The Real March Madness: Only Half of Black Male Student Athletes Graduate

Now that March Madness is in full swing, legions of sports fans are glued to their television sets, watching their favorite college basketball teams take it to the hoop in pursuit of the NCAA championship. Even the White House got in on the action by sharing President Obama’s bracket of matchups on its website on Tuesday. While Obama predicts the University of Kansas will earn the trophy, a shockingly high number of black male student athletes earning millions of dollars for TV networks and the NCAA never take home the real prize: a college diploma.

That’s the finding of a sobering report released Tuesday by the Center for the Study of Race and Equity in Education at the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education. The analysis is a follow-up to a similar 2012 report the center produced, which came to the same conclusion: Far fewer black male student athletes graduate from college within six years than other student athletes, other black students, or undergraduate students overall.

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During the 2014–15 academic year, only about 54 percent of black male student athletes graduated, compared with about 69 percent of student athletes overall. The black-male-student-athlete rate is below the 58 percent grad rate for all black undergraduate men and significantly lower than the 75 percent rate for all undergraduate students.

“Coaches go to the end of the earth to recruit players that they really want. They go to homes of low-income kids, and they sit on the couch with their single mom or with their two parents and tell them how they’re going to take good care of their son,” Shaun Harper, a professor at Penn and the executive director of the center, told TakePart.

According to data on the NCAA website, only 1.2 percent of men’s college basketball players end up in the NBA, and only 1.6 percent of football players make it to the NFL. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, a person with a bachelor’s degree is nearly twice as likely to be employed than someone who has completed only a couple years of college. Given those figures, success for a student athlete should mean a diploma, Harper said.

Harper analyzed the student populations and the six-year U.S. Department of Education federal graduation rates for the 65 top schools in the athletic conferences known as the Power Five: ACC, Big Ten, Big XII, PAC-12, and SEC.

He found that the school in which black male student athletes excel most is Northwestern University, where 94 percent graduate, compared with 90 percent of all athletes and 88 percent of black men enrolled at the private Big Ten school located outside Chicago. Stanford, Notre Dame, and Duke also managed to graduate more than 80 percent of their black male student athletes.

(Chart data: University of Pennsylvania)

The bottom 10 include Syracuse University, which only graduates 42 percent of black male student athletes, and Kansas State, which sees just 26 percent of black male student athletes earn diplomas.

The University of California, Berkeley, widely regarded as the best public university in the world, saw similarly dismal results. Only 34 percent of black male student athletes graduated, compared with 91 percent of students overall. As for Kansas, Obama’s pick for the NCAA basketball championship, just 51 percent of black male student athletes at the Midwestern school graduated, compared with 62 percent of students overall.

“Not one” of the worst-performing schools has reached out to Harper to discuss the results, he said.

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A similar study released this week from the University of Central Florida found that black male student athletes at schools competing in this year’s NCAA men’s basketball finals had a graduation rate of about 75 percent. But that study includes schools, such as Yale, that aren’t in the Power Five, Harper said. Although black males tend to be heavily represented on football and basketball teams, Harper included all of a school’s athletes in his graduation rates, not just those competing in the NCAA tournament or in the other big-money sports.

“I’m not suggesting that their work is in any way flawed. We’re focusing on the Power Five because that is really where the money is,” Harper explained. “The bottom line is, in the final four and certainly in the final two, it’s almost always schools from the Power Five.”

According to Harper’s report, every Division I football champion since 1989—and every Heisman Trophy winner in the past 25 years—has come from a Power Five school. All but one Division I men’s basketball championship team since 1991 has as well.

“It’s important to not just look at who’s at the tournament, but who’s going to walk away with the big bucks,” said Harper.

He also acknowledged that the NCAA uses a different metric to track college completion: the Graduation Success Rate. Unlike the federal measure, the GSR takes into account whether an athlete transfers to another school, which tends to make graduation rates higher. The numbers in the University of Central Florida study were based on GSR data.

“The reason we don’t use the GSR is that there is no GSR for students who are not athletes. So it doesn’t allow for an apples-to-apples comparison. It’s a number that the NCAA makes up and calculates on its own. We use the federal graduation rates because they treat all students the same,” Harper said. Although the GSR numbers are higher, “the racial inequities still remain. It doesn’t miraculously catch up black male athletes to their teammates by using this other number,” he said.

Unfortunately, students don’t always know they have serious clout on campus. “There’s a way that coaches tend to control players by reminding them that their scholarships are year-to-year scholarships. These guys end up being beholden to the tight grip of coaches, but they actually have more power in these situations,” Harper said.