The Atlantic Coast Conference's recent decision to expand to include the University of Miami, Virginia Tech and Boston College, not only will increase the conference's football prowess but also will increase the graduation rate of student athletes.
According to a study released this past Monday by the Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sport at the University of Central Florida, the expansion of the ACC will increase the average graduation rate of football players by 1 percent. Among conferences, the ACC currently has the top graduation rate for football players and, with the expansion, the rate should rise from its current 58 percent to 59 percent.
"Our standards are basically the same as other conferences -- we follow all other NCAA requirements," said Shane Lyons, associate commissioner for compliance for the ACC.
In order to count toward a school's graduation rate, student athletes in the ACC must graduate within six years; a specification which has provoked controversy for some time and, as such, is subject to constant review.
"The graduation rate -- the way it's calculated -- you're allowed six years to graduate in order to count positively," Lyons said. "You are not considered as a graduate [for statistical purposes] if you don't finish within six years."
The ACC also differs from the other NCAA conferences in that no institution in the ACC will allow a student who did not meet the academic standards required of recruited athletes to walk on to a team.
"We do not allow non-qualifiers to play," Lyons said. "If you are a non-qualifier you will never walk on to the team."
According to its recently released annual athletic report, Boston College has one of the highest graduation rates in the country for football players.
"We have a department called Learning Resources for student athletes that is very similar to the academic support units at many other colleges and universities," said Chris Cameron, associate athletic director for media relations at Boston College.
Cameron said he believes this sort of athletic and academic vigor enjoyed by the ACC is unique to the conference: Just as the conference is selective in terms of the institutions that comprise it, those individual schools are very selective when it comes to admissions.
"I think that, similar to many of the other ACC institutions, the standards for admissions to BC are very high to begin with, and therefore we attract some top caliber student athletes who have excelled on the playing field and in the classroom," Cameron said.
Duke University, with an average football player graduation rate of 91 percent, ranks first among pre-expansion ACC schools in terms of football players receiving degrees within six years, according to data covering 1993-2000.
The University comes in second, with both a mean and median graduation rate of 74.5 percent, and Wake Forest University ranks third with an average graduation rate of 71.6 percent.
The University of North Carolina comes in fourth with an average of 63.9 percent, and Clemson University ranks lowest among ACC schools in terms of graduation rates with an average of 45.8 percent.
The most recent analysis places the ACC third in terms of graduation rates of African-American students playing football. The study, entitled "The Classroom Counts" reviewed the 1996-97 rates of graduation.
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