I promise I'm not trying to make your head hurt ...
... but I feel compelled to dedicate this blog entry to the Academic Progress Rate (APR) numbers the NCAA released yesterday.
Hopefully, you were able to make heads or tails out of the story I wrote in today's N&R. If not, I apologize. Perhaps you can take some solace in the number of times I beat my head against my keyboard while trying to make sense of phrases like "upper confidence boundary", "aggregate cohort" and the always fun "squad-size adjustment."
Yet, I feel compelled to provide you with the link to another APR story, one with a more global view than the piece I wrote, but one with clear connections to the Triad. It's the Associated Press story on the APR numbers.
It makes several good points that I sorta wish I'd made in my story.
1) Just because programs avoided penalties this year doesn't mean they're in the clear - particularly when the mysterious "squad size adjustment" is dropped for some teams.
2) The first big glitch in this APR system is that it clearly is harder for programs with less resources - like the historically black colleges and universities - to reach these benchmarks than it is for the wealthier BCS schools. The NCAA responded to this in part by issuing a bunch of waivers, but it still has to figure out a way to make things a bit more equal for schools that don't possess an army of academic advisors and tutors.
Given how few schools have been punished so far, I'm starting to think that there will be so man loopholes in the APR system as to make it pretty toothless. But I'm willing to wait until a full four-year data collection period is wrapped up. I'm sure the NCAA is relieved to hear that.