March Madness Takes Priority over Graduation
March 18th, 2010 | by Justin | Published in College Access
As a former college basketball player, I understand the difficulty associated with juggling academics and athletics. It’s no cakewalk–one drives the other. The young men and women who have taken on the challenge of participating in athletics while simultaneously obtaining their degree are commonly referred to as “student-athletes”. Sadly, due to the immense commitment involved with playing Division 1 Sports, the reality for many student athletes is that they are athletes first. For most, meeting the obligations of both worlds is a rigorous balancing act. Consequently, a good percentage of athletes, mostly black, are leaving their respective institutions without a degree.
African-American males playing Division 1 Sports in this country are suffering far worse from this dilemma than any other ethnic group in college athletics. While the NCAA is capitalizing off of the athletic ability of all athletes involved in high profile sports, there are far too many African-Americans not graduating college and the NCAA is doing very little to fix the issue.
Coinciding with the NCAA Basketball Tournament, The Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sport at the University of Central Florida released their annual report highlighting the disparity in graduation rates (over six-years) between white and black players on this year’s men’s tournament bound teams. The study reveals that white Division I basketball male student-athletes graduate at a rate of 84 percent while only 56 percent of black Division I basketball male student-athletes graduate. Furthermore, the study finds that 79 percent of the men’s tournament teams graduated 70 percent or more of their white athletes, while only 31 percent graduated 70 percent or more of their black players. To illustrate the severity of this issue, it should be noted that the gap in graduation rates has increased by 22 percentage points from the previous year.
As we meticulously fill out our brackets projecting which team will be crowned 2010 NCAA Champions among the pool of 65, let us not forget that the young men entertaining us are also sacrificing their education. More importantly, as this gap in graduation rates between white and African-American athletes continues to widen, we can only hope that the NCAA will consider investing at least 1% of the $710 million in revenue that it averages annually (90 percent coming from the tournament) into developing programs and initiatives that focus on ensuring that African-American athletes complete their college degree.
photo source: http://whitneymcd7.files.wordpress.com/2008/03/march-madness-picks.jpg