Interesting analysis from the Stanford Scout site about college grad rates for 2007. 2007 Athlete Graduation Rates Gators are not in the top 10 but overall very respectable. The service academy's, Notre Dame, Stanford, Wake Forest are among the leaders in all sports and of course overall. The Gators are at a respectable 80% in football and no other SEC traditional powers are close. Anyway it's an interesting analysis. In leiu of Tailback liking to post so much negative about other programs I have to note that Georgia ranks in the bottom 10 in about every sport and is the worst in Basketball. They better watch out or some scholarship losses might be on the way.
Questions <r>Bill<br/> These guys tout Stanford's football grad rates and then go into great detail explaining away why Stanford's basketball rate is so low. They also call out the schools that lose players to transfers or the NFL/NBA as factories but again they go to great lengths to explain away Stanford's basketball rate but do no analysis on Cal's. Hatchet job. Bill, Florida has done a great job apparently, I'm just not sure this table shows it. Alabama's football rate, like Georgia's, is terrible, however our basketball rate is above Stanford and Duke??? I think this is a snapshot and the analysis is very important and this analysis is heavily slanted toward Stanford. Lies, damned lies and then there are statistics! <E>:wink:</E></r>
Does the GSR rating include juniors leaving for the pros early as "transfers" that do not count against you? If not then Florida's standing in this ranking goes up even higher because of all the juniors that did go pro last year including 4 BB team members from the back-to-back National Champions and several from the FB team including Reggie Nelson and Jarvis Moss.
Does it matter? <t>MCG,<br/> That is what I was asking in my post above. Each school has a story about why their "score" is really not as bad as it looks, or why their score should be better. I also think that every school should be trying to graduate as many athletes as possible, but sometimes it is better for the individual to quit sports for a variety of reasons or transfer to another school for a variety of reasons or go pro. I think the whole point of this article was to brag on Stanford. In my case I don't think Alabama really has a better grad rate than Stanford and Duke (in basketball) but I also don't think they are in the bottom 10 in football.</t>
The thing about these number for grad rates etc is that their seems to me more than one set floating about. I know that some recent numbers where the Gator basketball team was below the line but the NCAA did adjust for losing all those players in one year and we did not get put on notice. I can't reconcile or vouch for the numbers in this article but did think it was kind of interesting. I also did not post the article to throw stones at anyone, except TB of course who loves to toss stones at others. I am proud of the Gators who have made a lot of progress.
I know <r>I just don't understand the difference. While I would like for Alabama to be able to take the credit, I realistically have a hard time believing our grad rate is better than Duke's, and Stanford's in basketball. On the other hand, I know that the NCAA number's just came out and Alabama football was above the cutoff by a bit, yet we show up in the bottom 10 this list. Is the line set that low? It's obviously a Stanford article so maybe it just makes them feel better. Bill, Florida obviously is doing a good job and has reasons to be proud, but like I said before I'm just not this is the "study" that credibly reflects those achievements. <E></E></r>
KP, I just think you take items like this for what it's worth. In my case it tends to back up what most Gators think is taking place at Florida in terms of Meyer's emphasis on academics. As to putting to much emphasis on anything else I guess it's just a matter of reading and digesting. I do believe this person attempted to analyze the NCAA data and came up with some fairly realistic conclusions. However there is also room for doubt. Like I said earlier though I didn't post it to cast stones at any program, except maybe Georgia because TB cast a lot of stones in the past. That's kind of academic now though as he's managed to work himself right out of Skybox, at least for the time being. But that's another story.
Bill <r>I guess you're right. I will just cite this as a reference when folks talk about the SEC. "Hey, Alabama basketball has a better grad rate than Duke or Stanford". I may even win some money in some bar bets with that one. <E>:wink:</E></r>
My personal opinion of grad rates, private schools vs. state schools.......Two different sets of criteria re: admissions, curriculum, and student body makeup. State schools tend to have satellite campuses that draw mostly commuter students who work while pursuing their degrees and normally take as much as 5-6-7 years to complete their studies. Most "normal" students cannot afford more than 4 years of private schools, so their overall grad rates tend to show a much higher percentage graduating in 4 years. This tends to make invalid the comparisons of the two types of schools on a 4-and-out basis. Also, for whatever reasons, as I have read in the past, the overall grad rates of state schools tend to average in the 50-70% range, so the lower grad rates for the athletic teams at state schools are much identifiable with the student bodies. Of course, there also are the obvious transfer/leaving early scenarios that have been discussed in other topics, which apply equally to all programs and which tend to skew the 4-year rates in an unfavorable way. What does all this have to do with the football grad rates cited in the article? IMO it enhances Florida's performance and makes Alabama's performance not nearly as bad as the article implies, relative to other state school D-1 programs. One more personal opinion: Stanford people are stupidly arrogant enough to believe that their "analysis" has merit. I think they are full of horse hockey.
Yeah, I think they called out UGA as a factory or something like that, then went to great lengths to explain why Stanford had a bad percentage. But hey when your band plays better ball than your team what do you expect. :lol:
My teams are on both ends of the spectrum. ND has consistently been one of the best schools in the nation with regards to their academic programs for athletes, and Texas is one of the worst. I do think, and have said so before, that it's more likely that at ND all boats rise with the tide. ND is a small school, relatively, the student body is a large group of high achievers and I believe that the players being forced to live amongst the students are sort of pulled along by the whole atmosphere. Even with ND admissions having somewhat higher standards for athletes than state schools it's not like our athletes are outstanding high school students, sure some are but a lot are just good students not great. But the environment that they are in at ND just leads to them working a little harder and being more commited (like their fellow students) to graduating. I don't think at Texas that Mack recruits a bunch of dummies, and the Texas student body is over all a very intelligent group of kids, not all that far behind ND, Northwestern, Duke, but the atmosphere at a large university is much different with only a small portion of the students living on campus and a bigger party atmosphere. I think the UT Athletic dept probably has study program, study facilities, etc to match anybody. But the student/athletes are spread out all over the place in Austin and I think maybe they probably aren't as insistant as they are at ND that the athletes toe the line. They probably react more than proact. And that isn't necessarily a bad thing, if a kid doesn't care about his academics then it's hard to force them to care. At ND, as I said, the atmosphere is different and I think it affects the athletes and it is worth noting that the top 10 are all smaller private schools whose campuses and student body's are just much different. Terry