UNC student-athlete working group talks data on athletes

There’s no lack of data on student-athletes at UNC, but what administrators are struggling to do is find meaning.

“Numbers in the absence of context are just marks on the page,” said Steve Farmer, vice provost for enrollment and undergraduate admissions.

The "Student-Athlete Academic Initiative Working Group":http://www.dailytarheel.com/article/2013/08/athletics-comm-0826 met Monday to discuss the complexities of reporting student-athlete admissions data, such as SAT scores.

Executive Vice Chancellor and Provost Jim Dean said the process has been challenging so far, and the group wants to have a product at the end of the semester that represents its hard work.

“I am continually struck by the complexity of the things we are talking about,” he said.

Farmer said an advisory committee began meeting last May to decide how to report undergraduate athletic admissions.

“(The group) met fairly consistently over the summer and fairly consistently through the fall, and it turned out to be more complicated than we originally thought,” he said.

Farmer said the group will report to the Faculty Athletics Committee in April, and wants to make sure that the statistics they have on student-athletes are given context.

In 2013, 201 student-athletes were admitted. Of this group, 154 were admitted under special talent policies and procedures. The median GPA for those 154 after thier first semester was a 2.8.

Farmer said the group has agreed that more information needs to be reported, but statistics on athletes only represent easily quantifiable characteristics.

“The fear we have is that the information will be used as a weapon against the students we have enrolled,” Farmer said.

Athletic Director Bubba Cunningham said he does not think the performance of student-athletes should be compared against the performance of other students. He said he would like to see performance versus predicted GPA for student-athletes in order to better define what success means for a student-athlete.

“We are asking them to do a lot of different things that the rest of the student body isn’t doing, and to compare them one more time doesn’t make sense,” he said.

Sociology professor Andrew Perrin said an answer to this problem is transparency.

“The answer to that is to report on sufficient information and have people understand those numbers better,” he said. “Security by obscurity is not normally successful.”

Perrin said it would be helpful to report the performance of student-athletes once they have completed at least one semester at UNC, and one way to more fairly compare student-athletes with nonathletes would be contextualized grading.

Dean said the group will submit about 10 initiatives to the Faculty Athletics Committee by the end of the academic year.

“We are making progress,” he said. “It is slow, but we are getting there.”

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