The NCAA’s Graduation Success Rate: How Successful Is It?

Edwin Eckard

Research in Higher Education, 2020, vol. 61, issue 6, No 5, 780-793

Abstract: Abstract The Graduation Success Rate (GSR) plays a critical role supporting the NCAA’s Collegiate Model of amateur college athletics. The NCAA created the GSR to correct a statistical bias in the legally mandated Federal Graduation Rate (FGR) that causes it to underestimate rates. But the GSR’s attempted correction causes it to overestimate rates. This paper reports the first estimate of the size of this statistical bias. The focus is on the big revenue sport of men’s basketball in the so-called Power Conferences. The small size of basketball squads allows a reasonably accurate estimate of GSR cohort sizes based on publically available data. This in turn enables the calculation of a “corrected” GSR. The results indicate that the GSR exaggeration is large, perhaps as much as 20 percentage points. This raises fundamental questions about the success of the GSR as a useful graduation rate metric.

Keywords: NCAA; Athlete graduation rate; College basketball; Statistical bias (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s11162-020-09589-6 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:reihed:v:61:y:2020:i:6:d:10.1007_s11162-020-09589-6

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/journal/11162

DOI: 10.1007/s11162-020-09589-6

Access Statistics for this article

Research in Higher Education is currently edited by Robert K. Toutkoushian

More articles in Research in Higher Education from Springer, Association for Institutional Research
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().