Social Justice and College Sports

Two weeks ago I was picking up a car at Enterprise Rental and had to talk to the manager. I thought I recognized him and asked his name. Sure enough, he had played defensive end for UW nine years ago, graduated and now managed this branch complete in white shirt and tie and spread sheet analysis. We talked awhile, and he mentioned how scared he had been arriving at UW as a highly recruited three star recruit-but with horrible SAT scores and miserable GPA. He spoke of how difficult and depressing the first two years had been learning to be a student and things like getting his first coat and tie and learning how to study and behave on the road.  “It was hard, really hard, but I graduated. Now I’m on my way up in the company.” That was his summary.

By historical accident, college sports have become an agent of social justice on college campuses. In this discussion I will narrow my discussion to issues of minority access to colleges, but could just as easily have talked about the college athletics contributions  surrounding women's access and achievement. Each year thirty to fifty young minority males who would normally not get accepted are admitted to colleges across the country as student athletes. All the algorithms predict that these minority males should fail. Yet six years later sixty to eighty percent of them graduate. Each year college athletics helps minority students who by all majors should fail in college.

Many state colleges can admit unprepared student athletes as a normal part of their mission. College athletes from disadvantaged backgrounds both from broken urban areas and poor barren rural areas come from underfunded and disorganized public schools. They have neither the social resources nor academic support to achieve the SAT/ACT scores or fluid literacy to get into good private or flagship state colleges.

90% of minority and white students from these class backgrounds will never graduate from college. Elite publics and privates have trace elements of non-Asian male minority students on campuses. The triage of American higher education requires high-standardized scores, high grade point averages and high quality essays. These schools traditionally have few minority males based upon the collapsed pipelines from high schools. The end result black male students represent 2.7% of the population at flagship state universities compared to 7% of school age population. Minority males graduate at the lowest rate of any groups in colleges.

Many of the black and other minority presences on campus derive from recruiting and stocking up high achieving minority students. These schools seldom recruit minorities from seriously disadvantaged backgrounds get to these schools. College athletics enters the scene in recruiting and trying to educate minority from ill prepared backgrounds who would be consigned to the waste heap by normal admission andoutreach approaches. 

The few students from these backgrounds arrive at college struggling to master the textbooks, unused to the workloads and behind from the first day. Without strong support they fail at astronomical rates and have the highest non-graduation rates of any groups in college.  

Paradoxically college athletics has figured out a way to recruit, train and graduate these students. On many of these campuses athletes comprise very high percentage of the minority males on that campus In addition these destined to fail students graduate at rates far beyond anything that would be predicted by their academic profiles.

The difficulty in finding minority male students prepared to succeed academically is well documented. What is often ignored is that in a number of flagship state and private schools student athletes can make up as high as twenty to thirty percent of minority males in groups such as African American, Hispanic or Pacific Islander populations. This far exceeds the population ratios for the student body.

This reflects the collapse of the social and academic pipelines to these schools of prepared minority males. This is not an ideal situation, and no one in their right minds wants minority males investing immense amounts of effort into athletes rather than academics. Many males do not have the support structure to build opportunities for sustained academic success and mentoring. They find success, identity and most importantly engaged adults in sports. They claw their way out through sports, and colleges who accept them have the opportunity and obligation to not just train them as athletes but as real students. Modern NCAA rules require prospective student athletes to take a defined list of college core classes with minimum grades to even be considered for scholarships. A desire to play college ball is linked to getting a high school education. Colleges have an ethical obligation to invest in them so that student athletes leave school not as ex-athletes without a future, but as educated young men who will contribute to their own and their society’s future.

The relatively high graduation rates of admitted minority males who would not normally get into college or succeed remain one of the unsung achievements and lessons of college athletics. The average black athlete graduates at a 17 percent higher rate than black regular students. Black student athletes still graduate at 68% rate versus 87% rates with white athletes, but the rate has gone up considerably as the reforms of 2003-4 start to take effect.  At the same time minority male student athletes especially in basketball still tend to graduate at lower rates than anticipated.

Most student athletes come into college identifying as athletes. They have excelled as athletes and received praise and success as athletes. A very high percentage of student athletes from disadvantaged backgrounds expect to become professional athletes. 70 percent of the basketball players in Division II expect to become professionals when they enroll as freshmen!

Left on their own as athletes without significant social and academic support, these minority athletes will fail at high rates. The much lower graduation rates at Division I championship schools reflects the importance of economic investment in support. Student athletes get in, but these schools do not have the resources of the will to invest in significant academic and social support to help the young athletes develop as students and change their identity focus. To be blunt, admitting disadvantaged student athletes without serious investment in academic and social support amounts to exploitation—they will predictably fail at very high rates.

