Pumping up graduation rates

Opinion: March 30, 2011 at 12:00a.m.

San Jose Mercury News: U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan has been speaking up lately about low graduation rates for student-athletes at some colleges and universities. We applaud his effort to bring attention to the problem, but there are better solutions than his proposal to bar basketball teams with graduation rates below 50 percent from the NCAA tournament.

Mind you, no school should be proud of a rate like that. It’s just that the system is more complex than most realize.

There are three ways to measure graduation rates — the federal rate, the graduation success rate and the academic progress rate — and they have varying results. Interpreting each is a challenge since the figure covers such a small number of student-athletes; teams sometimes bring in just two or three players a year.

A numerical formula can’t easily account for all the variables affecting a basketball team. (The formulas are more reliable for football teams, which are much larger, and for athletic departments as a whole.) Players transfer. Coaches leave and arrive, sweeping players out with them. Kids leave for the NBA — should that choice be considered a failure for the school?

Colleges and universities must do more to ensure academic success for student-athletes, tying coaches’ compensation to student performance and adequately funding academic support. And the NCAA must demand accountability, particularly for the worst offenders, rather than imposing Duncan’s one-size-fits-all solution.