Posts tagged University of Alabama at Birmingham

Last time we talked a bit about the dilemmas of the student athlete. Well, I heard from a varsity basketball player on the west coast who told me to check out a International Herald Tribune story about Stephanie Campbell, a Villanova field hockey.

Bill Pennington’s story makes all the issues come alive:

“As a high school senior, she had been thrilled to receive a $19,000 athletic scholarship to play field hockey at Villanova, a select, private institution near Philadelphia. But she had not counted on the 7 a.m. start of every class day, something required so she could be in the locker room by noon to prepare for a four-hour shift of afternoon practices and weight-lifting sessions. Travel to games forced her to miss exams and classes. There were also mandatory team meetings, study halls and weekend practices.

She was overwhelmed.”

What Stephanie Campbell – and so many other student athletes – discovered was that something had to give. In her case, it was about recognizing the business end of school sports. Stephanie’s mom, Kathleen, helped her daughter figure it out:

“So Kathleen Campbell sat her daughter down, waited for a break in the sobs and said: “Villanova costs more than $40,000 a year to attend. They’re paying you $19,000 to play field hockey. At your age, there is no one out there anywhere who is going to pay you that kind of money to do anything. And that’s how you have to look at this: It’s a job, but it’s a great job.”

Campbell, 22, kept at it all four years, serving as a team captain last fall while majoring in marketing. She is expected to graduate this spring.

“I’m missing the sport terribly already,” she said last month. “But it was a ton of work. Receiving an athletic scholarship is a wonderful thing, but most of us only know what we’re getting, not what we’re getting into.”

Campbell made it work but a lot of student athletes don’t. You can get a sense of the problem by looking at the data the NCAA assembles on the Academic Progress Rate (APR), and the Graduation Success Rate (GSR) at colleges and universities across the country.

According to the NCAA :

“The APR provides a real-time “snapshot” of a team’s academic success each semester by looking at current academic progress of every student-athlete.
The APR includes eligibility, retention, and graduation as factors in the rate calculation and provides a much clearer picture of the current academic culture in each sport.
The GSR looks back at historical academic success by measuring graduation of all student-athletes, including transfer students and students who leave campus in good academic standing.

Each Division I sports team receives an APR score. An APR of 925 (out of 1,000) equals roughly a 60 percent Graduation Success Rate.”

Remember only about 60% of student athletes graduate within 6 years.

The importance of student athletes receiving a good education – and the issue of graduation rates – becomes especially clear when you examine how many or few student athletes make the transition to professional sports. Of course, playing professional sports is a dream of so many student athletes – but how often does the dream come true?

Here are some sports and the statistics:
Men’s Basketball – 1.2%
Women’s Basketball – 1.0%
Football – 1.8%
Baseball – 9.4%
Men’s Ice Hockey – 3.7%
Men’s Soccer – 1.7%

Here’s a look at the 1997- 2000 NCAA graduation success rates (and federal statistics) at two representative schools:

You can data for all schools on the NCAA website.

One last note: college is a challenge for all students, not just student athletes. The NCAA is quick to point out that in general, student athletes do slightly better than non-student athletes when it comes to graduating. And they believe their new statistical analysis is more accurate and illuminating than the federal graduation statistics.

The NCAA notes that:

63 percent of Division I student-athletes who began college as freshmen in 2000 graduated within six years, compared to 62 percent of students at Division I institutions, according to the federal data.

In particular, African-American student-athletes are graduating at a rate seven points higher than African-American students in general (53 percent to 46 percent). African-American male student-athletes are graduating at a rate 10 points higher than African-American male students, 49 percent to 39 percent.

White student-athletes graduate three points higher than their student body peers, at 67 percent to 64 percent. This is due in part to the fact that the graduation rate for white female student-athletes is seven points higher than white female students (74 percent to 66 percent).

So I guess the best advice anyone can give is, study hard, play well, and do your best to graduate!