Academic clustering among football student-athletes and exploring its relationship to institutional characteristics

ABSTRACT

With the advent of the Annual Progress in 2004, the assessment for athletic eligibility has shifted from individual measurements to aggregate outcomes among colleges and universities that participate in Division I athletics. Utilizing publicly-available data from the Fall 2011 media guides of 60 Division I football programs, the authors explored the prevalence of academic clustering among football student-athletes, extending the analysis of academic clustering across Football Bowl Subdivision (FBS) automatic-qualifying (AQ) conferences. Additionally, the authors explored the relationship between organizational affiliation and academic clustering among football student-athletes. Across all FBS AQ conferences, evidence of academic clustering is prevalent and found among non-white football players at a higher rate than white football players. Findings provide further evidence of academic clustering among Division I football programs and new evidence of statistically significant correlations between the presence of academic clustering and university membership in the Association of American Universities (AAU), and conference membership.

KEYWORDS:

• intercollegiate athletics
• clustering
• equity
• quantitative

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Note on contributors

Derek A. Houston is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Adult and Higher Education in the emphasis area of Intercollegiate Athletics Administration at the University of Oklahoma. His research interests focus on equity in intercollegiate athletics, education finance policy, and equity, access, & matriculation in postsecondary education.

Lorenzo DuBois Baber is an Associate Professor of Higher Education at Iowa State University. His research interests focus on access and equity in postsecondary education with emphasis on traditionally underrepresented populations.

Notes

1 FBS AQ conferences are the Big Ten, Southeastern, Atlantic Coast, Big East, Big 12, and Pacific 12 conferences. At least one institution within these conferences are automatically qualified for a spot in one of the Bowl Championship-Sub Division bowl games. The AQ status guarantees that each conference will participate in the revenue generated by the bowl games.

2 Fountain and Finley used ‘minority’ to discuss non-white student-athletes. Non-white is used in place to minimize reductionist language and provide continuity in the paper.

3 As of 2014, 33 AAU institutions compete at the FBS-AQ level (see AAU, 2015).

4 The study was completed prior to the most recent conference realignment (Missouri, Texas A&M in SEC; West Virginia, Texas Christian in Big 12; Louisville, Pitt in ACC; Rutgers, Maryland in Big 10).

5 Upperclassmen are defined as college athletes that were classified by their class standing as juniors, seniors, or graduate students for the 2011–2012 academic year.

6 Classification of the racial identity of each student-athlete was purposely limited to white and non-white. Although statistics suggest Black students make up nearly 44% of the football student-athlete population at BCS AQ schools, making inferences based on perception beyond the binary increases the likelihood of miss-identification.

7 See Agresti and Agresti (1978)