NCAA struggling to replace Prop 16

By GEOFF DODD
Collegian Staff Writer

Tuesday, the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals halted the elimination of the NCAA's freshman eligibility requirements -- known as Proposition 16 -- in an effort to give the collegiate athletic governance board a chance to rewrite its eligibility rules and file appeals.

The move came just two and a half weeks after U.S. District Judge Ronald L. Buckwalter struck down the bylaw in favor of a discriminatory lawsuit, Cureton v. NCAA, filed by four black student-athletes. The students had argued the minimum test score requirement discriminated against blacks because they have a history of doing poorly on the entrance exams when compared with their white and Asian counterparts.

In his ruling, Buckwalter said Prop 16, as it is commonly called, had an "unjustified disparate impact on African Americans."

NCAA President Cedric W. Dempsey said that last week's decision left the NCAA with "many unknowns about how to address eligibility standards."

Prop 16 outlines a minimum set of requirements that freshmen recruits must meet before becoming eligible to participate at the Div. I level. The student-athlete must complete at least 13 core academic courses, achieve a 2.5 grade point average in high school (on a 4.0 scale) and score either 820 on the SAT or a sum score of 68 on the ACT. It went into effect on Aug. 1, 1996, replacing the decade-old Proposition 48 standard.

Prop 48 had required a minimum of 11 core courses, a GPA of 2.0 and either a score of 700 on the SAT or 17 on the ACT. (ACT scoring standards have changed -- during Prop 48's days, it was an average of four scores, while now it is the sum of four scores.)

Despite the more stringent standards adopted by Prop 16, the ineligibility rate for freshmen has decreased every year since it went into effect -- from 10.9 in 1996 to 8 percent in 1997 to 6.8 percent in 1998.

Because of evidence like this, several Penn State personalities, most notably football coach Joe Paterno and President Graham Spanier, expressed contempt over Buckwalter's decision.

"I feel strongly about it," Paterno said at a press conference last Friday. "I feel there are a lot of bogus reasons to lower the standards. I can't buy the fact that we are depriving the kids of an opportunity.

"I feel that there are a lot of kids that we take who are great athletes and pass up other kids who are better students who are not quite as good athletes and they are minority kids. And yet, we bring them into our colleges and ask them to take loans and do a lot of things that make it very tough for them to leave college without being in debt. I personally feel freshman eligibility is a horrendous ordeal for the kids."

Although overall ineligibility rates have declined over the past three years, those for low-income students are still much higher (16.9 percent) than for middle- (6 percent) or high-income (2.3 percent) students.

Simultaneously, however, the ineligibility proportion of black student-athletes has declined at a similar pace to the overall rates. In fact, between 1996 and 1997, the black student-athlete rate dropped 5.5 percent from 27.3 to 21.8 percent, compared to the overall rate, which dropped just 2.9 percent. Both the overall and black student-athlete rates dropped 1.2 percent between 1997 and 1998, however.

Spanier, who also serves as the chairman of the NCAA Div. I Board of Directors, spoke out against Buckwalter's decision, saying the elimination of eligibility standards would cripple a student-athlete who was not academically prepared for college.

"Many of us remember the bad old days when some prospects arrived on our campus ill prepared for the academic rigors of university-level work," Spanier said in a teleconference Wednesday afternoon. "They played out their sports until the realities of the classroom pulled them up short, and then, too often, they were cast out with neither an education nor prospects for the future. No one wants to return to those times."

Spanier also reminded listeners that ultimately, each university is solely responsible for whom it admits. The NCAA simply sets guidelines that athletic departments must follow.

"I don't believe that by joining the NCAA, which I emphasize is a membership organization, that I am turning over responsibility to the NCAA for anything about my university," Spanier said. "We still make our own admissions decisions (at Penn State). I can add for example that at Penn State, our admissions criteria for student-athletes is more stringent than the Big Ten's, which is more stringent than the NCAA's."

Spanier said the NCAA has already discussed efforts to rewrite the rules of Prop 16, and changes could go into effect as early as Sept. 1.