UNC, where college athletes play like adults, read like 5th-graders
This story at CNN is frighteningly like the story told here on TA by Anthony. READ ANTHONY’S POSTS
A tutor at F
lorida State relates:
“I would say, ‘He’s not doing well. He can’t read and write.’ And (the tutor) said, ‘Well, we’ll see what we can do,'” . That stopped with a career-ending injury. “He’s worth nothing to the team, and I never once heard back from the academic support adviser. He never showed up to class again, either.”
The problem is just as bad at UNC, a premier academic school that, like the UW, is also a sport power.
A counselor at UNC relates meeting a student-athlete who couldn’t read multisyllabic words. She had to teach him to sound out Wis-con-sin, as kids do in elementary school.
And then another came with this request: “If I could teach him to read well enough so he could read about himself in the news, because that was something really important to him,”
Student-athletes who can’t read well, but play in the money-making collegiate sports of football and basketball, are not a new phenomenon, and they certainly aren’t found only at UNC-Chapel Hill. Of UNC-Chapel Hill athletes who played football or basketball from 2004 to 2012, 60% read between fourth- and eighth-grade levels. Between 8% and 10% read below a third-grade level.
Readmore at the CNN Report on Colleges Across US:
excerpts:
the threshold for being college-literate is a score of 400 on the SAT critical reading or writing test. Many student-athletes scored in the 200s and 300s on the SAT critical reading test — a threshold that experts told us was an elementary reading level and too low for college classes. The lowest score possible on that part of the SAT is 200, and the national average is 500.
many students in the basketball and football programs could read only up to an eighth-grade level.
counsellor for athletes admits she took part in cheating, signing name to forms that said there were no NCAA rules violations . But the NCAA, the college sports organizing body, never interviewed the counsellor who has spoken out.
fake classes were just a symptom of the bigger problem of enrolling good athletes who didn’t have the reading skills to succeed at college.
academic advisers, tutors and professors say it’s nearly impossible to jump from an elementary to a college reading level while juggling a hectic schedule as an NCAA athlete.
CNN only found one person in addition to Willingham who has ever collected data on the topic. University of Oklahoma professor Gerald Gurney found that about 10% of revenue-sport athletes there were reading below a fourth-grade level.
Billy Hawkins, an associate professor and athlete mentor at the University of Georgia.
“They’re graduating them. UGA is graduating No. 2 in the SEC, so they’re able to graduate athletes, but have they learned anything? Are they productive citizens now? That’s a thing I worry about. To get a degree is one thing, to be functional with that degree is totally different.”