4/23/2011: At a recent “visioning session” for the UO diversity office, a speaker from the local minority community made the very accurate point that UO’s outreach efforts were mostly focused on the athletic department – not on recruiting high academic performing minority students interested in college. The economist Charles Clotfelter, at Duke, has a new book: Big-Time Sports in American Universities. One of the commentators on the Marginal Revolution discussion on it makes the point even more bluntly:
… I enjoy college sports thoroughly, but the whole deal is based on young cheap labor being unfairly and inappropriately compensated; “black” sports (football and basketball), to put it crudely, subsidize “white” sports (swimming, golf, etc). The whole thing makes me queasy…and yet I still watch.
I’ve heard UO administrators argue that UO sports are important in part because they bring racial minorities to campus. And in truth a large fraction of UO’s African-American students are football and basketball players. Of course, these students are not selected on the basis of academic effort or achievement, which creates some pretty bad high school incentives, and low college graduation rates. (Read Schroeder’s RG story for examples – these “student athletes” are transferring for more playing time – or perhaps because coach Altman told them they weren’t good enough players to keep their scholarships. Nothing to do with academics.) While they are here we segregate them away from the regular students in the Jock Box. (Better than UVA at least, where the tutoring center is actually inside the basketball arena.) The whole thing makes me queasy too.
* federal graduation rates – those that include transfers from the university but exclude students who transfer in – the UO football team improved to 53 percent from 45 percent, men’s basketball improved to 79 percent from 78 percent, women’s basketball improved to 71 percent from 69 percent and volleyball improved to 62 percent from 50 percent. Softball student-athletes had a federal graduation rate of 87 percent, women’s track & field 85 percent, men’s golf 82 percent, women’s tennis 80 percent, women’s golf 78 percent and women’s soccer 70 percent.
The overall UO rate was 70 percent. All these data are old: for the students entering fall of 2003.
Of course, the difficulty with “recruiting high academic performing minority students interested in college” apart from the relatively low nubmers of minority students in Oregon, is the relatively low performance of such students (apart from Asians) in high school. And the competition from more prestigious schools. A black student with average (for UO) SAT scores of around 1100 is going to be heavily recruited by prestigious private colleges and universities; a (black) student with SAT scores of 1300 or above is going to be recruited by the likes of Harvard Princeton Yale etc.
So Oregon is probaby left to recruit a small pool of black students whose SAT’s are mainly in the 800-900 range. Not a terribly promising task.
Are my numbers off? Well, it would be interesting to see the University release the relevant data. I wouldn’t hold my breath. (I have seen relevant data for overall state performance of different groups, it’s in line with what I just wrote. It’s depressing, but that doesn’t make it any less true.)
My understanding is that about 1/3 of UO’s African-American students are athletes, mostly recruited by the football team and not on the basis of academic promise. So SAT scores by race, if UO were to release these, would be a very downward biased estimate of the academic talent of African-Americans. I agree with your other points though.