Graduation Success Rates - Washington State University Athletics

The NCAA Division I Board of Directors created Graduation Success Rate (GSR) in 1995 in response to Division I college and university presidents who wanted a rate that more accurately reflected the mobility of college students than the federal graduation rate. The GSR formula, intended to be a more complete and accurate look at student-athlete success, removes from the rate student-athletes who leave school while academically eligible and includes student-athletes who transfer to a school after initially enrolling elsewhere. The GSR also allows for a deeper understanding of graduation success in individual sports than the federal metric, which has broader groupings.
The federal graduation rate, however, remains the only metric that allows comparison between student-athletes and the general student body.

When compared using the federal graduation rate, Division I student-athletes continue to outpace their peers in the student body. The federal rate for Division I student-athletes rose one point to 67 percent, the highest rate ever. The student body federal graduation rate remained flat at 65 percent. When comparing different subgroups using the federal rate, college athletes perform better than or the same as their peers in every demographic category. White male student-athletes graduate at the same rate as white males in the student body. African-American male and female student-athletes dramatically outperform their counterparts in the student body. African-American male students who participate in sports graduate 12 percentage points higher than the African-American male student body (53 percent compared to 41 percent). For African-American females, the difference is 13 points (63 percent for college athletes in that demographic and 50 percent for the corresponding demographic in the student body).

Federal rates also provide a longer-term picture of student-athlete academic achievement. The federal graduation rate was first collected with the class that entered college in 1984, and the rate has continued to rise over the last 25 years. When rates were first collected, student-athletes did not achieve degrees at as high a rate as the general student body. The rate for all Division I college athletes has increased 15 points in that time and now exceeds that of the student body. The class of African-American student-athletes who entered in 1984 graduated at a 35-percent rate, according to the federal calculation; 56 percent of the 2008 entering class graduated. The men’s basketball rate increased nine points in that time, and Football Bowl Subdivision rates rose 14 points.

NCAA Graduation Rates