| I feel the need to respond to this because the Michigan fans are having a nice debate over academics and football after the Ann Arbor News "exposed" Michigan for steering athletes into the easy "General Studies" major.
These numbers only have value if the football players are at least marginally qualified academically. Why? Because good Universities attract top students. Their academics are suppose to be tough because top students are competing against each other in class. For athletes, such competition is even more difficult because they spend so much time on athletics. I find it extremely hard to believe that someone can excel in football and academics if they have a limited academic profile. It just doesn't make any sense. Something has to give.
So where's the data on the incoming SAT/GPA stats for athletes? If you have that data, we must compare that data with the changes in the SAT (which seems to have raised scores, so you can't compare the new SAT with the old SAT) and the median GPAs of students in each athlete's high school. We must then see how many Honors/AP classes each student took to gain more perspective on the GPA, especially in a school that does not weight GPA. Unless this analysis is done, Notre Dame cannot claim any more academic purity than other schools. I admit, when conducting this analysis, Michigan falls far short of meeting anything close to these standards.
I very much doubt Notre Dame meets these standards. Perhaps their scores are slightly higher than other schools, but even then the comparison is dubious. For example, if you count the academic credentials of walk-ons and players with little to no shot of playing on the field, my guess is that you'll find higher scores. This is a problem at Michigan because the players who actually make it to the field often have dreadful academic credentials (Manningham, for example). In other words, bench players were admitted with the rest of the academic pool, so their credentials are stronger than a similar pool at a lesser university. At the end of the day, there is a distinct possibility that the academic credentials of players who actually see the field are no different at Michigan than they are at a SEC school.
So the question becomes, why does Notre Dame (and BC) have such high graduation rates while seeing success on the field and on the recruiting front? Well, either Notre Dame and BC are schools where the academics are easy (only hard part is getting in), in which case these schools are exposed for poor academic training, or something else is going on. If ND and BC really do care about players and force them to spend all their free time on academics, the question becomes: What kind of grades are these athletes getting? Are they simply allowed to pass because ND and BC are afraid to give bad grades to all students, athletes or not? Is it simply that there's more grade inflation at these schools? Remember, employers are about how well you did. If you were a business major with a 2.2 GPA, you have just proven to your potential employers that you have ZERO marketable skills. You contrast that with someone who has developed a strong quantitative (math, science) or qualitative (writing, analytical ability) and the distinction is clear.
You have to ask these questions. These questions have led me to believe that for all practical purposes, Michigan football is no better than SEC-U when it comes to football players who actually make the field. What makes you think ND is any different? |