graduate/leave in good standing (draft, service, etc)

part, in that there probably isn’t any consequence, other than the normal consequences for a program. I guess the answer is to have standardized minimums for each school, but then again, how low of a bar do you set?

Entrance standards are the clear first reason for this. Schools like K-State have fairly low entrance requirements, thus it’s not that hard to meet them. K-State is a land-grant institution, and up until about 15 years ago (somewhere thereabouts), any kid who graduated from a Kansas high school could be admitted to K-State. The institutional philosophy has always been “give anyone who wants it a chance at a college education.”

I don’t look at this as inherently bad, but when your team is 90 percent special admits, things have gone a little overboard. I’d love to see a comparison between special admits and their graduation rate. Maybe it’s in the article? (I haven’t had time to read much with Ike on its way)

with having higher entrance standards, but schools that rely heavily on special admits want to have their cake and eat it too. They want to claim that the school only admits kids over a minimum academic standard so they can sell the institution to prospective students (and ostensibly to prospective student athletes). But that’s not really honest when, say, 94% of your football players are below the school standard. And as this is the first time I’ve ever even heard of this happening, I view the policy as fundamentally dishonest. The point is to have standards far higher than could reasonably permit the student-athletes you want by simply waiving the standard on their behalf. When nearly 10% of your entire incoming freshman class is below the university standard, is it still an academic standard at all?

all knew that this was happening, but I had no idea there was an actual term for it that was somewhat approved by the NCAA, that was the interesting thing to me, that this practice is condoned by the NCAA, which gives it some legs, but still doesn’t seem right.

I don’t think Texas A&M football players are substantially more or less academically qualified than Texas Tech football players for all the reasons you just stated; the fact is, schools and the NCAA have bent over backwards to make sure some (many, most, I don’t know) dumb people get into schools they could not otherwise get into by relaxing the standards. I am certain Texas Tech does this, as does Texas, as does every contemplatively competitive football program in the country. Many of OUR football players probably scored considerably lower on the SAT or other entrance exames than did students who scored higher but could not run an X.XX forty.

That’s not the issue here. A number of schools have promoted themselves as having minimum academic standards. The purpose of this is to increase the school’s academic reputation, integrity, and draw. For all I know these minimum academic standards are being used when these universities are ranked by respected university/college lists, so that those schools that set these minimum academic standards have advantages relative to the rest of us.

No problem, if you actually play by your own mandated rules. If you have minimum standards and you generally follow them, more power to you. If you have minimum standards, like A&M, and then you systematically and routinely ignore them for your football players, you’re simply trying to get the benefit of setting minimum standards without having to deal with the consequences, namely, that sometimes you’ll want athletes and students that don’t meet those standards.

If 8% of the Texas A&M student body is admitted on a “special admits” basis, at what point does it cease to be that “special”? I’m fairly certain that A&M would happily advertise their super-awesome minimum academic standards, but do you think they likewise admit that a non-trivial portion of their student body (including the vast majority of their football players) are not even held to the standards set by the University?

I see two solutions: You either lower the standard or you place some logical limits on the amount of kids you will permit to break that “standard” because failure to do so makes it meaningless. Again, it’s a having cake and eating it to issue; you shouldn’t reap the benefits of stringent academic standards if you don’t have to suffer the consequences.

Or “expand their ministry”