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The Chronicle of Higher Education, October 17, 2001 Report Documents Poor Academic Performance of Athletes at New England Liberal-Arts Colleges By WELCH SUGGS Athletes have a huge advantage in the admissions process and graduate at a higher rate, yet get relatively poor grades in their classes at some of the Northeast's most prestigious liberal-arts colleges. Those were some of the findings of a report on colleges in the New England Small College Athletic Conference that was completed last month by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation staff and the authors of The Game of Life. The presidents of the 11 NESCAC institutions released the report on their own campuses last week and issued a joint statement saying that its findings were a cause for concern, and that they would be examining their athletics programs to see whether they were consistent with the conference's core principles. William D. (Bro) Adams, the president of Colby College and current chairman of the NESCAC, said that the findings for the league closely mirrored those for the institutions surveyed in The Game of Life, the controversial critique of college athletics published in January. (See an article from The Chronicle, February 2.) Four of the NESCAC's members -- Hamilton College, Tufts University, Wesleyan University, and Williams College -- were included in that study, which was written by William G. Bowen and James L. Shulman of the Mellon Foundation. "The report confirmed some of the more general concerns we had already discussed on the basis of The Game of Life," Mr. Adams said. "Those concerns ought to lead us to a series of reflections on our practices with respect to possible areas of reform." Those areas, he said, would include admissions practices for athletes and other students; the resources colleges allocate to athletics; conference policies and rules; and "framework issues" such as the structure of the conference and Division III of the National Collegiate Athletic Association, in which NESCAC members compete. The NESCAC's teams are among the best in Division III, the only segment of the NCAA's membership that does not permit athletic scholarships. Williams has won the Division III Sears Directors' Cup for the best overall performance of its teams in the country five out of the last six years -- last year, Middlebury College was ranked second; Amherst College, 14th; Tufts, 24th; Hamilton, 41st; and Bates College, 50th out of nearly 400 institutions. (The NESCAC's other members are Bowdoin College, Connecticut College, and Trinity College in Connecticut.) "The types of students we recruit are the types who are able to do it all," said Harry C. Sheehy III, Williams's athletics director. "They're so bright, and they're able to get their schedules in order. However, faculty members, athletes, and administrators in the conference struggle over the role of athletics on their campuses more than possibly any other league in the country. The NESCAC's rules are much stricter than the rest of Division III, such as forbidding coaches from recruiting off-campus. Only recently did the league begin allowing teams to compete for national championships, and the presidents are still wary of placing too much emphasis on postseason play. Last month, league members voted to extend for another year an experiment in allowing any eligible teams to go to NCAA tournaments. The association invites the winners of each conference to its championships in most sports, and remaining slots in each tournament are parceled out to the best teams on an "at-large" basis. Numerous NESCAC teams, particularly from Williams, Amherst, and Middlebury, have earned at-large spots in recent years In many ways, the problems confronting colleges and their athletics departments are magnified at NESCAC colleges, said Mr. Adams, who was the president of Bucknell University in Division I before coming to Colby. While the economic pressures aren't there, academic issues and the question of whether athletics participation is too intense to accommodate serious students are major controversies because athletes make up such a large percentage of students at small colleges. "It's a matter of balance -- my concern is that the sense of balance is being lost, and I think you've got to be concerned," Mr. Adams said. "But it's very obvious and significant that wonderful things happen in those [athletics] programs. Kids learn a lot, and the kinds of things they learn are what we want them to be learning." The concern over postseason play and the NESCAC's athletics "context" prompted a question: Might the league -- whose members are among the country's most prestigious academic institutions as well -- consider dropping out of the NCAA? It's too soon to discuss that, Mr. Adams said. "It's one of the things we need to talk about," he said. "It's too early to say what the answer might be."
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