Data collected in an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation-funded study involving Division III institutions again indicate a gap in class rank between male student-athletes and nonathletes.

Differences in college class rank between female student-athletes and nonathletes were relatively modest again for students who entered the 77 schools participating in the study during 2006-07, compared to those who entered in 2005-06, according to the College Sports Project.

However, male athletes who began classes in 2006-07 posted a class rank 9 percentile points lower at the end of their first year of college when compared with their nonathlete counterparts, according to a CSP news release posted today on the project’s Web site. Recruited male athletes – who constitute about two-third of all male athletes at the Division III schools – ranked 6 percentile points lower as a group than nonrecruited male athletes.

The findings are from the second in a series of CSP reports to presidents of the participating schools, which CSP describes as institutions “committed to strengthening the bonds between intercollegiate athletics and educational values.” The research is being conducted in conjunction with the project’s “representativeness project,” which seeks to collect data for use in measuring progress toward ensuring that athletes are representative of institutions’ student bodies.

The reports compare college athletes and nonathletes at those schools on analyses of measures of academic performance. Data were collected from more than 70 schools. There are 429 active Division III member schools.

The data also indicate that differences in average class rank between athletes and nonathletes shrank by 1 percentile point during the second year of college for the class that entered in 2005-06 – possibly suggesting that athletes gradually make positive adjustments to the demands of academic life.

Women athletes in both the 2005-06 and 2006-07 cohorts fared better than their male counterparts, and nonrecruited athletes of both genders had GPAs only slightly below those of nonathletes.

CSP also reported that students at participating institutions identified as “highly selective” exhibit the greatest differences in grades between athletes and nonathletes, especially for male students. On the other hand, at 15 institutions that are less selective academically, the study found no academic underperformance by intercollegiate athletes.

Students participating in some specific sports had higher class ranks than nonathletes. For example, both men’s and women’s cross country yielded higher average percentile class ranks, and men’s tennis, women’s soccer and women’s track also ranked relatively high on academic outcomes.

The CSP reports, titled “Representativeness of College Athletes,” are products of a five-year longitudinal study of students at the participating institutions, and funded by a grant from the Mellon Foundation. The project’s first report was released in December 2007.

Division III institutions do not report academic data for student-athletes to the NCAA, as Divisions I and II do.  However, the importance of academic performance is addressed in the Division III philosophy statement , which states that “institutions assure that academic performance of student-athletes is, at a minimum, consistent with that of the general student body.”

A 2008 survey of the entire Division III membership indicated strong continuing support for that statement.  Most respondents also said institutions should set their own standards for satisfactory academic performance.

The NCAA Presidents Council, in one of its recent “white papers” addressing membership issues (titled “Academic Considerations”), suggested the possibility of establishing limited reporting of student-athlete academic performance in Division III, to enable comparison of athletes and nonathletes within institutions.

The new CSP findings are based on analyses for nearly 40,000 students who entered college in 2005-06, and for a similar group of students who entered college in 2006-07. Approximately 25 percent of the students at these relatively small colleges are intercollegiate athletes, and around 17 percent of all students are athletes who were recruited to play on athletics teams.

“The data reviewed to date begin to provide insights about possible changes over time,” Middlebury mathematics professor John Emerson, the study’s principal investigator, said in the CSP news release. “By examining their students’ progress throughout their college years, and by comparing different student cohorts, college presidents will be able to see whether trends at their own institution are in the desired direction.”

Emerson noted that the longitudinal nature of the latest data presents analytical challenges for the CSP research team at Northwestern University. For example, can differences in college GPA between athletes and nonathletes be explained by differences in their incoming educational characteristics or by factors they experience while enrolled in college?

Preliminary analyses with regression models that incorporate many variables about the students and their backgrounds suggest that high school SAT scores, grades, the high school attended, gender, and race and ethnicity do not fully account for the differences in college performance between athletes and nonathletes.

Instead, a significant part of the difference may be ascribed to what researchers have termed “underperformance” by athletes. The CSP defines underperformance for a student group as the difference between the average GPA observed for that group and the average GPA that is predicted based on the students’ test scores, grades and other prior characteristics.

Research by other investigators has found that the time athletes spend on their sport does not account for the differences in grades either. This year’s new data support that finding by revealing that nonrecruited athletes often do as well or better academically than their nonathlete counterparts.

Emerson notes that some findings remain puzzling, and that future data and analyses may shed further light on these questions.

The new report is intended for presidents of the participating institutions, but the research team also presented findings at a recent meeting of the Association of American Colleges and Universities.

“Providing information to leaders in higher education about the impact of athletics on educational outcomes continues to be a primary goal of the project,” said Rachelle L. Brooks, who directs CSP’s Center for Data Collection and Analysis, housed at Northwestern.