Editorial: NCAA runs a weak play on field of academics

The NCAA has long been criticized as an

organization that pays little more than lip service to academic
success, an image the association has made a point of fighting in
recent months.

But its most recent proposal to get student-athletes to hit the
books still sounds like little more than empty talk.

On Thursday, the NCAA announced a plan to pay colleges up to
$100,000 if their student-athletes show significant academic
improvement and have high graduation rates. The NCAA, which has
budgeted $10 million for the financial awards, would also give
money to some colleges that demonstrate a need to improve
student-athlete academic resources.

This plan is the latest in a string of moves engineered by the
NCAA to combat the perception that it doesn’t care about the
“student” part of student-athlete. Arguably its biggest
move was in March, when the association unveiled its Academic
Progress Rate formula that it said would provide a way to track
colleges where student-athletes were falling behind the standards.
But the formula came under fire from officials and groups
(including this editorial board) for being arbitrary and
imbalanced.

The logic of the most recent plan is a head-scratcher. The NCAA
is arguing that academic success should be rewarded with money. But
the whole mantra of higher education is that academic success is
its own reward. The NCAA should clear up which message it wants to
send not just to student-athletes but to all members of the
university community.

While the NCAA claims $100,000 is enough to help struggling
colleges piece together tutoring programs, it’s only a drop
in the bucket for some of the big-name Division I athletic programs
that have scored low in the NCAA’s academic progress ranking,
among them the University of Connecticut (the 2005 NCAA men’s
basketball champions) and USC (two-time national title winners in
football).

The NCAA has implied that programs at these universities
aren’t doing enough to enforce high academic standards, but
it’s hard to picture officials at perennial national
powerhouses taking those standards any more seriously for the likes
of $100,000, given that their athletic department budgets can swell
into the tens of millions of dollars.

The plan also doesn’t do much to dispel the notion that
the NCAA’s primary motivation is cash.

Perhaps the most telling statistic about this new plan is this:
The $10 million a year the NCAA intends to set aside for colleges
will come from money the association receives from CBS to broadcast
the Division I men’s basketball tournament, a deal worth $6
billion over 11 years, which comes out to $545 million a year. Put
$10 million over $545 million, and you get a fairly good idea of
how much the NCAA truly cares about academics.

If scholarly success were really as high up on the NCAA’s
list of priorities as athletic achievement, it would give concrete
proposals that hold itself and universities accountable for the
success ““ or failure ““ of the student-athlete in the
classroom.

Instead, we get window-dressing ““ again.