Four years after its origination, the Academic Performance Program has brought about a change in the culture of intercollegiate athletics.

Student-athlete academic performance is improving, and more athletics officials appear to be taking the APP seriously, devoting additional time, resources and staff members to help student-athletes make the grade.

NCAA President Myles Brand has consistently stressed that the purpose of the APP is to change behavior, not to penalize, and to that end, the program is showing signs of success. The overall Academic Progress Rate has gone up during the four years of data collection, and most individual sports also are improving, including football and baseball.

Division I Committee on Academic Performance Chair Walter Harrison, president of the University of Hartford, said the proof of the APP’s success is in the most recent data.

But where does the program go from here, and what further behavior changes are necessary? NCAA President Brand suggested that the answers may be how institutions allocate resources. When the four-year APR data were rolled out in April, Brand said that presidents should re-examine athletics spending with an eye toward academic improvement.

“The presidents should start asking questions: Are we spending the dollars we’re investing in athletics in the right way? It isn’t so much the resources an institution has to put into athletics than the priorities it has for spending those resources,” Brand said. “It makes more sense to put dollars into the academic success of student-athletes than it does to put that money into new suites for the football stadium.”

While the APP does not take resource level into account during the waiver process, the lowest-resource institutions may receive relief based on their resource status. Some of those institutions may need to closely examine how money is spent in the athletics department for student-athletes to remain competitive in the classroom and on the fields of play.

Harrison said if the APP forces presidents to look more critically at the way money is spent on athletics, the outcome can only be positive.

“If this has made some of us at lower-resource institutions think about putting more money into academics, that’s a good thing,” he said. “I’m not only the (chair of CAP), I’m also a university president. I’m faced every day with issues involving funding – there are many worthy ways to spend money but rarely enough money to pay for them all. That requires some difficult decisions about prioritizing … We have to keep remembering that as college presidents our goal is to help student-athletes graduate.”

Also critical in the evolution of the APP is the emerging significance of improvement plans for teams and institutions that fail to meet APR benchmarks. So far, the national office has accepted more than 150 plans that set reasonable goals for improvement and garner input from campus units other than athletics.

Completing the process and submitting an acceptable plan often helped a team receive conditional relief from penalties – provided the team meets the goals set forth in the plan and continues to show improvement.

Harrison said the improvement planning process requires teams to do more than just acknowledge they have problems – they must also develop a solution. The process also allows staff and the committee to respond to institutions individually.

Harrison wants to see enough improvement in the coming years so that institutions avoid more stringent penalties, such as postseason restrictions.

“We could adopt a far less interventionist program if we saw that progress was continuing,” he said.