For underprepared and disadvantaged student athletes to succeed two processes have to occur. First, they have to come to a new understanding of themselves as students. This requires getting the basic skills and confidence to compete in the same classroom with well-prepared peers. Second, the students need the academic and social support to get over the first two very hard years where they struggle like fish out of water.

Athletics achieves this by leveraging the student athlete’s passion to play sports just as new rules require high school athletes to take better classes and get better grades. Under NCAA rules the student must make progress towards degree by taking a set of classes in percentage increments, passing the classes and finding a degree over a three-year arc. Unless student athletes meet these rules they cannot play. These formal rules will only really work if the coaches strongly, let me emphasize strongly, push classroom attendance and education. If athletes experience lost playing time or practice time tied to academic attendances and performance, they will show up.

The first two years are critical for support. The student athletes grapple with succeeding in alien classrooms where the stakes and standards are higher than they have ever experienced. The introduction to academic classes needs to occur slowly.

We need to be honest here. Most of these athletes from disadvantaged backgrounds have failed as students. Academic classrooms are places of anguish and failure for them. They face an alien culture that many of their middle class students take for granted. So most successful programs start out student athletes in prep classes to introduce them to the demands of modern college classrooms. They take a trajectory of classes for small successes. This slow preparation takes around two years to acclimate student athletes into functioning as students in the practiced way many middle class or successful working class kids take for granted.

Good academic support programs build in strong tutoring, study tables. This takes economic investment to ensure students master basic skills and confidence as students to compete in the classroom. If the system works, then in their junior years student athletes begin to identify as students also, but also begin to realize that they will not be professionals—although this confidence can be invincible when third string corner backs still believe they will be professionals some day.

The other huge lesson and advantage lies in the community and structure that surround athletes. In even off-season they work 30-40 hours a week on athletics. This surrounds them with a community of peers and adults. The structure gives them a purpose and leverages the purpose towards keeping the student focused when they face the chaotic, strange and seemingly hostile academic world of major universities.

This structure and community can be replicated for non-athlete students. Programs that succeed in educating students from disadvantaged backgrounds do so with programs that provide purpose, strong initial academic support and a community structure—the very attributes that college athletes provides. The data on increasing not only minority but also all student graduation rates builds upon community and support structures.  

The academic and social support is not perfect and can be abused. But they help compensate for the very heavy and required work load that the athletic scholarship burdens

All the support in the world will not matter if coaches do not bring push connecting learning in the classroom to desire to play. Most college coaches are teaching at college because they believe in helping educate the student athletes as well as coaching sports and winning. In addition the coaches and universities now have strong incentives to push for academic progress because off potential lost scholarships and worse lost opportunity to play in NCAA tournaments or bowl games.

I am not naive. A high percentage of minority athletes end up in majors that look like dead ends, especially often maligned ethnic studies. These claims often do injustice do many ethnic study programs that have strong social science and humanities components. But it is important to remember that most college students end up in majors that do not prepare them for jobs. This is not the point of most social sciences and humanities; they prepare students to read with understanding, write well and think critically. They provide general adaptable cognitive frameworks for how to learn and master subjects in a wide variety of settings. All students from these backgrounds face short-term challenges in this job market.

The graduation rate of minority male student athletes has improved for the last several years reflecting consistently tighter and more aggressive academic reforms ranging from higher high school requirements to mandate progress to degree to new penalties for lower graduation rates that kept schools like Connecticut. The one spot that continues to resist reform efforts remains men’s basketball especially at mid major schools who use it to get tournament access. College basketball has by far the most corrupt feeder system, and the one and done mentality encourages less high school preparation, less investment in athletes once they arrive and leads to a culture of rampant transfers to gain playing time. Unfortunately transferring leads to lower GPA and a much lower probability of graduation.  The roots of basketball sport are now so compromised and so many schools have so little money for academic support that I remain deeply pessimistic that the universities will be able to achieve the social justice possibilities in basketball that present themselves elsewhere.

This combination of purpose, support and structure can provide the context for academically and economically disadvantaged students to integrate in and succeed in quality academic settings. This stands as a success, paradox and challenge of college sports.

