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Athletes' Eyes On Degrees

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The Associated Press

Published: February 1, 2009

OXFORD, Miss. - From the moment he arrived on campus, 320-pound tackle Michael Oher seemed destined to be a star on Mississippi's football team and a failure in its classrooms.

Oher was the son of a crack-addicted single mom, and as a teen could barely read. His educational record - 11 schools in nine years as he moved from home to home in Memphis, Tenn. - read like an indictment of a failed education system.

Four years later, at a school that graduates fewer than 60 percent of all students within six years, Oher has cleared every hurdle and nearly earned his degree - the only barrier to graduation is the NFL draft in April.

"I haven't struggled a bit in college," the standout offensive lineman says. "It's been a breeze."

It's a tribute to Oher's determination and character, to be sure.

His story also says something about the state of big-time college athletics.

Like a lot of other college athletes, Oher got not only tutoring help but a full range of academic support services throughout his career. At Ole Miss, 14 full-time staff members line up tutors for student-athletes, help them choose classes, monitor study halls and check attendance. Athletes at Ole Miss averaged about 1,000 tutoring sessions a week this fall.

Such services are not unusual. The past five years have seen an astounding jump in the time, money and resources spent on academic support for student-athletes. Tougher regulations instituted by the NCAA punish schools for poor academic performance, fueling a major spending binge with private and public funds on tutorial staff and athletes-only facilities filled with study rooms and computer labs.

The developments have been hailed by the NCAA. Yet faculty are disturbed by what they see as a shift that puts athletes ahead of other students.

Before the first kickoff of the season, The Associated Press began a survey of the 65 schools from the six major conferences involved in the Bowl Championship Series plus independent Notre Dame. The AP obtained at least some financial information from 45 schools about the resources they devote to graduating athletes.

The picture formed by the data is one of schools frequently spending more than $1 million annually on academic support, with some spending hundreds of thousands of dollars more in 2008 than they did in 2004, the AP found. Eight BCS schools reported spending increases of more than 70 percent in the past five years. Four - including the University of South Florida - increased spending by more than 100 percent.

Study Centers Rising

Helping athletes graduate has become its own profession. A group for people in the field has nearly doubled to about 1,000 in just two years.

Glitzy academic support centers are popping up everywhere. A few weeks after Mississippi State opened a $10 million center in November, South Carolina upped the ante with a groundbreaking ceremony for a $13 million facility.

Even some critics of college sports agree that when schools recruit underprepared students and demand thousands of hours of practice and travel time, they owe them extra help. Sure enough, the changes have helped push NCAA graduation rates to record levels.

"Now, when I go around and speak on campuses and speak to coaches ...they want to brag about how well they're doing academically," NCAA President Myles Brand said. "They want to show me the academic study centers. The coaches want to talk about and brag about their APR Academic Progress Report. ...A few years ago, that was the last thing people wanted to talk about."

But there's also a range of criticism. Faculty have raised concerns about oversight, and the growing disparity between concierge-style academic support for athletes and what nonathletes receive. They also worry growing academic support hurts America's educational values and that athletes never learn the lessons of responsibility that are supposed to be part of a full college education.

"It grates," said Kenneth Holum, a veteran University of Maryland history professor and chairman of the faculty senate. "Why are the athletes more deserving than the other students? We try hard to give all the students an equal chance to profit from the material we're providing them, and other students don't have this opportunity."

Advisers to athletes consider themselves educators. Several at North Carolina State emphasized they do a lot more than line up tutors. They teach study skills and offer career and personal advice. Increasingly, those in the field have graduate degrees in subjects such as psychology and special education.

Many are former athletes, such as Natasha Criss, who works with Maryland's men's basketball team. When she came to Maryland as a track and field competitor in 1988 there were four staff members working from cramped quarters in the old Cole Field House. Now she's one of the department's 15 full-time staff members working out of a sparkling suite in Maryland's Comcast Center arena.

On a recent Friday, Criss watched the team finish a pregame walkthrough at the Comcast Center and greeted players as they left the floor, laughing with and hugging them. But she's pushing them hard. In 2006, none of Maryland's four seniors left with a degree. All three seniors on last season's team graduated.

