EDMUND BURKEBrian Kelly, head football coach at Notre Dame, recently said:
[A]ll of my football players are at-risk – all of them – really. Honestly, I don’t know that any of our players would get into school by themselves right now with the academic standards the way they are. Maybe one or two of our players that are on scholarship.
Kelly went on to say that “we have to provide all the resources necessary for them to succeed and don’t force them into finding shortcuts,” keeping in mind the great demands football makes on players’ time and the “incredibly competitive” nature of Notre Dame classrooms.
Kudos to Brian Kelly, who sounds as if he really wants to do the right thing.
But it will only be possible for Kelly to do the right thing if his football players have the capacity to do Notre Dame-level college work.
According to its website, 98% of Notre Dame’s undergraduates ranked in the top 10% of their high school class and the middle half of them had SAT scores between 1380 and 1510. I am not suggesting that athletes must have those credentials. Surely students with lower credentials can succeed at Notre Dame. But by the same token, not everyone can succeed at Notre Dame. All so-called at-risk students are not the same.
The NCAA has minimum admission credentials that member schools must follow, but those standards are absurdly low. For Division I, the NCAA employs a sliding scale – the higher one’s high school GPA, the lower his or her SAT score may be, and vice versa. For example, a kid in the middle of both scales needs a GPA of 2.75 and an SAT score of 720 to be accepted by an NCAA college.
Experienced educators have told me that an SAT of 1100 is considered the base for being able to do rigorous college work. Of course, there are kids who do poorly on standardized tests but have the capacity to do rigorous college work nonetheless. To demonstrate that, however, such students should have performed well in at least a moderately rigorous high school program.
How do we know if Notre Dame – and other colleges – are really doing the right thing? The yardstick the NCAA and colleges want us to use is graduation rates. But graduation rates, by themselves, are inadequate. If athletes are steered into sham classes – as was the case at the University of North Carolina – or into gut courses, graduation rates don’t mean a thing. In fact, very high graduation rates may just as easily reflect academic fraud or lack of meaningful standards as academic success.
As Jay M. Smith and Mary Willingham suggest in their important book, Cheated: The UNC Scandal, The Education of Athletes, and the Future of Big-Time College Sports (Potomac Books 2015), the best mechanism for ensuring academic integrity is transparency.
Smith and Willingham urge colleges to publish a list of courses that athletes take together with the average grade of all students in those courses. This would not violate students’ privacy rights. The particular courses students take are public information of a sort anyway – instructors and other students know who is sitting in their classrooms – and no one’s individual grades would be made public. But by comparing the GPAs in these courses with the average GPAs of other courses offered by the same academic departments (which should also be made public), we’d have a pretty good idea if athletes are being channeled into sham or gut courses.*
Colleges should also publish the average admissions credentials for their athletic programs. Suppose, for example, Notre Dame reported that it accepted thirty new football players last year, that 80% of them ranked in the top half of their high school class, and that their average SAT score was 1180. I, for one, would feel that even though those credentials are well below those of all Notre Dame’s undergraduates, those kids, as a group, probably have the capacity to do Notre Dame-level work. On the other hand, if only 20% of the football players ranked in the top half of their high school class and their average SAT score was below 980, I would reach the opposite conclusion.
Publishing this information would be powerful. As Justice Louis D. Brandeis famously put it: “Sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants; electric light the most efficient policeman.”
Who should mandate this kind of transparency? As a Syracuse alum, I’d like to see the athletic conference to which my alma mater belongs – the Atlantic Coast Conference (ACC) – do it. And there are good reasons for the ACC to take the lead in this kind of reform. The ACC includes academically prestigious schools such as Duke, Virginia, Wake Forest, and Georgia Tech. Moreover, the ACC includes two Catholic institutions – Notre Dame and Boston College – for which morality has a special importance.
Would this place the ACC at a disadvantage vis-à-vis the major college conferences? Perhaps. But some athletes and their families might take special pride at going to an ACC school. Some fans might take a special interest in the ACC; after all, presumably they like college sports because they want to see real college students on the field and on the court. And if the ACC took the lead, maybe the Big Ten and other conferences would feel pressure to follow suit. Or again, maybe not. But sometimes you just have to do the right thing anyway.
The ACC mission statement proclaims that the ACC strives to afford individuals the “equitable opportunity to pursue academic excellence.” The scandals at UNC and other schools demonstrate that it is not living up to that aspiration.
So how about it ACC college presidents? How about it ACC Commissioner John D. Swofford? Are your stated desires to do the right thing genuine or merely propaganda?
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* To be entirely clear, let me add this postscript. I am not suggesting that universities publish the courses taken by individual athletes but rather by athletes as a group. It would be perfectly fine to restrict the list to courses taken by, say, more than two athletes. We would therefore have a list of courses with a notation about how many total students took the course, how many were members of athletic programs, and the progams (e.g., football, wrestling, etc.) with which they were associated. No individuals would be identified.