NCAA Basketball
Let's talk sports. No, really. NCAA basketball, specifically. There's a lot of excitement here in Philadelphia about St. Joe's race for the title this year, and people are pretty worked up.Pity they're not worked up about the fact that St. Joseph's will graduate less than half it's black players this year. Greg Easterbrook talks about the failure of the NCAA to graduate the black players on basketball scholarships:
How about plucky Saint Joseph's, this year's sentimental favorite and much-hyped in the media as a school that's winning games and yet still cares about education? Here are St. Joseph's page graduation rates. One column for men's basketball gives an African American graduation rate of 43 percent, well below the school's overall graduation rate of 73 percent. Most other figures about St. Joe's basketball are blank, just those asterisks that lead to the word "suppressed."Actually, the tables show that the graduation rate for male African-American athletes has been rising somewhat, from 28% to 38% in one year. Unfortunately, the NCAA has also recently decided to stop publishing the graduation rates in this category, citing player privacy.
Do black athletes have a right not to get an education? Of course. If my white friend Paul has the right to skip classes at Amherst to pick up chicks, so do basketball players, no matter how much Paul dislikes the competition. But the NCAA has long faced controversy of giving scholarships to athletes and then, once the tickets have been sold, not giving a damn about the athletes' education. Even Sports Illustrated has published an article on the subject.
It's exploitative for the NCAA to give some big black kid a scholarship as long as he sells tickets. It's also unbecoming of a public institution; colleges are schools, and schools can't be slaves to the whims of the free market.
But we also need to recognize the personal responsibility of the athletes involved. Some to graduate; the ones that really want an education get it. So, let me say something to all the basketball players in the NCAA: If you're going to go to college, it's about more than just a basketball game, about more than just picking up chicks. You should really go to class once in a while.
