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The Honolulu Advertiser
Posted on: Tuesday, September 11, 2001

UH grad rates beat national average

Advertiser Staff and News Services

University of Hawai'i-Manoa athletes graduated at a rate slightly higher than the national division I-A average, according to an NCAA study released today.

Athletes who entered Manoa in 1994-95 graduated at a 64 percent rate — six percent higher than the national Division I average, according to NCAA figures.

The graduation rate for all students at Manoa for the period was 54 percent.

Manoa was the only one of five NCAA member institutions in the state to exceed the national average. The other four — Brigham Young-Hawai'i, Chaminade, UH-Hilo and Hawai'i Pacific — are all Division II members and had rates ranging from zero (BYUH) to 38 percent (UH-Hilo).

The NCAA did not announce a nation figure for Division II schools.

Men's basketball lags

Graduation rates among all college athletes held steady in the most recent NCAA figures, but the rate among men's basketball players dropped to its second-lowest level since 1984.

While graduation rates for all Division I athletes remained at 58 percent — the same as surveys conducted the past two years by the primary governing body for college sports — the rate among men's basketball players dropped from 42 percent to 40 percent.

The rate among white male basketball players in Division I declined 4 percentage points to 52 percent. But the rate for black male basketball players, however, increased by 1 percent to 35 percent.

"That is a halt of the decline of black graduation, so it's kind of consistently ratcheting down," said Richard Lapchick, head of the Center for the Study of Sport in Society at Northeastern University in Boston.

Word of caution

Lapchick said the rates are "still low enough in basketball that we have to build in safeguards" to ensure athletes have a realistic opportunity to complete college degrees.

Black female basketball players in Division I showed the single largest increase ever, graduating 61 percent from the class that enrolled in 1994 — a 9 percentage point jump from the previous year.

Experts say the NCAA's figures must be interpreted with caution.

"The problem with graduation rates always is it's a snapshot of a single year," Lapchick said. "That may be a distorted year."