"She helps us pick our classes, she checks our classes. To be honest with you, our graduation rate is getting better because of her," said forward David Neal, the lone senior on this year's team. "She's hounding us to do our work, we have a mandatory study hall because of her. Her job is to make us graduate, and she's doing a great job of it."

A Conflict Of Interest?

Critics acknowledge that all students are entitled to academic help. But the rapid spending growth makes them skeptical the new money is being doled out thoughtfully.

A big question is oversight: Who do the academic advisers work for? The players? Coaches? The university?

"It's a straightforward potential conflict of interest," said Nathan Tublitz, a university of Oregon neuroscientist who works with the Coalition on Intercollegiate Athletics, an alliance of Division I faculty senates dedicated to academic reform.

Because programs need athletes to stay eligible, "it's in their best interest to find advisers to make sure they will be eligible, whether they do it the right way or the wrong way," he said.

Mark Meleney, president of the National Association of Academic Advisors for Athletics, estimates about half of academic support operations nationwide report to the athletic director, not the academic side of the university - though Meleney personally thinks the latter structure is preferable.

A standard reply from defenders of academic services is that cheaters will cheat no matter who's in charge.

Meleney knows that point all too well. At Florida State University, where he works, the advisers report to the academic side of the university. But FSU has been embroiled in a scandal in which 61 athletes were found to have engaged in academic fraud involving an online music course. It was determined that two employees in FSU's office of Athletic Academic Support services, which Meleney led, had enabled and encouraged the cheating. FSU failed to monitor aspects of the program, and the NCAA's Division I Committee on Infractions will soon issue its decision.

In the wake of the scandal, Meleney's contract was not renewed and he was reassigned elsewhere in the university. He no longer works in the field whose professional association he leads.

Another worry is that the growth in academic support services - and their facilities for athletes' exclusive use - is contributing to the isolation of student-athletes on campus.

At Maryland, the basketball players practice, eat dinner and then report to study hall in the Comcast Center, saving them travel time. That may help them bond and save time for studying, but it's an example of how the centers can further isolate players from the student body.

Then there is the so-called "clustering" of student-athletes in courses and majors.

A New Degree Path

It's not unusual to find former student-athletes with stories like that of Ryan Roques, who was a starting defensive back at UCLA. He was on a path to a psychology degree, but a class he needed to stay eligible conflicted with practice.

His academic advisers said he only had one choice.

"They said, 'Well, you've got to switch your major,'" Roques recalled. "I said, 'What major could I possibly be three-quarters done with if I've actually been majoring in psychology?' They were like, 'Well, let's see here, sociology or history.'"

Roques graduated in 2000 with a degree in sociology.

"A sociology degree, I don't even know what using that would be," Roques said.

After years of working within the system and rationalizing the treatment of players like Roques, David Ridpath, a former compliance director, changed direction when he became entangled in NCAA sanctions at Marshall University in 2002. He says he was unfairly used as a scapegoat amid accusations of wrongdoing, including academic fraud.

Now a sports administration professor at Ohio University, Ridpath heads The Drake Group, a watchdog that has proposed doing away with stand-alone support centers and moving athletes into the normal academic advising system.

"The big problem with these academic centers for me is very clear - and only because I lived it and I can say this from experience," he said. "The goal is to keep the kids eligible, and there's a big difference between keeping kids eligible and helping them get a viable college education."

THE PRICE OF EXCELLENCE

A look at what universities are spending on athletes since NCAA officials began a push for reform that has resulted in regulations that penalize schools for failure to graduate student-athletes, according to information gathered by The Associated Press:

•Twenty-six of the schools answering the query spent more than $1 million on counseling, tutoring and salaries in 2007-08, up from 14 in 2003-04.

•One school spent more than $2 million - Oklahoma at $2.4 million.

•Overall spending on academic support for student-athletes increased during the five-year period in 42 of the 45 schools that provided information.

•Twelve schools increased spending by at least 50 percent.

•Four schools more than doubled their spending during the period the AP studied. They were the University of South Florida, Illinois, Georgia and Kansas.

•Seventeen of the 31 schools that reported the number of full- and part-time workers involved in academic support had more than 100 employees involved in counseling and tutoring.

The Associated Press

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