Nationally, athlete graduation rates are on the upswing. Earlier this fall, the National Collegiate Athletics Association released its annual report on the graduation rates of scholarship athletes. Student athletes as a group continue to graduate at higher levels than the student body as a whole, and their graduation rate is increasing. Over a six-year window beginning in 1996, 62 percent of student athletes graduated, a two-point increase from the previous survey.
Keeping graduation rates high for athletes has become a point of pride among many universities, Georgetown included, and for good reason. The academic integrity of an institution rests on all of its students, athletes included. No one should be left off the hook. Perhaps more importantly, no athlete’s education should be a casualty of their athletic career.
The issue is a complex one. For student athletes at Georgetown, the graduation rates are lower than the student body average, but still well above the national average: 77 percent of student athletes graduated within six years. This number includes all athletes who played for Georgetown but don’t graduate. Basketball players Tony Bethel and Drew Hall, who both transferred over the summer, will eventually be counted statistically as non-graduating athletes at Georgetown, even if they graduate from the schools they have transferred to. Mike Sweetney, drafted by the New York Knicks after his junior year, will also count as a non-graduating athlete. Averaging graduation rates over a four-year period should smooth out aberrations from transfers and superstars, and Georgetown’s four-year average graduation rate for athletes is 87 percent.
Yet at Georgetown, as at the national level, this number obscures underlying differences between sports. Women’s teams tend to graduate more players than men’s teams. Georgetown’s lower-profile sports graduate well over 90 percent of their players. The men’s track team regularly graduates 100 percent of its scholarship athletes. The men’s basketball team’s most recent four-year average graduation rate, on the other hand, is 46 percent, down considerably from 63 percent in 2000. Historically, it has been even higher; during the 27-year tenure of John Thompson, 97 percent of the four-year players graduated.
The graduation rate now is even more striking when broken down by race. Only 30 percent of African-American men on the team graduate. In this respect, Georgetown is actually well below the national average of 38 percent. The low numbers of basketball players are clearly a factor in this dip, but the trend is striking nonetheless.
The source of these drops in graduation rates are difficult to pin down. The survey is limited and anonymous, and unfortunately, several more years will have to pass before the survey gives a strong indication if this is a fluke or a major shift. For now, the rate has dropped to 77 percent. If this is launching a trend, the University needs to be prepared to fight for the academic success of its athletes. Academic and athletic success are parallel goals.
