Graduation rates while playing baseball

You can search graduation rates by school, conference, and sport at the NCAA web site:

http://www.ncaa.org/about/reso...success-rates-search

Best wishes,

While you are investigating this you may want to look at the majors the baseball players at your target schools are taking.  There are a surprising number of undecided, undeclared, and assorted fluff majors listed on many rosters, even for upper classmen.  You may be looking for more than this.

I would make sure the school will permit you to be in the program you want to study as well as play baseball (for instance Engineering / Baseball).  I have not had the opportunity to be in that position yet, but have heard that some of the VA Colleges like VT will not permit you to be in their Engineering program and play baseball.  There is a belief that you would not be able to commit the time and energy to do well in both, so they make you choose.  It can't hurt to ask.

I applaud you for researching this on behalf of your son.  I know in my house, graduating in 5 years was never an option.   Swampboy has given you the keys to the kingdom in terms of a historical metric perspective on the topic.  I thoroughly agree with Smitty28 that if you want to get more granular, then review the rosters of each school.

 Specifically, I’d look to see how many juniors and seniors changed their majors from their freshmen year.  That is good info to know at least as a baseline.  

Also, it is important to understand how your son’s anticipated major is going to fit into a D1 semester with 56 games, travel, practices and all the other undocument baseball activities things that come with it.   Different conferences have different travel requirements & distances based on their rivals.  You definitly want to ask these questions up front.  In my son’s case, he was told by some very honest coaches that he would have to change his major if he was going to come to school there.  If your son is fortunate enough to get academic money there is also some pressures to maintain a certain GPA.  College athletes are constantly squeezed for time, and they are forced to make decisions based on those factors.  It is very real.

Another thought is to check College Navigator (google it) to make sure your son is within a specific targeted range of students accepted to the school.  For example:  if his academic stats are at the bottom 25% of incoming students, and he is going to play baseball with a difficult major then that may not be a good fit.  Possibly, you’d want a school where he is closer to the median with baseball and a difficult major...again just an example.  Your mileage may vary.

While Fenway made good points as usual I would caution you against looking at players who changed majors as a criteria for picking a college.  Many students, not just athletes change majors after they start college as they realize their interests change as they mature.  My own son changed majors after his soph. year.  As a result he took a full load the summer between his junior and senior year online while playing in a wood bat league so he could graduate on time.  One of the advantages of taking the courses in the summer versus returning to school for one more semester is that his scholarship was applicable in the summer, it would not have been there for an extra semester.

The next time you see the person who told you this, you should tell them that they're completely mistaken. The entire curriculum is open to players at Virginia Tech.

A current Virginia Tech coach's response to the assertion: "Absolutely not." He went on to say that "it's the exact opposite;"  that the coaches encourage players to major in challenging disciplines like engineering and business when they're so inclined....and a check of the current roster confirms it.

By the way, Head Coach Pat Mason tweeted today that the team's average GPA for the first semester exceeded 3.0. Quite an accomplishment.

Prepster.

I have to point out that the objective facts are at odds with the coach's assertion. While it is certainly true that two out of 28 non-freshman players have engineering majors (one is a starter, the other a reserve), that equates to about a 7% rate of engineering majors. According to the V Tech Common Data Set for 2013, 21% of degrees conferred were engineers. It appears that engineering majors on the baseball team are VERY underrepresented when compared to the general student body. (Not meant to bash VT, in virtually every college roster I have analyzed, the team tends to gravitate towards the "easier" majors offered in that college. That's the reality of having what is essentially a full time job while trying to get a quality education.)

In my mind, this confirms that baseball (and probably most sports) and an engineering major is quite tough to manage - the more "serious" the baseball, the harder such a combination becomes. (And, VT has a serious baseball program.)

It's not unusual at all for the percentage of engineering students on a DI baseball team to be appreciably lower than that of the general student population at a university that has a strong engineering curriculum. It's a well known fact that the combination of engineering and baseball is about as demanding as a student might choose. As a result, no matter how much a program's coaches might consistently encourage players to pursue challenging majors, many players will choose a less demanding path.

When my son was being recruited by Georgia Tech, they had 36 players on the roster and only 4 were studying engineering; despite the fact that the Georgia Tech staff provided the same sort of support for the choice that I know to be the case at Virginia Tech.

I was responding solely to the earlier contention that VT's staff prohibited their players from studying engineering. I wasn't making a case for the proposition that players there routinely opted for it. I never would have expected that to be the case in a competitive DI program.

While I agree with the above statement, I think a lot also depends on the player as well.

This is a definite conversation to have during recruiting with the coaching staff as well as the athletic academic advisor (preferred if you can meet with them).  If the program is paying a lot of academic dollars, they may have a say in what they feel would be in their best interests as well as the players.  

It's important to ask the right questions during recruiting. For a lot of coaches in competitive environments caring about academics means caring about the players maintaining their eligibility and a reasonable team APR score. not their major. I was amused seeing Mississippi's coach bragging about his team's 2.57 GPA.