Jan 15, 2010 6:54:25 AM

ATLANTA – A discussion of the pros and cons of compiling and reporting academic data at Division III institutions suggested that doing so will produce a richer view of the role of athletics in educational institutions and generate more respect for student-athletes.

But participants in Thursday's Convention panel discussion of the topic also questioned whether such data needs to be reported beyond a campus or, if it is, who should collect it.

The Division III Presidents Council recently approved a two-year pilot program to collect data from volunteering institutions for use in exploring the possibility of calculating graduation and academic-success rates for student-athletes. The Council suggested in one of its membership-issues "white papers" that academic reporting might be used to monitor whether student-athletes are performing comparably to an institution's general student body – one of the tenets of the Division III philosophy statement.

Thursday's session briefly described plans for the pilot program but focused more broadly on the benefits and drawbacks of academic reporting.

A college vice president who oversees athletics and a faculty athletics representative said compiling and sharing data on their campuses played an important role in improving institutional support of their schools' athletics programs.

Data collection at Austin College demonstrated that student-athletes are representative of the student body academically, and a range of data obtained over 13 years contributed to building a more competitive athletics program, said Tim Millerick, the school's vice president for student affairs and athletics.

"It went a long way toward simplifying the question, do our student-athletes persist, and are they a part of the academic program?" Millerick said. "The answer was, absolutely, they are."

Dennis Leighton, faculty athletics representative at the University of New England, said sharing data widely on his campus increased support for athletics "administratively and emotionally" and helped improve the faculty's perception of student-athletes.

"Faculty have come to recognize the importance of athletics, and that we have good students who are athletes," he said.

The panel also included two university leaders, including a college president who doubts the value of compiling student-athlete academic data beyond campuses. Debra Townsley said Nichols College will participate in the pilot program to learn from it, but "our participation doesn't mean we agree" that Division III should collect academic data.

"We are getting bombarded with this at the state level, at the federal level, at the accreditation level," She said. "We're getting questioned (about graduation rates) a lot…the last round of reauthorization (of the Higher Education Act) was all about graduation rates. That discussion is going to be hitting us in such a huge way as we move forward…this is coming at us from all directions, and I guess I'd rather not see it come from one more direction."

Panelist Rick Wells, chancellor of the University of Wisconsin, Oshkosh, said the Wisconsin Intercollegiate Athletic Conference is one of only a few Division III conferences that collect academic data from members – a model that might provide an alternative to national reporting.

He said the best use of data may be for assessing and shaping athletics programs' impact on student-athletes' educational experience.

"I would argue…that we need to spend a lot more time in Division III talking about how we can make it very clear that the intercollegiate athletics experience is in fact a high-impact educational experience, and therefore puts intercollegiate athletics right at the center of the educational mission of the institution," Wells said.

The first data in Division III's pilot program will be collected this spring.