While the College Guide is on the subject of college football, it’s worth taking a look at a recent piece at Higher Ed Watch. The publication annually looks at the graduation rates and academic progress of the country’s top college football teams.
It’s pretty bad. According to the article, “only 55 percent of the players… receive a diploma. The overall figure does not tell the whole story. White players graduate at a rate of 64 percent, 15 percentage points higher than their black teammates. This gap is only slightly smaller than what is seen in the overall college student population.” At the top of the list (schools in which football players do well academically) are Penn State and Stanford. The school at the bottom of the list is the University of Texas, which “has a 41 percentage point gap between the graduation rate for the football team and the school overall and a 36 percentage point gap between its white and black players. This is the result of graduating just 28 percent of its black players.”
In 2002 Sports Illustrated chose the University of Texas as “America’s Best Sports College.” Stanford was number two. Of the 200 schools on the Sports Illustrated list, Texas’s graduation rate rank was 170.
