NCAA to Release Datasets

Data on college sports and athletes will be much more accessible than it has been, under an arrangement announced by the National Collegiate Athletic Association and the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research at the University of Michigan. The new Web site will eventually feature longitudinal datasets of team-level graduation rates and Academic Progress Rates, an NCAA-developed score judging teams' performances in the classroom. In addition, the site will present results from two ongoing NCAA projects, “the Study of College Outcomes and Recent Experiences” (SCORE) and “the Growth, Opportunities, Aspirations and Learning of Students” (GOALS). Some of these figures are already available from the NCAA but are not readily accessible in an open-source, searchable format. NCAA officials say that “the data-sharing initiative will enhance research directly benefiting student-athletes, colleges and intercollegiate sports, and will broaden the dialogue between NCAA research staff and outside scholars.”