Diversifying Through Football

You'd be hard pressed to find a college or university now that has not made the ethnic and socioeconomic diversification of its student body a high priority. Institutions have stepped up their recruitment efforts, reaching out more aggressively to students from underrepresented racial and other groups, expanding their financial aid offerings to low-income students, and bolstering as well their strategies for retaining academically underprepared students. Gone, presumably, are the days when the primary way an African American male could catch the eye of a college was with a sweet jump shot or throwing a football 60 yards.

Right? Not so fast.

Data drawn from the National Collegiate Athletic Association's annual survey of graduation rates, analyzed by Inside Higher Ed, show that scholarship athletes make up at least 20 percent of the full-time black male undergraduates at 96 of the nearly 330 colleges that play sports in Division I, the NCAA's top competitive level. At 46 of those colleges, according to the data, which are from 2005-6, at least a third of the black male population play a sport. And at 31 one of them, football players alone make up at least a quarter of the black undergraduate men.

All told, male athletes make up about 3 percent of full-time male students at Division I institutions.

The trend is most evident at two types of institutions. The first is public universities in states with relatively small black populations, where the institutions recruit more or less locally or regionally for their general student bodies, but participate in the national recruitment system that has grown up around big-time sports over decades. So state universities like Boise State University (where 34 of the 92 full-time black male undergraduates in 2005-6 were athletes), Montana State University (35 of 40), and Western Carolina University (77 of 211) jump out. Yet the proportions can also be surprisingly high at major public universities in states with sizable black populations, such as the University of Georgia, (21 percent), and the University of Colorado at Boulder (28 percent).

The other category of colleges where the proportions of black athletes are highest is private institutions, mostly those that have selective admission standards and are small compared to other sports powers, yet still try to compete with the big boys. This includes institutions like Northwestern University (where 43 of the 163 full-time black male undergraduates are athletes), Lehigh (31 of 78), Rice (47 of 99) and Wake Forest (69 of 128) Universities, and the University of Tulsa (68 of 95), among others. (One other group of selective private institutions that competes in Division I -- those in the Ivy League -- are excluded from the data below because the NCAA collects information only about scholarship athletes, and the Ivies do not award sports scholarships. The same is true of the U.S. military academies.)

The question of what it means for these colleges (and for their students) if their ratios of black male athletes to black male students are high is a complex and contested one. Officials at many of the institutions where the proportions are high said almost to a one that they would like their proportions (of athletes to students) to be lower and that they were working hard to step up their recruitment and retention of black (and other minority) students generally -- in some cases mirroring strategies athletics departments have perfected.

Some argue that their institutions should be judged not on the relative number of black athletes and other students they are bringing to their campuses, but on how successfully they are educating and graduating those students -- and most, not surprisingly, said they are doing a good job.

But some advocates for minority students are troubled when they look at the numbers, which they say suggest that some colleges are more interested in recruiting black men with exceptional athletic talent than they are mere hard-working students. "It's absolutely shameful that these institutions obviously could do such a great job of expending the effort to recruit black male athletes but can't seem to get their arms around the recruitment of other black male students," says Shaun R. Harper, an assistant professor in the University of Pennsylvania's Graduate School of Education.

"At a lot of institutions," he says, "there's a very limited expenditure of effort" toward recruiting black students generally, there's no strategy, there are no real goals that are written down. Yet when it comes to the recruitment of black male athletes, all those things are in place. It's hard not to think that that's because they're interested in winning, so they're going to put forth the effort to recruit students who will enable them to win."

Adds Kevin Carey, research and policy manager at Education Sector, an education think tank: "If a very large percentage of your students of color are athletes, what that suggests is that you’re using your athletics program as a proxy for achieving your diversity goals. That's different from an institution that both pursues its athletics goals and also tries to recruit and retain significant numbers of students of color who are aren’t athletes."

Data showing low enrollments of black male students are unlikely to shock anyone who's been paying attention in higher education; the most recent national data, from 2004, show African Americans making up 11.7 percent of all undergraduates in American colleges and about 9.5 percent of undergraduate men, slightly less than their representation in the U.S. population generally. Black students are disproportionately overrepresented, as well, at historically black universities and community colleges. So given that context, the fact that the latest NCAA statistics show that 9.4 percent of male students at Division I campuses are black is not surprising.

