March Madness Academic Accountability � The Quick and the Ed

March Madness Academic Accountability � The Quick and the Ed

March Madness Academic Accountability

by Ben Miller

After an opening round weekend of thrilling upsets and buzzer beaters, the NCAA Division I Men’s Basketball Tournament continues tomorrow evening with the 16 remaining teams battling for a spot in the Final Four. But while all of these squads have shown the ability to succeed in the postseason, many of them have failed to match this success in the classroom.
Last week, Education Secretary Arne Duncan proposed that teams with graduation rates below 40 percent be banned from postseason play. Duncan justified his idea, saying, “if you can’t manage to graduate two out of five players, how serious are the institution and the coach about their players’ academic success? How are you preparing student athletes for life?”
Curious to see how this proposal would affect the teams in this year’s Sweet Sixteen, Abdul Kargbo and Forrest Hinton have put together the video below, in which I talk through what would happen if the games were decided by graduation rates, not points scored.
The results show that clearly some teams are capable of properly balancing academics and athletics. Butler, Duke, Northern Iowa, and Xavier all have graduation rates above 75 percent. Other teams, however, clearly need to spend more time hitting the books. Washington (29 percent), Tennessee (30 percent), Kentucky (31 percent)