What Should a Student Athlete Graduate Look Like Part II

Graduating from college is no guarantee of a job, and this applies to students athletes as well as most college graduates. The modern economy has made clear that getting a job is much harder than graduating from college, and many colleges are struggling to connect career preparation with traditional university generalist education. One of the major changes in higher education in the last twenty years has been the increasing importance for experience based learning of internships, extra-curricular activities or service learning or in experience based labs and exercises

We also have to remember the baseline entry level will shape the baseline of the graduates. The exact level of skill and exacting rigor and reasoning capacity may be tied to the mission of the university and level of commitment by the student body at large including student athletes. I don't’ expect the quality of knowledge and skill on average of many state college open admission students to match that of an elite private student graduate, but I do expect it to match strong standards of writing, reasoning and competence needed by business and life paths.

The vast majority of student athletes graduate at rates comparable or above similarly situated populations at their universities. This has been the great unheralded success of the NCAA and college athletics over the last twenty years. 

Graduating surveys support that graduating student athletes possess comparable levels of skills in the first three areas to their peers. Few university graduates master the professional path. It is even rarer to master the professional path given how hard it is for student athletes to get the advanced class requirements given their travel schedules.

I also want to acknowledge the real challenge that colleges face in bringing in a number of special admits each year to play athletics. Many of them are minority athletes from low social economic status backgrounds. Many come from broken urban or rural high schools and have not received the resource investment or education to be prepared for college level classes.

These special admits are admitted in clear knowledge that the admitted student does not fit the academic profile of regularly admitted students. These special admitted students will need strong academic and personal support the first two years to become a viable college students with their reading, reasoning analytic, math and class room skills.

These students come in identifying as athletes and aspiring to become professionals. Their reading levels may hover around 10^th grade and they have grown up seeing themselves as academic failures and athletic successes. The amazing thing is that with strong support from staff, a strategic academic plan over two years and relentless pressure from coaches linking their ability to play to their performance in the classroom, the vast majority of these special admits can grow into viable academic students as well as athletic students. Colleges are now graduating minority student athletes at record high levels after twenty years of sustained effort and making it in coaches’ interests to get athletes to class and move towards degrees. I don’t want to romanticize this, a large number of schools still need to bring up the graduating level of their minority basketball and football players.

The key lies in strong investment in academic and social support for this development and unremitting coaching support. The NCAA reforms are all aimed at changing coaches’ incentives to put more effort into pushing academics and invest in robust academic support.

The Broader Case for Student Athletes

Here I want to make a case about what college athletics can also achieve. Many students learn the most in their internships, extra-curriculars or service learning or in experience based labs and exercises.  I would make the case that student athlete graduates possess not only the three academic dimensions but have gained other vital capacities that will stand them in good stead for life and careers.

Here are four vital skill sets that student athletes graduates often have gained.

1)   Goal setting, self-discipline and time-management are inbred into the process of being a successful athletic student.

2)   Cooperation, self-sacrifice and team coordination and commitment are ingrained in athletic team competition.

3)   Sophisticated pattern recognition of situations that develop in real time. Athletes must master complicated patterns of play and real time opposition and understand, integrate and deploy this perceptual skill.

4)  Taking responsibility and making decisions that have real time consequences based upon the pattern recognition while under intense stress. This real world acclimation to deploying knowledge and judgment under competitive stress infuses all athletic activity.

The data on the cognitive and emotional attributes of athletes supports the maturing of student athletes in these areas. I found one of my greatest hopes and frustrations was getting students who are athletes to understand how these athletic driven attributes transfer to the academic classroom and to the life they will face after college. When young student athletes figure this out, their lives change profoundly. 

I cannot emphasize enough how much this second set of attributes depends upon a high and moral quality of coaching, the type that the recent Rutger's scandal illuminates what should not happen. 

I believe that if the student athlete graduates from college and if the combined endeavor of the athlete and the college have achieved three of the four outcomes above, then colleges have done justice to the student athletes and vice versa.

I also believe that the value added attributes generated from athletic participation enrich and deepen the quality of the person who graduates from college.

What Should a Student Athlete Graduate Look Like--Parts I & II

The NCAA defense of the concept of student athlete drives the immense efforts and progress college athletics has made over the last decade in increasing the graduation rates of student athletes. This increase has occurred in all areas and also led to pronounced increases in graduation rates of minority athletes as well as athletes in revenue sports. This progress is by no means perfect and requires constant pressure on schools and recruiting. The NCAA assumes that if a person graduates from the school, then the college has achieved the purpose that it sets for all entering students—a college graduate.

