USU ranks high for Graduation Success Rate
USU student-athletes have a graduation rate of 84 percent on a four-year average, according to the NCAA’s Graduation Success Rate (GSR) report, released last week.
Among its 16 NCAA-sponsored sports, USU’s softball and men’s basketball teams are both at a 100 percent graduation rate for the fourth year in a row.
Other USU sports that excelled are women’s basketball and soccer, which have success rates of 94 and 91 percent, respectively. Every team’s rate is at least 75 percent, contributing to the above-average total rate.
Brian Evans, associate athletics director for Academic Services, said the NCAA compiles the GSR report, giving students six years to graduate.
Each freshman class of student-athletes receiving scholarships is placed into a cohort and tracked until the student-athletes complete their college degrees. Last week’s results are based on students who enrolled at Utah State in the fall of 2004. Given the six-year rule, they should have graduated by the end of summer 2010.
Evans said the NCAA has three allowable exceptions, which are military service, church missions and pregnancy.
At USU, military service and pregnancies are not common things that take student-athletes away for a time, but the number who serve missions for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is pretty high, Evans said.
“If they start after their freshman year, then leave and go on a mission, they are excluded from the cohort,” Evans said. “Even though they may come back after their mission and graduate, they are on a shorter timeline because there are two years they’ve been out. They are taken out completely, so they don’t count for or against our overall percentage.”
USU is in the 15th percentile of national graduation rates. This year, the national average is at an all-time high of 80 percent.
Aggie women’s basketball head coach Raegan Pebley said the attention the athletics department gives to student-athletes and their academic success is what gives Utah State such a high average.
“We have amazing resources,” she said. “Our student-athlete academic support staff maximizes the resources we have available to us. It’s not done with a lot of money; it’s done with attention to detail.”
“Within our athletic culture here at Utah State, academics is one of the higher values,” Evans said. “The setup that we have in our academic services unit and how we interact with the campus community is very important to our student-athletes doing well. Of course (coaches) want to win, but they also want to see their student-athletes do well academically and graduate,” he said.
The support of student-athletes extends beyond just the athletics offices.
“Coaches are in tune with what’s going on academically and encourage that. Another layer is the student’s academic advisers,” Pebley said.
Each team also has its own techniques and rules to help student-athletes succeed both in their sport and in the classroom.
“You’ve heard the term “It takes a village to raise a child,'” Evans said. “We have a university administration, from the president down to the provost and the deans, that are very supportive of athletics — not only the sport part of athletics, but the academic side of it as well. Their message is clear that they want to see our student-athletes succeed academically.”
Pebley said a lot of the responsibility falls on the athletes, but they are certainly driven to succeed.
“The university attracts the right students and the right student-athletes,” she said. “To be an athlete requires a lot of discipline on their field or on their court, and I think that carries over to the classroom. You aren’t here to get a degree in basketball.”
– megan.allen@aggiemail.usu.edu