Sports Gab:
Equal grad rates?

As the university and its athletic department released its grade point average information, along with it comes the question of graduation rates of CSUS student athletes.

While there are several problems associated with the numbers tallied regarding graduation rates, there is a lot more to what is shown on paper.

For example, the NCAA does not ask that universities release complete graduation rates. Instead, the NCAA, in order to make it easy on themselves as well as each educational institution, only asks for rates concerning freshman athletes who are on scholarship and exhaust their eligibility and graduate with the same university.

How many athletes do these numbers leave out?

Too many.

The grad rates do not include junior college transfers, athletes who need more than six years to graduate, and athletes who transfer, whether they have exhausted their eligibility or not, to another university.

At some universities, the junior transfer rate is not much to write about. At Sac State, however, it is a considerable number. Until the most recent recruiting period, more than half of the recruits brought onto Hornet teams were from junior colleges. When a program struggles overall, there is a need for the “quick fix,” therefore decreasing the amount of freshman brought into the program eligible for graduation rates under the NCAA rules.

The problem is not recruiting junior college athletes though. The biggest problem is that Sac State, as an institution, does not conduct its own studies on how many of its athletes graduate.

Sac State became a Division I-AA university during the 1991-92 academic year. With the first six years of Division I competition completed, the most recent report discussing graduation rates is a first. The findings are not stunning, shocking, or even interesting, really.

Within the six years of the study, 43 percent of undergraduates at Sac State earned a degree. This means that 43 percent of 1,210 eligible students graduated within the time period.

Well, the numbers would suggest that the athletes performed better in the same time frame, graduating 46 percent of its students. The numbers, however, do not tell the whole story. The 46 percent apply to only 13 possible athletes. In the first year of Division I competition, the Hornets only scholarshiped 13 freshman.

How can an honest evaluation be made?Right now the numbers are based on a small number of people. It is an unfair evaluation of a department that, seemingly, is still in a transition period. Sac State is trying to be a respected program. While the teams are not winning on the field or court, they could be winning in the classroom.

Softball coach Kathy Strahan said 80 percent of the athletes she has coached at Sac State have graduated.

If there is winning going on at Sac State, especially in the classroom, it needs to be reported to gain program respect from an angle other than winning percentages.