Today’s Wall Street Journal has fantastic article highlighting the upcoming change in the NCAA enforcing college graduation rates.  The article re-enforces our mantra at NCSA that you are not making a 4 year decision.  You are making a 40 year decision.  Athletes need to be looking at colleges that are serious about graduating their players.  Our power ranking point to university’s with success at graduating athletes for every division level.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB120589156486247445.html?mod=googlenews_wsj

The college-sports sanctioning body is toughening up on schools that fail to meet minimum academic standards. The NCAA has long had its Graduation Success Rate (GSR), a six-year rolling average that measures how successful schools are at graduating athletes. And this is the fourth year of the Academic Progress Rate (APR), a more real-time measure of an athletic department’s academic progress. When the new APR numbers come out in May, schools that fall short will, for the first time, suffer increasingly harsh penalties, including lost scholarships and, if they’re chronic laggards, banishment from the postseason tournaments and bowl games that are their financial lifeblood.

Dr. Tublitz, co-chairman of the Coalition on Intercollegiate Athletics, has concerns that the APR -- like many of the rules that govern recruiting, scholarships and eligibility -- will become for schools just another game of "catch us if you can." Furthermore, he worries that as the APR’s true consequences are realized, schools will lobby the NCAA to water it down or make exceptions.

The NCAA insists that it’s serious about enforcing the new standards, regardless of a team’s national ranking. "This is a real-time measure that has a component of accountability that’s tied to consequences," said Kevin Lennon, the NCAA’s vice president for membership services. "That’s unique. We have not had this before."

Mr. Lennon also said that the new penalties will carry "a broader recognition" for teams that perform poorly in the classroom. "We feel that under these new measures, they’ll want to avoid being labeled as underperforming," he said. "And they want to avoid the penalties that will impact their ability to compete."

More important, schools aren’t doing these kids any favors by admitting them when it’s unlikely that they will succeed academically. They come here and see an incredibly fancy locker room with individual TV screens, air conditioning and videogames. They go in and see the new football stadium and the new $200 million basketball arena.

"They come here and are treated like royalty. Until they break a leg or get put on the second string and then they get set aside. Many don’t earn a degree. They don’t have the training or the skills to be independent after they leave the university. They’re lost."

As educators, we need to make sure that those kids from underprivileged backgrounds are given the skills to achieve their potential. We need to put more resources into that group of students."

-Brian