This season, 19 percent of the [NCAA basketball] tournament teams have graduation rates below 40 percent, according to The Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sports at the University of Central Florida. Across all 36 sports monitored by the N.C.A.A., men’s basketball has the lowest graduation rates, with fewer than two-thirds of players earning degrees. The Central Florida study released Monday highlighted a vast disparity between white basketball players, with an 84 percent graduation rate, and African-American ones, with a 56 percent rate.
March 15th, 2010 at 4:07PM
From the cited article:
“Our alumni over the years have told me that they’re so proud of the graduation rates,” Fleming said over a post-Mass coffee at Starbucks last week during the Atlantic 10 Conference tournament. “They don’t want to hear about Xavier, or any university, using students athletically and then dumping them without a degree.”
Xavier, one of the better college teams in the country, is entering the N.C.A.A. tournament seeded sixth in the West Region with a 24-8 record. But Sister Rose Ann Fleming is a perfect 77-0. Since she became the academic adviser for Xavier athletics in 1985, every men’s basketball player who has played as a senior has left with a diploma.