Cal task force: Fewer midweek games, more focus on academics to raise athletes' grad rates

A task force formed to improve the academic performance of student-athletes at California-Berkeley is recommending that the school admit fewer students who fail to meet minimum qualifications, reduce midweek athletic events and evaluate coaches based on how their players perform in the classroom as well as on the field.

The report to Chancellor Nicholas Dirks that was released Friday said that the "acceptable" overall graduation rate for student-athletes should be raised from two-thirds to the more than 90 percent six-year graduation rate for the entire campus and that athletes must be more integrated into campus life.

"It was made powerfully explicit that student-athletes desire more integration into the wider campus and that non-athlete students desired more interaction and engagement with student-athletes," the report said.

The Chancellor's Task Force on Academics & Athletics was formed last fall in response to low graduations rates in football, men's basketball and six other sports. Cal's 44 percent graduation rate for football players who entered school from 2003-06 was the lowest of any major conference team. The 38 percent rate in men's basketball was fourth worst among major conferences.

While those graduation rates have already begun to rise, the task force consisting of 20 members, including professors, coaches, student-athletes, students, administrators and alums, made more than 50 recommendations for additional improvements after interviewing coaches, students and consulting with counterparts at Stanford, UCLA, Harvard and Virginia.

Among the most noteworthy recommendations are lobbying the Pac-12 and Pac-12 Networks to cut down on midweek games that force students to miss class time; lobbying the NCAA to allow student-athletes to take fewer than 13 credits in a semester during the season to stay eligible; calling on coaches to redshirt more freshmen; and admitting fewer athletes who don't have a 3.0 grade point average and a 500 score on both the math and reading portions of their SATs.

In the eight sports with the lowest graduation rates, student-athletes with a 3.0 high school grade point average graduated at a 70.2 percent rate, compared to 38.6 percent for those under a 3.0. There was a similar pattern for students who scored below 500 on their SATs.

"It appears that many of these student-athletes who did not graduate were not fully prepared for the combination of the athletic and academic rigors of their Berkeley experience in terms of their high school preparation," the report said.

The report also recommended that contracts for coaches and their evaluations should place more value on the academic performance of their student-athletes.

"If we believe that good teams with excellent graduation rates, to cite the most rudimentary measure of academic success, are better than great teams with poor graduation rates, hiring decisions, coaches' contracts, and performance evaluations must communicate that message and reflect that prioritization of values," the report said.

While the report acknowledged that student-athletes said the amount of time they spent practicing, conditioning and playing games affected their classroom performance, the task force made no recommendations to reduce the time spent on sports.

The task force also recommended that the athletic director report directly to Dirks instead of the Vice Chancellor for Administration and Finance; the athletic department conduct bi-annual evaluations of student-athlete experience; freshman athletes have non-athlete roommates as part of an effort to integrate them more into the campus; offer key courses at more times so they don't conflict with practices; and have more student-athletes take classes the summer before and after their freshman year.