Universities offer athletes academic help
By By Chris Talbott
Associated Press
Wednesday, December 24, 2008
OXFORD, Miss. -- From the moment he arrived on campus, 320-pound tackle Michael Oher seemed destined to be a star on Ole Miss' football team and a failure in its classrooms.
Oher was the son of a crack-addicted single mom, and as a teen could barely read. His educational record -- 11 schools in nine years as he moved from home to home in Memphis -- read like an indictment of a failed education system before finally landing at Briarcrest Christian.
But four years later, at a school that graduates fewer than 60 percent of all students within six years, Oher has cleared every hurdle and nearly earned his degree -- the only barrier to graduation is the upcoming NFL draft.
"I haven't struggled a bit in college," the standout offensive lineman says. "It's been a breeze."
It's a tribute to Oher's determination and character, to be sure.
His story also says something about the state of big-time college athletics.
Like a lot of other college athletes, Oher got not only tutoring help but a full range of academic support services throughout his career. At Ole Miss, 14 full-time staffers line up tutors for student-athletes, help them choose classes, monitor study halls and check attendance. Athletes at Ole Miss averaged about 1,000 tutoring sessions a week this fall.
Such services are not unusual. The last five years have seen an astounding jump in the time, money and resources spent on academic support for student-athletes. Tougher regulations instituted by the NCAA now punish schools for poor academic performance, fueling a major spending binge with private and public funds on tutorial staff and athletes-only facilities filled with study rooms and computer labs.
The developments have been hailed by the NCAA. And yet faculty are disturbed by what they see as a shift that puts athletes ahead of other students.
Before the first kickoff this season, The Associated Press began a survey of the 65 schools from the six major conferences involved in the Bowl Championship Series plus independent Notre Dame. The AP obtained at least some financial information from 45 schools about the resources they devote to graduating athletes.
The picture formed by the data is one of schools frequently spending more than $1 million annually on academic support with some spending hundreds of thousands of dollars more in 2008 than they did in 2004, the AP found. Eight BCS schools reported spending increases of more than 70 percent in the last five years. Four increased spending by more than 100 percent.
Helping athletes graduate has become its own profession. A group for people in the field has nearly doubled to around 1,000 in just two years.
Glitzy academic support centers are popping up everywhere. A few weeks after Mississippi State opened a $10-million center last month, South Carolina upped the ante with a groundbreaking ceremony for a $13-million facility.
Oklahoma, with a 30,000 square-foot facility that cost between $7 million and $8 million, spent $2.45 million helping all its athletes last year.
Florida, the Sooners' opponent in next month's football national championship game, spent $1.67 million. Texas ($1.90 million), Ohio State ($1.89 million), Kentucky ($1.86 million), Tennessee ($1.83 million) and Georgia ($1.77 million) are in the same league.
Even some critics of college sports agree that when schools recruit often underprepared students, and demand thousands of hours of practice and travel time, they owe them extra help. Sure enough, the changes have helped push NCAA graduation rates to record levels.
"Now, when I go around and speak on campuses and speak to coaches and athletic programs and to student-athletes, they want to brag about how well they're doing academically," NCAA president Myles Brand said. "They want to show me the academic study centers. The coaches want to talk about and brag about their APR. All that is good. A few years ago, that was the last thing people wanted to talk about."
But there's also a range of criticism. Faculty have raised concerns about oversight, and the growing disparity between concierge-style academic support for athletes and what nonathletes receive. They also worry growing academic support hurts America's educational values and that athletes never learn the lessons of personal responsibility that are supposed to be part of a full college education.
"It grates," said Kenneth Holum, a veteran University of Maryland history professor and chair of the faculty senate there. "Why are the athletes more deserving than the other students? We try hard to give all the students an equal chance to profit from the material we're providing them, and other students don't have this opportunity."
Advisers to athletes consider themselves educators. Several at North Carolina State emphasized they do a lot more than line up tutors. They teach study skills, and offer career and personal advice. Increasingly, those in the field have graduate degrees in subjects like psychology and special education.
Many are former athletes, such as Natasha Criss, who works with Maryland's men's basketball team. When she came to Maryland as a track and field competitor in 1988 there were just four staffers working from cramped quarters in the old Cole Field House. Now she's one of the department's 15 full-time staffers working out of a sparkling corporate-like suite in Maryland's Comcast Center arena.
On a recent Friday, Criss watched the team finish a pre-game walkthrough at the Comcast Center and greeted several players as they left the floor, laughing with and hugging them. But she's pushing them hard. In 2006, none of Maryland's four seniors left with a degree. All three seniors on last season's team graduated.
"She helps us pick our classes, she checks our classes. To be honest with you, our graduation rate is getting better because of her," said forward David Neal, the lone senior on this year's team. "She's hounding us to do our work, we have a mandatory study hall because of her. Her job is to make us graduate, and she's doing a great job of it."
Critics readily acknowledge that all students, student-athletes included, are entitled to academic help. But the rapid spending growth makes them skeptical the new money is being doled out thoughtfully.
Spending on Academic support for student-athletes
To learn about what U.S. colleges and universities are spending on academic support for student-athletes, The Associated Press requested information from 65 schools in the six conferences that participate in football's Bowl Championship Series plus independent Notre Dame. Seventeen universities declined to provide any answers to The AP's questions. Eleven of those schools are private. Some highlights of the information obtained by the AP:
Twenty-six of the schools answering the query spent more than $1 million on counseling, tutoring and salaries in 2007-08, up from 14 in 2003-04.
One school spent more than $2 million -- Oklahoma at $2.4 million.
Overall spending on academic support for student-athletes increased during the five-year period in 42 of the 45 schools that provided information.
Twelve schools increased spending by at least 50 percent.
Four schools more than doubled their spending during the period the AP studied. They were South Florida, Illinois, Georgia and Kansas.
Seventeen of the 31 schools that reported the number of full- and part-time workers involved in academic support had more than 100 employees involved in counseling and tutoring.
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