Collegiate sports competition has come a long way since the rowing contests that marked the birth of intercollegiate athletics in the mid-19th century. What university president back then could have imagined that sports would become such a force in shaping many of their institutions?
At Stanford, athletics has been an important part of campus life since the beginning. Even so, the University’s founders would be amazed at the level of Stanford’s success in this realm. For the last eight years, Stanford has won the top award—formerly known as the Sears Directors’ Cup and now simply called the Directors’ Cup—for the best overall Division 1 athletics program.
As a long-term member of the Stanford family, and as president, I am proud of our student-athletes and the honors they have earned in academic and athletic pursuits. I am also concerned, however, about the overall direction of intercollegiate athletics nationwide. The resulting environment encourages athletic success over academic success, as well as a creeping professionalism.
This may sound a bit extreme. Some would argue that the situation has improved; the NCAA, for instance, reported last fall that the graduation rate for Division 1A athletes is the highest since the organization began calculating rates in the 1980s. But in the big three sports—baseball, football and basketball—graduation rates continue to lag. In men’s basketball, for instance, the six-year graduation rate is 34 percent, compared to 62 percent for the male student body overall, according to the latest NCAA data. Baseball at 44 percent and football at 53 percent fared slightly better.
Perhaps even more telling is the fact that some of the biggest disparities between the graduation rate of athletes and that of a school’s general student body are at premier institutions, like those that make up the Pac-10. For example, among the entering freshmen of 1995-96, male students at Pac-10 universities graduated at an average rate of 65 percent, while male basketball players graduated at an average rate of only 30 percent. If we leave out Stanford, the average graduation rate for male basketball players falls to 22 percent.
The reasons for this are complex. One is that many student-athletes, especially in the marquee sports, are poorly prepared for college during their high school years. Even with the slightly more stringent NCAA requirements approved last fall, which increased the number of core courses high school students must complete from 13 to 14, the bar is still too low.
Once student-athletes arrive at our schools, the pressures on them only increase. Intense practice schedules that include “voluntary” sessions and ever-longer seasons create additional challenges to keep up academically. The NCAA recently toughened requirements for the progress a student-athlete must make toward graduation each year, but it is unclear whether these regulations are dramatic enough to significantly improve the abysmal graduation rates in the premier sports.
What drives these imbalances and why do universities allow them? Again, there is a complicated set of factors, but at the base there is just one: money. Most intercollegiate athletics programs lose money. Outgoing NCAA president Cedric Dempsey recently reported that the shortfall between expenses and income across 970 NCAA schools now exceeds $1 billion annually. This creates a demand for longer seasons and more bowl games, and puts incredible pressure on coaches and players to win at all costs. Meanwhile, the escalating cost of coaches’ salaries in the top sports and the construction of expensive new facilities often require subsidizing athletics programs from universities’ academic budgets.
Stanford has avoided many of these problems by maintaining strict admission standards for athletes and ensuring that all students receive the academic support they need to be successful. Moreover, our intercollegiate athletics program is self-sustaining: it does not draw from the academic budget. I worry, however, that in the long term, we are not immune to the overall trends in intercollegiate athletics. My predecessor, Gerhard Casper, once noted that even at Stanford—the envy of many university presidents for its balance of the athletic and the academic—athletic pursuits can lead to trade-offs in the classroom. And the more we win, the more pressure we place on all programs to be more competitive, recruit more talented athletes, and raise more money.
Stanford shares this challenge with all universities. We pledge to do our best to balance the competing interests, while never losing sight of the fact that we are first and foremost an educational institution and that our student-athletes are students first. The larger challenge is to the entire system of intercollegiate athletics and its role in higher education. Only a program of major reform led by university and college presidents will adequately address these issues.
