Inside Higher Ed had a story yesterday about the release of the new graduation rate data for college athletic programs. The data are summarized in the table at right.
The two columns in the table show the graduation rate under the federal standard, and the new "graduation success rate" which fixes some of the problems with the older standard. The older rate calculation counted students who transferred out of a program as not graduating, while not counting students who transferred in as graduates. The new calculation is a little more realistic, and counts students based on their academic standing when they enter and leave a program.
As you would expect, this leads to a dramatic increase in the graduation rates for the "revenue sports," namely football, basketball, and baseball. Those sports have fairly dismal graduation rates (55%, 45%, and 46%, respectively) under the old system, thanks to large numbers of players changing schools or leaving early to go pro. Under the new system, those rates go up by ten to twenty percentage points (to 65%, 59%, and 65%, respectively).
What struck me as weird was the size of the improvement in other, non-revenue sports. Particularly striking was the 19-point jump in the graduation rate for fencers. Where in hell are the fencers going early? Is there a professional fencing circuit in Europe? Are there lucrative job openings in the Dread Pirate Roberts field?
Also noteworthy: graduation rates for female athletes are generally 5-7% higher than their male counterparts, in corresponding sports. The only sport played by both men and women in which male athletes had a higher graduation rate was ice hockey (73% to 71%, which probably isn't really significant). This probably means something, but I couldn't begin to say what.
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Where are the equestrians?
They rode into the sunset...
What kills me is that skiing is there. Skiing? Seriously? Must be a western or northeastern thing.
As a former fencer, I can say with some confidence that they're not going pro! In addition to the fact that only a few fencers in the world make a living by fencing (mostly by being sponsored by companies that sell fencing equipment to other fencers), almost all of those people are Europeans. Americans are relatively bad at fencing (with occasional exceptions, mostly women).
I have no idea why the numbers would jump so much. The NCAA fencers I've known have mostly been drunken hooligans, but they did mostly end up pretty successful after graduation. I wonder if the numbers are from transfers in instead of transfers out? Perhaps people are getting recruited by Notre Dame and Stanford and Columbia after a couple of years at smaller schools?
Weird.
As a fencer, I felt I should comment as well. Is it possible that the fact that so few schools even HAVE NCAA fencing squads could be doing screwy things to the statistics? I don't know of any people getting recruited from schools without teams to schools with teams. Mostly students get recruited at national tournaments... I'll ask around and see if anyone has any answers...
As a wild guess, there is less money in female sports, which mean a larger percentage of athletes are doing it more as a hobby or side interest and so tilting their balancing act between sport and academia more towards the latter.
Brian has a point. The fencing sample size is itty-bitty. I fenced through high school and after college (but before grad school...no time of extra curriculars there...). My point is that I met a lot of fencers, NCAA and otherwise. The community is very small, and the typical fencer is a pretty well educated individual.
This is from a friend of mine who is more in touch with NCAA fencing than I am:
(Consider Ohio state, for example. The NCAA rate is 100% for both men & women, while the fed rate is "-" for the men, and 50% for the women. Big,
round numbers like 50% bother me. I think this is just a case of undersampling.)
Make of that what you will...