The Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sport at the University of Central Florida College of Business Administration (#UCFBusiness) has released a new study on the Graduation Success Rates and Academic Progress Rates of the teams in the NCAA Division I Women’s and Men’s Sweet 16.
Richard Lapchick, Ph.D., the primary author of the study, is the director of TIDES and chair of the DeVos Sport Business Management Graduate Program. The study was co-authored this year by Evanna Howell and Maclin Simpson.
“Overall, women basketball student-athletes achieved greater academic success than their male counterparts,” Lapchick said.
“And no matter whether we look at women’s or men’s college basketball, there is a gap between the graduation rates of white and African-American basketball student-athletes. The fact that this year’s numbers are much better than last year is a clear indication that the academic reforms instituted more than a decade ago have helped.”
This study is a follow-up report to the annual study, “Keeping Score When It Counts: Academic Progress/Graduation Success Rate Study of the 2015 NCAA Division I Men’s and Women’s Basketball Tournament Teams,”
which compared the GSR and APR for all teams that were selected for the men’s and women’s basketball tournaments.
Five schools have teams in both the men and women’s 2015 Sweet 16 fields: Duke University, Gonzaga University, University of Louisville, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and University of Notre Dame. Duke University, Gonzaga University, and University of Notre Dame achieved the highest level of success on the court and in the classroom.