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Graduation rates among Division II athletes dropped by an unusually high three percentage points this year, the National Collegiate Athletic Association announced Tuesday, but officials say it’s likely due to a technical glitch. The Academic Success Rate – similar to Division I’s Graduation Success Rate, except that it includes non-scholarship athletes -- measures the number of players who graduate within six years or leave in good academic standing. The ASR for cohort entering college in 2006 is 69 percent this year, compared to 72 percent for the six-year cohort that enrolled in 2005.
The division's Federal Graduation Rate, which counts transfers and other departures as dropouts, held steady at 54 percent.
An NCAA researcher, Gregg Summers, said the “very rare” large ASR decline is probably a result of the new reporting system Division II programs used this year. Instead of entering data manually, student by student, the staff transferred the data en masse electronically, and probably let some errors pass through in the process, Summers said. Specifically, because the number of athletes in the tracking system fell short of the number counted in the ASR by about 10 percent, and because the number of students recorded as leaving while eligible was unusually low, officials suspect that many athletes who left their teams while eligible were incorrectly marked as dropouts. (Typically, about a quarter of Division II players leave their sport voluntarily at some point.) Also, after asking a couple institutions whose data seemed off to review their numbers to address this question, their ASRs improved.
Still, NCAA officials acknowledged they would like to see the rate go up. At January’s NCAA convention, Division II members will vote on a new academic rules package similar to one that NCAA President Mark Emmert pushed through Division I in October 2011, which Division II Director Maritza Jones said should help improve the ASR. (This year’s Division I GSR tied an all-time record of 82 percent.) Rates for individual colleges and sports can be viewed in the NCAA's searchable database.
