 2010-11.

“The program could be a mechanism for allowing an institution to determine whether student-athletes are performing academically in a manner consistent with the student body at that institution,” said Division III Vice President Dan Dutcher.

Presidents Council members will have their own opportunity to discuss the possibility of experimenting with a reporting program during their spring meeting Thursday in Indianapolis.

An academic reporting program could aid institutions in assuring “that the academic performance of student-athletes is, at a minimum, consistent with that of the general student body” – one of the tenets of the Division III Philosophy Statement.

“While we believe that is the case for the division overall, member institutions currently are not required to review such data, and no uniform method exists through which member schools can make this determination,” Dutcher said.

Obtaining such information also might better equip Division III to describe the general academic performance of student-athletes in any future efforts to promote the identity and attributes of Division III, Dutcher said.

The Management Council reviewed outlines of a pilot program that would focus on graduation rates for student-athletes, compared to the student body, as the key comparative criteria.

The NCAA already receives graduation data from institutions in all three NCAA divisions but does not require Division III institutions to identify student-athletes in the report unless they receive athletics-related financial aid as members of a team playing in Division I.

Eric Hartung, Division III associate director of research, told Council members the capability already exists to identify student-athletes in reports to the NCAA and that participating schools likely would be asked to do so using the definition of “student-athlete” that already has been established for Division III financial-aid reporting.

The resulting data would permit calculation of an “academic success rate” for each school, which would allow comparison of graduation rates following a six-year period for each class of student-athletes and students overall, accounting for those who transfer to another institution or leave a school in good academic standing before graduation.

“A pilot program would allow an assessment of the burden that such a program might place on schools,” Hartung told Council members.

Through no decisions have been made yet to implement a pilot program, Hartung told the Council that it could be conducted as early as the 2009-10 academic year.  However, waiting until 2010-11 would help participating institutions by allowing them to use student-athlete lists they began compiling annually in 2004 for Division III’s financial-aid reporting program.

Graduation-rate data would be collected between March 1 and June 1 during the academic year in which the pilot is conducted.

The pilot program could lead to consideration at a future Convention of adopting a reporting program for the entire Division III membership, though the Presidents Council made clear in its “white paper” on academic considerations that it has no interest in going  so far as establishing division-wide minimum academic standards, as Divisions I and II have done. That paper states that such standards are “not under active consideration” and suggests possibly amending the philosophy statement to “clarify that such standards are best left to institutional and conference autonomy.”

But the paper also calls for consideration of “limited reporting” that “would emphasize the comparison of student-athlete and nonstudent-athlete data within institutions, not between institutions.”

The paper likened the limited academic reporting to Division III’s financial-aid reporting program, but in a key difference from financial-aid reporting, academic reporting would be used only for informational purposes and no minimum threshold would be established for institutions to meet.