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NCAA 'Pleased' With Progress

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The Associated Press

Published: February 1, 2009

INDIANAPOLIS - NCAA President Myles Brand has made it a priority throughout his nearly six-year tenure: Schools have to help student-athletes in the classroom.

Overall graduation rates for athletes are at a record high, and schools are investing millions of dollars to attain satisfactory scores on the annual Academic Progress Report, an evaluation of classroom performance. Teams that don't make the APR grade face possible punishments of scholarship losses and, potentially, postseason bans.

The Associated Press spoke recently with Brand about academic support for student-athletes. Brand's condensed responses are excerpted below.

For those who do not follow college sports, can you talk about what the APR is and give a little synopsis of the penalties and why they were put in place?

You really need to have a semester-by-semester measure that correlates with a 60 percent graduation rate and we call that APR. The number 925 out of 1,000 correlates with 60 percent. We're now holding not just the student-athletes accountable, through their eligibility requirements, but we're also holding the teams accountable, and that's the first time we've done that. If a team doesn't have a 925 average, semester-by-semester, then there are going to be sanctions.

We've been phasing this in over several years, so the sanctions start with the loss of scholarships. Starting this year we're going to up the ante. If the teams haven't repaired the problems, if the universities haven't assisted the coaches and the players in meeting their academic requirements in an appropriate way, then we're going to start making sure that not only are additional scholarships taken away, but practice time - and we'll begin to hold teams out of postseason play.

Next year, if they still haven't repaired the problem, we're going to decertify the team. What that means is that no team in the entire athletic program can participate in postseason play if any team is so penalized. So if one of the minor sports teams is penalized, then basketball and football can't play, or if football turns out to have a problem then the baseball team can't go to the College World Series.

The most important final point I want to make is that our goal is not to sanction. In fact, I think if we don't sanction anyone, we're doing the best job possible. Because our goal, really, is to change behaviors.

The good news is ... we have started to change behaviors.

Do you think these standards are affecting the educational experience of college athletes and college sports in general?

I certainly do.

The Associated Press found that overall spending on academic support services has increased dramatically since the implementation of the APR. Was this anticipated when the standards were toughened or is this an unintended consequence?

I think it's a good consequence. I want them to spend money to support the student-athletes in their academic endeavors. These are good expenditures by the athletic department. When a university takes a young man or a young woman and it gives them a grant-in-aid scholarship to play sports, they undertake a certain obligation or responsibility to that young person to provide them with the best education possible. The obligation sometimes is financial, sometimes is attitudinal, but we're very pleased to see those movements.

Some critics point to clustering, in which athletes are pushed to take certain courses in a major that is seen as easy, as a consequence of the new standards. Does the NCAA view clustering as a negative event?

Clustering may or may not by itself be bad. For example, my expectation is that those who are interested in music, who are music majors, cluster in certain majors, too, and those who are interested in education tend to cluster in certain majors. But you have to make sure clustering hasn't risen to the point at which it really is problematic. And that could happen. The national office cannot go campus-by-campus, look in every classroom over every faculty member's shoulder to see what they're teaching and how they're clustering. That's the role of the institution. It isn't necessarily bad, but I think it is a warning sign that should alert universities to see if there are particular problems.

Is there an extra benefit for student-athletes because of the money available for academic services as opposed to other students, who may not have access to those services?

What we've always asked is for the universities to support these student-athletes in their academic endeavors. What's happened now, I think, is that the institutions, the athletic programs, the individual teams are taking this aspect of their requirement more seriously. So it's not a new benefit, it's a requirement actually of what we expect from our universities and their treatment of student-athletes. I think it's an obligation of the institution. The institution also has an obligation to other students, non-athletes as well, to provide academic services. How the university decides it wants to allocate its money is up to them. But the fact is they also have a responsibility to those young men and women who play sports.

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