New ranking shows high graduation rates for some UO sports.

Byline: Greg Bolt The Register-Guard

A new method of tracking graduation rates among college athletes produced some mixed results for the University of Oregon, where several teams landed among the best in the Pac-10 but others didn't do as well.

Women's basketball, men's track and football were the programs that ranked high compared with their conference peers, while men's basketball was in the middle of the pack and women's track was next to last. The Ducks also beat the average national graduation rates in six of 10 programs and missed the other four by only a few percentage points.

The NCAA developed the new formula because it wants graduation rates to include transfer students. Graduation rates prepared by the federal Department of Education generally count transfers as dropouts, even if they were academically eligible when they left and went on to graduate.

That's been a sore point for universities, who feel that the federal data distorts the success rate of student athletes.

NCAA President Myles Brand announced the first-year results of the new method in a teleconference with reporters Monday. The data covers students who enrolled between 1995 and 1998 and graduated or left school in the following six years.

Nationwide, Division I athletes graduated at a comparatively healthy 76 percent rate overall using the new system.

A large majority of Division I schools have higher - sometimes substantially higher - graduation rates using the NCAA method. For example, the UO men's basketball program has a 53 percent graduation rate under the new system compared with a 22 percent graduation rate using federal figures.

But the football program is one of the few that came out worse, although not by much. The NCAA data gives the UO a 63 percent graduation rate; the federal figures put it at 66 percent. Men's golf has the same three-percentage-point differ- ence.

Better tracking of transfer students is one reason for the difference between the NCAA and federal graduation figures. For the UO, that would indicate that athletes in football and golf who transferred into the program aren't doing quite as well as their teammates, but officials said the difference isn't remarkable.

"Certainly we would like to improve their performance academically, but I don't think that that is setting off alarm bells," said Bill Clever, the UO's athletic compliance officer.

The NCAA did not release graduation rates for universities as a whole, saying it wants to focus attention on individual teams before the university graduation rates are released next month. But UO officials calculated an overall grad- uation rate of 75 percent for the school.

Clever said the new figures are generally good news for the university. With the exception of men's basketball and the 71 percent graduation rate in women's track, he said the UO numbers are among the highest in the Pac-10.

"Certainly in a couple of sports we'd like them to be a little higher, but I think that given the new metric they certainly accurately represent where we stand in several of our sports," Clever said. "In some sports we're obviously quite pleased."

Those would include women's basketball and men's track, where the graduation rates are the highest in the Pac-10, and football, which is third in the conference. But men's basketball landed fifth in the Pac-10 and women's track topped only last-place USC.

For now, graduation rates don't figure very prominently in the new system the NCAA has devised to dole out penalties to schools that fail to keep athletes in good academic standing. Penalties instead will be based on a different measurement, known as the Academic Progress Rate, that awards points to schools based on whether athletes remain enrolled as full-time students and are academically eligible to compete.

The APR scores will be released in February and the UO could face the loss of scholarships in football unless figures from 2004-05 raise the score the Ducks received for the previous year or unless the NCAA tweaks the rules. UO officials indicated earlier this year that the school's APR score for football based on only the first year of data would place it in jeopardy of losing scholarships but did not provide details.

The new measurements are part of the NCAA's academic reform efforts aimed at ensuring athletes do well in class as well as on the field. The APR figures are designed to offer a "real-time" measurement of student athlete success while the graduation rates offer a broader, long-term look at academic performance.

While the graduation rates don't currently figure into the penalty system, schools can use the numbers as mitigating evidence should they become subject to more severe sanctions, such as the loss of post-season bowl eligibility. The graduation rates also could be incorporated into the penalty structure in the future.

In most sports, the UO comes out well in the new assessment. Men's track logged an 82 percent graduation rate compared to 59 percent under the federal rate; women's track earned a 71 percent rate from the NCAA and 65 percent under the federal rate.

Women's basketball earned the school's highest NCAA graduation rate at 93 percent (77 percent federal rate). Women also scored 89 percent in golf (67 percent federal), 82 percent in soccer (65 percent federal), 79 percent in softball (72 percent federal), 88 percent in tennis (63 percent federal) and 90 percent in volleyball (70 percent federal). Men's golf earned a 75 percent graduation rate compared with 78 percent under the federal rates. Men's tennis has an 86 percent rate (33 percent federal rate) and men's wrestling had an 89 percent rate (68 percent federal).