But when the data are unpacked by individual college, and contrasted to the number and proportion of black athletes on those campuses, the results can be eye-popping and raise some interesting issues, for athletics departments, for specific colleges, and for higher education as a whole. Some of the issues differ depending on the type of institutions. At public universities where the numbers are starkest -- where many or even most of the black male students are athletes -- the situation arises in part because the institutions recruit nationally for athletes, but draw students generally almost entirely from their states, which may have relatively few minority citizens.

At the University of Nevada at Reno, for example, 63 of the 99 full-time black male undergraduates on the campus in 2005-6 were athletes, and 57 of them were football players. Officials there note that the undergraduate student body is representative of the black population in the northern Nevada region that the university serves. The local county high school district from which Reno draws 50 percent of its enrollment graduated all of 70 black students (of a total of 2,800 graduates) in 2005, says Melisa Choroszy, associate vice president for enrollment services at Nevada. And only 35-40 percent of them meet the university's admissions standards, she says.

Between half and two-thirds of the university's scholarship athletes, on the other hand, are from out of state, says Sandie Niedergall, director of compliance services in Nevada's athletics department.

"One of the great things that athletics is able to do is to seek out talent in a geographic way across the country that we don't have as much of an option to do because of financial constraints," says Choroszy. "Athletics is able to help us with the greater diversity picture we strive for."

The University of Oregon faces a similar situation. The state's African American population hovers in the 2 percent range, as does the black proportion of the undergraduate student body at the university. Of the 137 black undergrads on the campus in 2005-6, 48 (or 35 percent) were scholarship athletes and 38 played football on Oregon's team, which this year ranked among the nation's best.

"From the data, it seems obvious that lots of African-American male students see athletics as a major pathway to college," says Charles Martinez, vice provost for institutional equity and diversity at Oregon. The challenge, he says, "is not to have a reliance on a single pathway" for first generation, low-income, or minority students. "Higher education is just coming around to the realization that for effective outreach [to underrepresented students], we can’t start in high school. That's something that athletics [departments] figured out a long time ago."

The Picture at Private Colleges

At the selective private universities that try to compete in football and basketball in the stratosphere of Division I, the issues are slightly different. Most of them have significantly smaller student bodies than their public university peers, so if they sponsor football teams, and recruit meaningful numbers of black athletes to populate them, the black players will tend to skew their overall black enrollment numbers more than would be true at a larger institution.

In addition, the admission standards at many of the selective private institutions are such that the pools of African American students who qualify academically are relatively small, especially if the institutions lean significantly on standardized test scores. Most selective colleges and universities tend to bend their admissions standards more (proportionally) for athletes than they do for other categories of students, though officials at the colleges steadfastly reject the notion that they are doing a disservice to the athletes, or to their institutions, by opening their doors to them -- far from it.

"In our case, black male student athletes graduate at a higher rate than our black male students," said David Shi, president of Furman University, where 46 of the 77 full-time black male undergraduates in 2005-6 were athletes, and fully half played football. "We have never had a problem with the academic performance of our football players in general, much less our African-American football players. We've had the good fortune of being able to recruit some very high performing student athletes and not feel worried that somehow we’re compromising the integrity of the institution."

Shi bristles at the assertion that athletes make up a large proportion of Furman's black male students creates equity or other issues, not only because they succeed academically but because they are so well incorporated into the campus. "We do not have distinctively different cultures, there is no separate athletic dorm, so the fact that an African American student is here on a football scholarship does not in any way diminish their contribution to the institution. They are terrific role models not only as athletes but as students and as citizens."

Other college officials and most experts on campus diversity agree that one important part of the equation in assessing the relative representation of black athletes and other students is how well they fare academically and otherwise. "I would want to look at this as an opportunity -- these students have excelled at something that gave them an opportunity to go to college," says Ross Wiener, who heads the policy team at Education Trust, which promotes educational equity for low-income and minority students.

"The key question is whether that promise is kept -- whether they are just supported as athletes, or whether they also get supported as students. That probably varies from place to place. If the athletic achievement has opened up doors to these whole other world for these students, that's great. But if not, if the universities use them as athletes or ignore them as students, that's a different story."