I want to discuss what this ideal of graduating from college looks like for a student athlete to see if it makes sense. Most media critics of the NCAA seem to assume that no student athletes graduate and that their degree is meaningless. This gives credence to their claims that the system is a “plantation” and based on “exploitation” because the student athlete, beyond playing what they love for four years, gains nothing of lasting value.

What should a graduated student athlete look like?

We need to remember that American higher education exists at many levels from private colleges to state comprehensive or open enrollment universities to R1 world-class research institutions. Each set of schools has different missions and different graduation rates. 

Students coming from well off homes and attending good private colleges may graduate at rates of 90 percent over a 6 year period while students coming from wildly diverse homes to open enrollment comprehensive state schools may graduate over six year period at 40 percent rates.  The NCAA covers all these rates, but reasonable rates across all levels suggest that strong state schools—which can be a proxy for NCAA colleges, will graduate students at the rate from 50-65%. This is a simple rate where you take the number of students who enter at a given year and divide it by the number who have graduated six years later. This simple division rate is what the federal government uses for its graduation rate numbers. This “target” rate drives the NCAA’s own efforts to graduate student athletes at the rates normal students graduate. The NCAA ideal would be to have student athletes graduate at an 80 percent rate.

This simple federal rate does not capture the complexity of student lives. While few students flunk out of the modern universities, many drop out from lack of money or lack of motivation or they transfer. Many drop out for a while and come back later.

Schools know simple 6-year averages do not capture the true reality especially at large schools serving diverse populations where the path to completing college can be nonlinear. This same issue impacts college athletes in a powerful way. Simply measuring the number of athletes who enter a class and those who graduate 6 years later tells you very little for two reasons.

1)   Many student athletes transfer and move on to graduate from other schools. In sports like men’s basketball the transfer rate can be over 30 percent. The federal rate misses this while NCAA numbers positively account for a transfer who graduates. 

2)   A very few student athletes leave to become professional athletes. This is not the norm but afflicts a few elite institutions. The effect is mitigated in baseball and football by rules made by professional teams who do not draft players until they have at least three years of college. Given the modern emphasis upon summer school classes and progress towards degree, a student athlete at the end of three years is often very close to graduation and well ensconced in a major. The NCAA does not penalize a school who leaves in good standing to play professional ball. 

As a membership organization the NCAA tries to respect the autonomy of different schools with different missions. The schools demand that autonomy. The NCAA gives schools immense freedom on their classes and graduation requirements but requires markers to ensure student athletes make reasonable progress toward graduation. This seeks to avoid past scandal where schools could go years without graduating their players.

What Graduates Should Know

Let’s get down and dirty and ask what a college graduate should possess and whether a graduated student athletes possess this. I believe we want to see several outcomes from any college graduate:

1)            They can read, write and reason. This is the bottom line of college, and many fine state universities face high school populations who possess real deficits in their ability to read and comprehend advanced prose, or reason and express it in writing. 

This miscarried outcome of modern high school education wounds the capacity of many college freshmen to reason or write clearly. Universities around the country have scaled down introductory writing and expanded writing requirements to adapt to this shortfall bringing students up to higher writing and reasoning levels. The reading and writing ultimately are means to a deeper end, the trained capacity to reason about problems.

2)            Students know basic math and can deploy sensible math including statistics skills to understand the world around them and use it to budget their lives and understand the realities of business and government. This remains the most fundamental failure of modern American education. Universities around the country have scaled down math requirements deal with the mathmatically illiterate populations they get from high schools. With the exception of technical professions that require strong mathematical literacy, modern higher education struggles to secure reasonable proficiency in applied math or statistics or even spread sheet math required by so much of modern life. Colleges strive for this but are floundering in achieving it for all their students.

3)            Reading, writing and math literacy—sound familiar? These should provide the basis for a college student to enter a major—a selected area where a student masters a field of knowledge and can solve problems within it using the technical and language based skills of the field. Many majors such as sociology, my own political science, anthropology, English literature, history etc. teach a student to reason about issues and integrate reading and analysis, but not necessarily practical mathematics, to engage serious problems. 

None of these majors guarantees a job or job preparation. 

Many social sciences and humanities rank very low on some the job preparation scales. Good majors provide the chance for students to become educated individuals capable of thinking through issues, reasoning about them, communicating their reasoning and writing about them. These skills contribute to multiple career and life paths.  Some majors such as economics, applied math, or modern empirical psychology provide a level of mathematical and analytical competence that can be deployed in many professional paths that differ from the reasoning and analysis of many social sciences and humanities.

