Data from the fourth year of the Academic Progress Rate are set to be released next month, and NCAA officials hope the numbers reflect recent efforts to help schools improve their performance. NCAA Vice President for Membership Services Kevin Lennon talked about some of the early APR trends and what the future may hold for the academic success of Division I student-athletes.
Q: What are some of the improvements you’ve seen with the APR?
K.L.: Previously poor-performing teams – particularly in men’s basketball, football and baseball – that have been below 925 have realized significant improvement. Also, the low-resource schools, defined as the bottom 10 percent based on expenditures, have improved. Fewer will be penalized this year than in the past, and many institutions have taken all their sports teams and improved across the board.
Q: How are the low-resource institutions improving their performance?
K.L.: They are focusing on improvement plans that deploy a campus-wide approach. That’s one of the things we really have been stressing, that it has to be an institutional commitment to improve. There’s also an improved monitoring of the individual student’s academic performance, looking at specific students and making sure they’re doing better.
Q: Will the number of teams penalized be as high as what was predicted last year?
K.L.: No, and I think that’s a good news story. Because we are seeing real improvement – and due to the implementation of the improvement plans – we are anticipating that fewer teams will be penalized than what we’d anticipated.
Q: How does the national office’s focus on assisting institutions and other educational efforts play into the trends?
K.L.: We have taken a great deal of time and energy to work directly with schools. We’re devoting an awful lot of staff energy to build a one-on-one relationship with a campus and our particular staff. That pays dividends. We work them through the specifics of their plan and focus on evaluating their deficiencies. That one-on-one contact is something President Brand has stressed, and we are seeing results.
Q: What do you hope to see as a result of the change that waives the retention point for student-athletes who transfer in good academic standing to another four-year institution?
K.L.: It’s going to help the school’s APR, but most importantly, it’s putting students into a better academic situation at the school they transfer to. They’re now closer upon transfer to graduation.
Q: What advice would you give to schools seeking to improve?
K.L.: You need an institutional commitment. It applies to every player along the way – to the students and their academic performance, really holding them accountable, to the coaches to the athletics director to the overall administration. You have to have a collective buy-in on the academic performance of your student-athletes. Then, if you’re an institution that has been deficient, you have to develop a broad-based plan. You also must determine whether your at-risk students have the opportunities to be successful on your campus through your academic advisement and other support programs.
Q: Do you think academic reform is moving toward its goal?
K.L.: Yes, I do. We are two years away from actually matching up the Academic Performance Program class with the Graduation Success Rate because of the six-year lag, but the trends are pointing up. And keep in mind that we have some other things coming into play. One is the APR, which is in its fourth year of gathering steam, but the other is progress-toward-degree rules that require a student to move closer toward graduation. Academic reform is a package – the increased standards in initial eligibility and progress toward degree, combined with the accountability factor inherent in the APR – that will produce more graduates. That’s why we started this whole business.
NCAA Vice President Kevin Lennon says institutional commitment is key to academic reform. / Stephen Nowland, NCAA Photos