There’s a reason it’s called “March Madness.”<\/p>\n
As the NCAA basketball tournaments tipped off, researchers at The Institute of Diversity and Ethics in Sports did a little research.\u00a0 They looked at the graduation rates of the 65 men’s and 64 women’s teams, utilizing a metric called the APR (Academic Progress Rate) which the NCAA uses to measure teams’ graduation performance.\u00a0 A perfect APR of 1000 equals a 100% graduation rate.\u00a0 If a team falls below a 925 APR – equivalent to 60% of their students graduating – they face the loss of some NCAA scholarships.<\/p>\n
The researchers found that women hoopsters hit the books as well as they crash the boards.\u00a0 57 of the 64 women’s teams in the tournament received a passing APR grade, and 19 programs have graduated 100% of their players.\u00a0 All of the #1 seeded teams have graduated 100% of their players, including Tennessee, which has famously graduated all of its players for years.<\/p>\n
But among the men, not so much. Although all of the #1 seeded teams received a passing score – including Kansas, which scored a 1000 APR – 19 teams out of 65 received a failing grade.\u00a0 Of the Sweet 16 teams, 4 of them – Purdue, Kansas State, Ohio State and Tennessee – are facing NCAA sanctions for falling below 925.<\/p>\n
Even more troubling is a 27-point discrepancy in graduation rates between whites (76%) and blacks (49%), a gap that is steadily growing.\u00a0 Five men’s teams in the tournament have graduated less than 20% of their recent black players, and two teams – Maryland and Cal – have graduated 0% of their recent black athletes.<\/p>\n
Yesterday, Arne Duncan, the Secretary of Education, got into the game.\u00a0 Noting that basketball is by far the lowest-performing NCAA sport, with 1 out of every 6 programs graduating less than 40% of their players, he is advocating making a 50% graduation rate a requirement for post-season play.<\/p>\n
We thought that sounded good.\u00a0 We called Vegas, to place some money on the prospect of that happening. They laughed at us; no one takes bets on things with odds that long.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"There’s a reason it’s called “March Madness.” As the NCAA basketball tournaments tipped off, researchers at The Institute of Diversity and Ethics in Sports did a little research.\u00a0 They looked at the graduation rates of the 65 men’s and 64 women’s teams, utilizing a metric called the APR (Academic Progress…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[73,114,515,783,863],"class_list":["post-109","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-5","tag-apr","tag-basketball","tag-graduation-rate","tag-march-madness","tag-ncaa"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quicksilverhg.com\/thequicksliver\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/109","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quicksilverhg.com\/thequicksliver\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quicksilverhg.com\/thequicksliver\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quicksilverhg.com\/thequicksliver\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quicksilverhg.com\/thequicksliver\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=109"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/quicksilverhg.com\/thequicksliver\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/109\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quicksilverhg.com\/thequicksliver\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=109"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quicksilverhg.com\/thequicksliver\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=109"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quicksilverhg.com\/thequicksliver\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=109"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}