The NCAA has revised its rules for the eligibility of student athletes (link requires subscription). According to the Chronicle of Higher Education,
The new rules will permit athletes with stellar high-school grades to qualify for college sports even if they have abysmal scores on standardized tests. However, athletes already in college will have to make more progress toward a degree to remain eligible to compete.
Currently students must have a score of 820 on the SAT and a GPA of 2.5 in 13 core high school courses to play as a freshman. Under the new rule freshman could play with an SAT as low as 400, the score if you simply sign your name to the test, if they have a GPA of 3.55 in 14 core courses.
Coaches and minority advocates have complained about the old rules, arguing that relying on SAT scores to set eligibility is unfair to minority students. And indeed, the entire NCAA debate seems to have much less to do with the academic question of eligibility requirements for athletes than it does with attempting to insure that no rule has a “disparate impact” on black athletes. It would be one thing, for example, if the role of the SAT were minimized because of questions about its accuracy or usefulness, but that does not appear to be the case since under the new rule an athlete “can qualify with a grade-point average as low as 2.0 if he or she achieves a significantly higher SAT score, based on a sliding scale.”
Avoiding “disparate impact” appears to be a difficult if not impossible task, and the new rules are already coming under familiar criticism.
And some coaches, particularly in men’s basketball, complain that administrators are really just forcing them to recruit fewer black players, on the theory that white players will have an easier time getting through college.
It sounds as though the coaches would like to continue recruiting black players regardless of their chances of making it through.
In the same vein, William Kirwan, Chancellor of the University of Maryland and former chairman of the NCAA board that devised the new rule, wrote a letter to the Washington Post that reveals the dual purpose of the rule change:
The initial eligibility proposal, including the elimination of the cutoff score for standardized tests, is a better predictor of the academic success of incoming students. In addition, recent NCAA research demonstrates that the use of a cutoff score has a disparate, negative effect on African American students.
If rules that better serve academic purposes also benefit black students, so much the better. But it appears as though the NCAA’s primary goal is to avoid any possibility of its rules having a “disparate impact.”
