The NCAA has made another deposit in its bank of academic data supporting student-athlete success in the classroom with a first-time collection in Division II that shows student-athletes graduating at rates significantly higher than those revealed using the federal methodology.

The new measurement is Division II’s Academic Success Rate (ASR), a metric similar to the Division I Graduation Success Rate that takes transfer students into account but goes one step further by including student-athletes not on athletically related financial aid. The result is that the ASR captures more than twice the enrolled student-athletes as the federal rate, largely because of about 8,000 nonscholarship athletes being included in the NCAA calculation.

Using the ASR, Division II student-athletes entering in 1999 graduated at a rate of 69 percent, compared to a 55 percent rate using the federal methodology. Rates by gender showed a similar disparity, as female student-athletes posted a 79 percent ASR (64 percent federal rate) and male student-athletes a 63 percent ASR (49 percent federal rate).

"These data confirm the good news we were only able to speculate before, which is that Division II student-athletes are performing at an even higher level in the classroom than the federal methodology had indicated in the past," said Pfeiffer University President Charles Ambrose, chair of the Division II Presidents Council. "Also key is that the NCAA research includes nonscholarship student-athletes, which comprise a significant Division II constituency that has never been accounted for in the federal rate. As we suspected, a majority of these student-athletes are obtaining their degrees."

Division II presidents commissioned development of the ASR for largely the same reasons that their Division I peers called for the GSR — the federal rate does not accurately depict student-athlete academic performance because it does not reflect the transfer culture in higher education. The Department of Education’s own analyses show that more than 50 percent of all new bachelor-degree recipients attend more than one undergraduate institution before obtaining their diploma. Yet the federal rate does not credit institutions from which transfers leave in good academic standing, nor does it credit schools into which transfers enter and graduate.

"The ASR does both," Ambrose said. "We believe the new metric more accurately reflects the academic landscape."

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 84 percent of Division II institutions submitted ASR data from the 1999 entering class. The NCAA research staff eventually will build a four-year rolling average as is done with the GSR in Division I.

A sport-by-sport breakdown of the 1999 data reveals that 11 women’s sports and two men’s sports posted ASRs of at least 80 percent. Men’s water polo (95 percent) and field hockey (91 percent) were the highest. The lowest ASRs for men’s sports were in rifle (50 percent), football and basketball (55 percent each). The latter two, however, were still 10 percentage points higher than their respective federal rates.

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 1999 entering class outperformed their student-body counterparts by nine percentage points (55 percent to 46 percent), a one-percentage-point increase from the 1998 comparisons. 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 41 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).