graduation rates

It's NCAA tournament time, which is time for everybody to break out the moralizing stories about the pernicious aspects of college athletics that they've been sitting on since the football season ended. The Associated Press (via the New York Times) clocks in with a particularly discreditable entry, a story on a study of racial disparities in graduation rates in major college baskeball: An annual report by the University of Central Florida's Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sport found a 2 percent overall graduation rate increase to 66 percent for Division I players, but showed the rates…

The current push in our state is to improve college graduation rates. Who could argue that is a bad thing? Having more students succeed in college is a good thing. The problem is assessing the performance of the state universities by looking primarily at graduation rates. Why? Simply - if the goal is to just raise graduation rates, that is easy to do. Just make sure more students pass. Is this really what we want? I think not. Louisiana Governor Ricky Bobby Jindal compared the poor graduation rates of the state universities to a football coach without a winning season hinting that you…