At the end of every college football season, there’s an uproar about the "Bowl Championship Series" (BCS) formula that decides which teams get to play for the National Championship and in various bowl games. Higher Ed Watch developed an alternative BCS formula to draw attention to the academic performance of big-time college football teams and colleges in general, and to see which top-ranked college football teams perform best in the classroom.
Click HERE to see a list of top re-ranked BCS top 25
Unlike the reams of information available on the athletic performance of college football teams, public data on the academic performance of student-athletes is scarce. But there are two available data points: graduation rates and the NCAA’s "Academic Progress Rate" (APR) for each team.
Graduation rates are the most important data on academic quality that we have, as they count football players who actually left school with a degree in hand. In addition, graduation rates are disaggregated by race, which gives us the opportunity to look at how well teams are supporting their black and white players respectively. The education attainment gap and achievement gap are major education policy concerns nationally.
The NCAA's APR measure is a real-time indicator of the progress of each team's student-athletes toward a degree. But it’s a much less rigorous test of academic performance than students actually graduating, and thus weighted less in Higher Ed Watch's Academic BCS formula. Half of each school's APR score is based on student-athletes just being enrolled as students. The other half is derived from the number of student-athletes completing 20 percent of their courses toward a degree each year, with no minimum GPA required.
Our Academic BCS formula starts with each football team’s four-class average federal graduation rate, which includes all football players who entered college between 1997 and 2000 and graduated within six years of initial enrollment. Football teams then earn or lose points based on (A) the gap between the team's graduation rate and the overall school's graduation rate (it’s important to consider the context of an athlete’s academic experience); (B) the gap between the team's black-white player graduation rate disparity and the overall school's disparity (it’s important to expose and penalize teams with significant achievement gaps); and (C) the team’s NCAA APR score in comparison to the median APR for all Division I-A teams.
The Results: Best and Worst Performers
Applying the Academic BCS formula to the teams currently ranked in top 25 in the BCS poll produces a very different ranking. Instead of perennially-dominant LSU, Ohio State, and Georgia sitting at the top, Boston College, Cincinnati, and Auburn would be headlining the national championship discussion.
It’s not surprising that Boston College leads the Academic BCS poll, given that its athletes have traditionally graduated at high rates. The BC football team’s graduation rate is one of the highest in the nation at 87 percent—almost equaling the school’s overall graduation rate of 91 percent. Only football powerhouses like Stanford and Duke have higher graduation rates. (Don't congratulate the BC Eagles too much, though. There are other problems at BC, and around the country, with the professionalization of its football players and the tax-exempt status of big-time programs.)
It’s also not surprising that five of the six teams who played in the last four National Championship games—Texas, Ohio State, LSU, Oklahoma, and Florida—are pulling up the rear of Higher Ed Watch's Academic BCS poll. Texas’s football team has always been an academic bottom-dweller, graduating only 32 percent of its players (and only 22 percent of its black players), in comparison to a 75 percent graduation rate at the school overall. Ohio State is dangerously close to being penalized by the NCAA for its low APR of 928 (penalties start at 925).
Surprises
A few schools that most fans assume perform well in the classroom—for example, Virginia, Wisconsin or Illinois—are not top contenders in the Academic BCS ranking. It's largely because their football teams aren't doing nearly as well in graduating football student-athletes as the overall school is in graduating students in general. Virginia graduated 65 percent of its football players who entered the school between 1997 and 2000—but the university graduated 93 percent students overall. That's a 28 percentage point gap.
Other teams with average numbers get hurt by significant gaps between the graduation rates of their black and white players. Missouri appears to be doing not particularly bad at graduating its football players, and its APR is right at the national median. But its overall football graduation rate masks a large black-white gap: 40 percent of Missouri's black football players who entered the school between 1997 and 2000 graduated, compared to 68 percent of its white football players. In other words, black Missouri football players are more than a third less likely to graduate than white football players, while the overall school's black-white graduation gap is much lower at 9.5 percentage points. Oregon is sitting at the bottom with a stunning 49 percentage point graduation gap between its black and white football players (26 percent vs. 75 percent). Michigan's football team, which recently dropped from the BCS poll, rivaled Oregon with a 45 percentage point gap.
Other teams that are generally not considered academic powerhouses—for example, the University of Cincinnati—are doing a relatively good job supporting their football players. At Cincinnati, 71 percent of football players who entered the school between 1997 and 2000 left with a degree, in comparison to only 49 percent of students at the school overall. In addition, Cincinnati’s football team had only a 3 percentage point black-white graduation gap, while the overall school had a 19.5 percentage point gap.
To read more, including on why academics matter for the BCS, please visit www.higheredwatch.org