March 2004
"What Kind of Game Are We Playing," by Charles F. Blaich, and the related report on the Wabash College Center of Inquiry in the Liberal Arts research underlying it, raise important questions regarding the role and place of intercollegiate athletics, the latter's relationship to liberal arts colleges' educational mission, and the importance of evaluating athletes' overall educational experience and contributions on our campuses. Such questions require transparent, nuanced and comparative analyses that move beyond narrow stereotypes, intellectual baggage, and misleading conclusions. While we support the Wabash researchers' attempt at conducting such analyses, we encourage them to consider a few of the lessons learned from earlier studies and to correct what we believe are some inaccurate statements.
The research report and article refer to the path-breaking work of William G. Bowen's and James L. Shulman's *The Game of Life* (2001) and to Bowen's and Sarah A. Levin's *Reclaiming the Game* (2003). In targeting the earlier work, however, the researchers ignore the methodological innovation that distinguishes *Reclaiming the Game* from its predecessor, and from their own research. That innovation--differentiating recruited athletes (defined as those students who are included on a "coach's list" sent to admissions offices) from non-athletes and athletes who are not recruited ("walk-ons")--allows Bowen and Levin to understand admission preference in a new way and to provide much more rigorous and telling estimates of the extent of academic underperformance. [See Endnote 1.]
A second important methodological consideration that distinguishes *The Game of Life* and *Reclaiming the Game* from the Wabash study is the former's use of percentile rank in class, rather than grade point average (GPA), as a measure of academic performance. This is a crucial and differentiating factor because GPAs are not directly comparable across institutions. Additionally, as every college professor and administrator knows, grade inflation and compression mean that there is not much space between the GPAs of any students. Distributions of class ranks are also more likely to reveal to what extent recruited athletes are "representative" of all students, which should, after all, be the goal and cornerstone of a truly integrated athletic and educational program. [See Endnote 2.]
In his article, Blaich suggests that the findings in *The Game of Life* and *Reclaiming the Game* are limited in utility because their universe encompasses a small, elite group of "all-stars" whose "problems" bear little resemblance to institutions educating first-generation college students. "Rationing access to highly prized educational opportunities," Blaich implies, is not a luxury most colleges and universities in Division III can afford to consider, and he cautions institutions to resist making the highly selective colleges' problems their own. Fair enough; unfortunately, many of the problems associated with intensified athletic programs cut across admission selectivity, endowment size, and national reputation. An underlying theme in both books--which the Wabash researchers correctly identify--has to do with the total educational experience of athletes on our campuses.
There may be less of a statistical (academic) divide between the recruited athletes and other students from the ten colleges and universities in the Wabash study than between those from the institutions examined in the *The Game of Life* and *Reclaiming the Game* [See Endnote 3.]--(we won't know until comparable statistical analyses are done separating recruited athletes from walk-ons and non-athletes)--but there is an equally troublesome divide that clearly exists across the board. This divide reflects the changes in athletics that have occurred across our colleges and universities--the extraordinary intensification and professionalization of athletics, the number of hours committed to practice, in- and out-of-season conditioning, numbers of coaches hired, the residential clustering and curricular grouping of athletes, and the athletic subculture that tragically isolates these students from the campus culture. [See Endnote 4.] Moreover, whatever the putative differences in admissions between highly selective and less selective institutions, the fact remains that athletes are recruited at almost all institutions, that these recruits are generally admitted at a higher rate, and that, once matriculated, their overall college experience is shaped and narrowed to an exceptional degree by their athletic associations.
Athletes, of course, are not the only students who may be performing below predicted levels, but few institutions, as Derek Bok recently observed, "have made . . . a serious effort to discover whether their undergraduates are performing up to their capabilities." The most successful programs, as Bok notes, share one common characteristic--they establish high academic expectations for all students. [See Endnote 5.]
There is no real difference, Blaich suggests, between the chemistry major who spends all her time in the laboratory and the football player who devotes countless hours to training, breaking down film, and practicing. In both instances, he contends, their lives are unbalanced and they're missing out on many other enriching aspects of campus life. But there is an important difference--chemistry is a part of the core educational curriculum, football is not.
Blaich and his fellow researchers are absolutely correct in calling upon all who care about liberal arts education and athletics to focus on mission and values. When we do, we'll find that we share much more in common--the problems and their solutions.
Acknowledgement
The authors gratefully acknowledge the assistance of Michael S. McPherson, president of the Spencer Foundation.
Endnotes
1. Readers of *The Game of Life* and *Reclaiming the Game* will recall that one of their most troubling findings is the degree to which recruited athletes underperform in the classroom-that they do less well than they would be expected to do based on their academic credentials and demographic traits. By contrast, the researchers at Wabash College's Center of Inquiry in the Liberal Arts find limited evidence of underperformance among athletes at the institutions in their study, but they do not report the methodology used to calculate their findings. In order to validate these potentially significant results, future analyses will need to provide more transparent methodological information. Similarly, it does not appear that the Wabash researchers include control variables for race. We know from Bowen's and Derek Bok's *The Shape of the River: Long-Term Consequences of Considering Race in College and University Admissions* (1998) that underrepresented minority students tend to underperform. The failure to control for race likely confounds the estimates of underperformance associated with being an athlete, and also makes the current Wabash results incomparable with those of *Reclaiming the Game*, which does control for race.
2. Another methodological problem in the research supporting "What Kind of Game Are We Playing" has to do with the presentation of evidence. For example, in attempting to show that using rank in class overstates differences in academic performance, the researchers write on page 9 of the report that the difference between a 3.06 and a 3.07 grade point average is equivalent to a difference of 8 percentile rank points (40th versus 48th percentile). However, the table to which they refer (Table 4) shows the average GPA of athletes and non-athletes along with the percentage of athletes and non-athletes in the bottom third of their class--it does not show the percentile rank in class associated with particular GPAs. The 8-percentile-rank-point difference is a figment derived from a misreporting of the researchers' own data.
3. While *Reclaiming the Game*'s database is drawn from some of the nation's most selective colleges and universities, it's helpful to keep in mind that two of its schools (Denison University and Kenyon College) are among the ten liberal arts institutions included in the Wabash study.
4. "What Kind of Game Are We Playing" argues that Bowen and Levin care more about students "who are turned away" than they do with the intellectual growth of the athletes who attend these institutions; this is inaccurate. Although they do discuss the "opportunity cost" of athletic admissions advantages in detail, the majority of Bowen and Levin's analysis focuses on the academic-athletic divide on-campus--the cultural isolation of recruited athletes described in the text above and their worrisome academic underperformance. What the authors of *Reclaiming the Game* lament is the extent to which a student does not live up to his or her academic potential. The problem is not the "B" student who challenges herself and explores a diverse array of subjects and activities; it is the "B" student who follows the academic path of least resistance despite her potential to be an "A" student. In sum, it is the failure of many recruited athletes to realize their full academic potential that makes the opportunity cost of athletic preferences in admission so high.
5. Derek Bok, "Closing the Nagging Gap in Minority Achievement," *Chronicle of Higher Education* 50:9 (October 24, 2003), B20.
Direct personal responses to Eugene M. Tobin at EMT@Mellon.org.
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