4)           Professional competence that prepares students to leave school and enter into a professional career path. This is a more rare outcome, and the vast majority of college students do not pursue this route. Students, however, who enter engineering programs, science programs or information science or computer science for example can achieve this as they can in applied humanities such as design or art or theater programs.  Business schools offer undergraduate degrees but with the exception of accounting, most of the “skills” tend to be softer and lead to less efficacious reasoning outcomes than anticipated.

I think any student athlete who graduates as a true student must meet categories 1 through 3 at least—in this they would join the vast majority of American undergraduates.

Graduating from college is no guarantee of a job, and this applies to students athletes as well as most college graduates. The modern economy has made clear that getting a job is much harder than graduating from college, and many colleges are struggling to connect career preparation with traditional university generalist education. One of the major changes in higher education in the last twenty years has been the increasing importance for experience based learning of internships, extra-curricular activities or service learning or in experience based labs and exercises

We also have to remember the baseline entry level will shape the baseline of the graduates. The exact level of skill and exacting rigor and reasoning capacity may be tied to the mission of the university and level of commitment by the student body at large including student athletes. I don't’ expect the quality of knowledge and skill on average of many state college open admission students to match that of an elite private student graduate, but I do expect it to match strong standards of writing, reasoning and competence needed by business and life paths.

The vast majority of student athletes graduate at rates comparable or above similarly situated populations at their universities. This has been the great unheralded success of the NCAA and college athletics over the last twenty years. 

Graduating surveys support that graduating student athletes possess comparable levels of skills in the first three areas to their peers. Few university graduates master the professional path. It is even rarer to master the professional path given how hard it is for student athletes to get the advanced class requirements given their travel schedules.

I also want to acknowledge the real challenge that colleges face in bringing in a number of special admits each year to play athletics. Many of them are minority athletes from low social economic status backgrounds. Many come from broken urban or rural high schools and have not received the resource investment or education to be prepared for college level classes.

These special admits are admitted in clear knowledge that the admitted student does not fit the academic profile of regularly admitted students. These special admitted students will need strong academic and personal support the first two years to become a viable college students with their reading, reasoning analytic, math and class room skills.

These students come in identifying as athletes and aspiring to become professionals. Their reading levels may hover around 10^th grade and they have grown up seeing themselves as academic failures and athletic successes. The amazing thing is that with strong support from staff, a strategic academic plan over two years and relentless pressure from coaches linking their ability to play to their performance in the classroom, the vast majority of these special admits can grow into viable academic students as well as athletic students. 

Colleges are now graduating minority student athletes at record high levels after twenty years of sustained effort and making it in coaches’ interests to get athletes to class and move towards degrees. I don’t want to romanticize this, a large number of schools still need to bring up the graduating level of their minority basketball and football players.

The key lies in strong investment in academic and social support for this development and unremitting coaching support. The NCAA reforms are all aimed at changing coaches’ incentives to put more effort into pushing academics and invest in robust academic support.

The Broader Case for Student Athletes

Here I want to make a case about what college athletics can also achieve. Many students learn the most in their internships, extra-curriculars or service learning or in experience based labs and exercises.  I would make the case that student athlete graduates possess not only the three academic dimensions but have gained other vital capacities that will stand them in good stead for life and careers.

Here are four vital skill sets that student athletes graduates often have gained.

1)   Goal setting, self-discipline and time-management are inbred into the process of being a successful athletic student.

2)   Cooperation, self-sacrifice and team coordination and commitment are ingrained in athletic team competition.

3)   Sophisticated pattern recognition of situations that develop in real time. Athletes must master complicated patterns of play and real time opposition and understand, integrate and deploy this perceptual skill.

4)  Taking responsibility and making decisions that have real time consequences based upon the pattern recognition while under intense stress. This real world acclimation to deploying knowledge and judgment under competitive stress infuses all athletic activity.

The data on the cognitive and emotional attributes of athletes supports the maturing of student athletes in these areas. I found one of my greatest hopes and frustrations was getting students who are athletes to understand how these athletic driven attributes transfer to the academic classroom and to the life they will face after college. When young student athletes figure this out, their lives change profoundly. 

I cannot emphasize enough how much this second set of attributes depends upon a high and moral quality of coaching, the type that the recent Rutger's scandal illuminates what should not happen. 

I believe that if the student athlete graduates from college and if the combined endeavor of the athlete and the college have achieved three of the four outcomes above, then colleges have done justice to the student athletes and vice versa.

I also believe that the value added attributes generated from athletic participation enrich and deepen the quality of the person who graduates from college.