By Collin D. Williams, Jr.
In Black Male Student Athletes and Racial Inequities in NCAA Division I Sports, Dr. Shaun Harper, Horatio Blackmon and I endeavored to make public and even more transparent the existence of racial inequities in college athletics, particularly the overrepresentation and low graduation rates of Black male student athletes on D1 basketball and football teams in the top 6 athletic conferences.
Across all the schools in the ACC, Big East, Big Ten, Big 12, Pac 12 and the SEC, Black male student athletes were 2.8 percent of full-time, degree seeking undergraduates, but 57.1 percent of football, and 64.3 percent of basketball teams. At those same schools, Black men graduated at rates lower than student athletes overall, Black males who are not athletes, and the general study body. By making various stakeholders (the NCAA, colleges and universities, the media, and even the athletes themselves etc.) aware of these longstanding inequities, we hold them accountable. We also provide recommendations for how we can both individually and collectively begin to mitigate these issues. Holistically, it starts with broadening the role of institutional leaders, particularly the coaches and athletic directors at high revenue generating D1 programs, to include a formal prioritization of achievement and maintenance of racial parity. Our recommendations include:
For college and university leaders, we recommend that:
College and university presidents, trustees, provosts, and faculty senate committees that oversee athletics demand disaggregated data reports from athletics departments and offices of institutional research.
Presidents hold themselves, athletics directors and coaches accountable for narrowing racial gaps documented in these reports.
Campus leaders pay more careful attention to racial differences in student-athletes’ grade point averages (GPAs), classroom experiences, course enrollment, major selection patterns, participation in enriching educational experiences beyond athletics and post-college pathways.
Efforts to improve rates of completion and academic success among Black male student-athletes include some emphasis on their confrontations with low expectations and stereotypes in classrooms and elsewhere on campus.
Provosts, deans, and department chairs engage faculty colleagues in substantive conversations and developmental exercises that raise consciousness about stereotypes and racist/sexist assumptions they possess about students of color and student-athletes.
For coaches and athletics departments, we recommend that:
Athletics departments create a collaboration between the director of athletics, collaborate with coaches and other department staff to devise a strategy for narrowing racial gaps in graduation rates, academic success indicators, and other student-athlete outcomes.
Athletics departments create internal committees or task forces that focus on racial equity. This group should be comprised of stakeholders within and beyond the athletics department, including administrators from academic and student affairs, current and former Black male student-athletes, and professors who study and write about race and/or sports.
Athletic departments learn from Black male student-athletes who are academically successful and other NCAA Division I institutions at which Black male student-athletes’ graduation rates are comparable to or higher than student-athletes overall, undergraduate students overall, and Black undergraduate men overall.
College presidents and athletics directors expand the reward structure for coaches to include metrics related to student-athlete engagement (as coaches are unlikely to be supportive of anything that threatens their own career stability). Coaches must be departmental agents who are rewarded for winning games AND achieving equity in student-athlete success.
Not only did we find it important to provide the empiricism behind what so many have only observed anecdotally, but also we thought it important to disaggregate the data by race and sport to see exactly how salient the disparities were. In doing so, we were able to dispel a myth that the NCAA perpetuates in one of their own television commercials. They claim that “Black male student-athletes at Division I institutions graduate at higher rates than Black men who do not play college sports.” While this may be true across the entire Division I, it is not the case at the overwhelming majority of colleges and universities in the six championship conferences. Across these 76 schools, Black male student-athletes graduate at 5.3 percentage points lower than their same-race male peers who are not on intercollegiate sports teams. What this means in reality is that on average, 49.8 percent of Black male student-athletes on these campuses do not graduate within six years.
In our report, we stick to the numbers. Moving forward, we call for statistics that are even more disaggregated in order to get richer detail of the experiences of these student athletes. In addition to future quantitative analyses, the forthcoming book, Scandals in College Sports, of which Shaun Harperand I are both authors, will directly address similar issues of exploitation on a case-by-case basis, calling out not just the NCAA and D1 institutions, but also the particular individuals who made these happenings so “scandalous.”
Evidenced by the Associated Press covering the report, the prompt response the NCAA made to it, and the myriad mediums through which the report has been publicized (ESPN, Sports Illustrated, Yahoo Sports, Huff Post, ABC.com, NBC.com, Inside Higher Ed, etc.) it seems that others find these pervasive issues as troubling as we do. Nonetheless, institutional change and progressive implementation are the ultimate goals, processes that begin with the leadership within athletic departments. In the end, everything we do at the Center is to narrow racial inequities in education. Black male student athletes are a critical part of that.
Williams is Doctoral Student of Higher Education & Research Assistant at the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education’s Center for the Study of Race & Equity in Education. He can be reached at cold@gse.upenn.edu
