Blacks Playing Men's Hoops, Football Lag Behind in Degrees

 

 

Young black men playing basketball and football for the country's top college teams are graduating at lower rates than black male students at the same schools — despite having financial and academic support that removes common hurdles preventing many undergraduates from earning a degree, a new report has found.

While 58 percent of black male undergraduates at the 65 schools in the Power 5 conferences got degrees within six years, 54 percent of black male student-athletes at the same schools graduated, according to an analysis of the 2014-2015 academic year by University of Pennsylvania researcher Shaun Harper.

Harper said the graduation gap represents a wide and systemic issue worse than isolated scandals seen on individual campuses.

"It happens just about everywhere," said Harper, director of Penn's Center for Race and Equity in Education. "Generations of young black men and their parents and families are repeatedly duped by a system that lies to them about what their life chances are and what their athletic outcomes are likely to be."

Just as the attention of the sports world shifts to March Madness, the home page for the NCAA's website features data on how few student-athletes are drafted to play professional sports, promoting its efforts to educate college players. The NCAA men's and women's basketball tournaments begin this week.

According to estimated data from the NCAA, only 1.2 percent of college men's basketball players are drafted by the NBA and only 1.6 percent of college football players are drafted by the NFL.

"Although there is a great deal of interest in basketball this time of year, we think it is important to remind fans of what our mission is — to provide student-athletes educational opportunities that will last a lifetime," Bob Williams, NCAA senior vice president of communications, said in a statement to The Associated Press.

The statement also said graduation rates rose 13 percentage points in football and 15 percentage points in basketball for black student-athletes at all Division I programs between 1995 and 2005.

Nationwide, black men comprise 2.5 percent of undergraduate students, but make up 56 percent of college football teams and 61 percent of men's college basketball teams. Harper says college is failing a large number of these students, who also graduate at lower rates than student-athletes overall (69 percent) and undergraduates overall (75 percent) at these schools.