Tuesday, December 27, 2011

GSR rates for teams in today's bowls ...

Up front, I'll give readers a warm welcome and ask for a show of support  for the Beyond Friday Nights blog by clicking on some of the ads on display on the right side of the blog's pages. Now on to other things ... 

Check out the NCAA graduation rates (officially known as the Graduation Success Rate, or GSR) for all of today's bowl teams. (See my previous posts on this issue, too.)

Little Caesar's Bowl --
GSRs: Purdue, 59; Western Michigan, 61

Belk Bowl --
GSRs: North Carolina State, 56; Louisville, 66

A few things to keep in mind: The NCAA's GSR measure looks at the percentage of players who earned a degree within six years of entering college. The latest data is for those who entered college in 2004, so it's a somewhat dated measure, reflecting how well those students performed academically -- as measure solely by whether they earned degrees or not -- over the past six years. So if a particular college program decided this year to improve the academic success of its players, we wouldn't see results, as measured this way, until six years later. Of course, the opposite of that is true too -- if a program began dropping the ball, so to speak, on working hard to ensure that their players earned degrees, we wouldn't know about it for many years. It's important to note, too, that the GSR calculation doesn't penalize schools for students who, while in good academic standing, leave the program, perhaps to transfer to another school or maybe even go to the NFL before earning their degree. The NCAA makes GSR data available by school and by conference in a searchable database. And see a rather rosy-sounding NCAA news release, too, covering GSRs for all sports.

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