That picture will vary by institution, but the NCAA's aggregate data show that black male athletes in Division I graduate at a higher rate than do all black male students at Division I colleges (48 percent to 37 percent in the association's most recent report). "At the end of the day, the goal of higher education is to provide a degree to as many students as possible," says Charlotte Westerhaus, vice president for diversity and inclusion at the NCAA. "The reason I am not troubled by these numbers is that these student athletes are graduating at a very high rate."

(Comparisons of graduation rates for scholarship athletes and for all other students, regardless of race, must take into account two facts: that athletes are generally shielded from the financial difficulties that force many normal students -- especially those from underrepresented groups -- off track for graduation, and that athletes tend to benefit from exceptional levels of academic support from their athletics departments.)

Some campus administrators say they recognize the possibility that having a large number of their black male students be athletes can diminish the experience for black students, especially if the athletes aren't integrated into campus life. At Nevada, "we make tremendous efforts to make sure that the student athletes are part and parcel of the population on campus," says Reginald Chhen Stewart, director of the Center for Student Cultural Diversity there. "The coaches gave them release time from [team meetings] to attend the [Black Student Organization] meetings so that they were integrated," for example.

Stewart acknowledges, though, that having many or most of an institution's black men be athletes can add to a stereotype that has long plagued black men on college campuses. "It's just one of the ills of higher education that people assume if you're a black man on campus that you're an athlete," he says.

He and other campus officials say that, ironically, colleges may begin to break down that perception by borrowing some of the tactics that athletics departments have long embraced and using them to bolster their recruitment of black and other minority students who aren't athletes.

"Coaches have been doing it a long time, and we might learn from them," says Paul Orehovec, vice president for enrollment management and continuing studies at the University of Miami, where athletes make up 26 percent of the university's black male undergrads. "I see my role and my staff's role as beating the bushes in any way we can to recruit good black students, and we've begun walking the halls of some of the predominantly black schools" like coaches have been doing for years.

The university has begun working with the principal and other top officials at Miami's inner-city Northwestern High School -- whose football team was ranked among the nation's best by USA Today -- to recruit students, not athletes. Miami hosts a dinner on its campus for the school's top-ranked students, and has been driving home the message that "if they meet the academic qualifications, there will be financial aid available to them."

Harper, the Penn professor who last year studied the state of black male students at public flagship universities for the Dellums Commission, agrees that there are possibilities for university admissions officers to learn from sports recruiters. "They should be saying, Wow, you guys seem to be particularly good at recruiting this particular population that is otherwise missing from the campus. Is there something we can learn from your approach." Coaches "go to a kid's house, sit in his living room with his parents, and the parents get excited and the kids get excited." He wonders if campus recruiters couldn't do the same, though he acknowledges that such an approach would only work if the black male non-athletes had "advocates" with as much sway in the admissions office as top coaches tend to have.

But Harper believes that colleges and universities need to do much more to prove that they are as willing and able to recruit, enroll and graduate black male students who can't dunk a basketball. More aggressive outreach, recruitment and financial aid efforts aimed at black male students are a must, but he would go further.

In his paper last year, he wrote that the the "NCAA should consider a policy requiring that racial representation on any sports team should minimally correspond to a certain percentage of undergraduate student enrollments at the institution. For example, if black males comprise four percent of the undergraduate students on a campus, their representation on an intercollegiate sports team should not be permitted to exceed a certain percentage (e.g., 20 percent, which would be five times more than black men in the general student population). The introduction of this policy will surely compel university admissions officers to more aggressively recruit black male students who are not brought to the institution to play sports."

While such a policy is a long shot, even some campus officials who say they're doing everything they can to bolster their minority enrollments admit that data like the ones below can prove a useful stimulant.

"Numbers like this just keep us honest," says Stewart of at Nevada-Reno. "It's all part of the business of education. Sometimes the numbers look really outstanding, and sometimes they show you what you need to work on."

Numbers and Proportions of Black Male Students and Athletes at Division I Colleges, 2005-6

 

*These institutions provided incomplete data on undergraduate enrollment to the NCAA.

**These institutions did not report information in most categories because of damage from Hurricane Katrina.

The eight Ivy League colleges and the U.S. service academies did not report data for athletes because they do not offer athletics scholarships.