107
Journal of Intercollegiate Sport, 2011, 4, 107-120
© 2011 Human Kinetics, Inc.
Nichols is a professor emeritus, Corrigan is a PhD candidate, and Hardin is an associate professor, at
John Curley Center for Sports Journalism, College of Communications,Penn State University,Uni-
versity Park, PA.
Integration of Athletics and Academics:
Survey of Best Practices at FBS Schools
John Spicer Nichols, Thomas F. Corrigan, and Marie Hardin
Penn State University in collaboration
with the Coalition on Intercollegiate Athletics
The Coalition on Intercollegiate Athletics (COIA), an alliance of 57 university
faculty senates, was founded in 2002 to provide a faculty voice in the national
discussion about how to best maintain academic integrity in big-time college sports.
COIA’s most recent white paper, Framing the Future: Reforming Intercollegiate
Athletics (2007), proposes best practices for individual universities to help ensure
that college sports are more fully integrated into their academic goals, values and
missions. Reported here are the results of a national survey that gauged the extent
to which COIA’s best practices have been adopted by schools participating in the
Football Bowl Subdivision. The ndings suggest that big-time athletics programs
have a number of underutilized tools at their disposal that can assist them in
protecting core academic values and standards at universities competing at the
highest level of intercollegiate sport.
“(I)ntercollegiate athletics, while providing positive benets to athletes, the
campus and the broader community, at times clashes with the educational
goals and mission of our institutions. These conicts, which by many measures
are on the increase, have the potential of undermining the values and aims of
higher education” (COIA, 2007, p. 2).
Those words are from a report by the Coalition on Intercollegiate Athletics
(COIA), an alliance of 57 university faculty senates founded in 2002 to provide
a faculty voice in the national discussion about how to best maintain academic
integrity in big-time college sports. COIA represents member senates at universi-
ties participating in the Football Bowl Subdivision (FBS), formerly Division 1A of
the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA), and aims to engage faculty
with issues of intercollegiate athletic reform and share ideas on how reforms can
be implemented at their institutions.
Since its founding, COIA has produced several policy papers and reports
to intercollegiate athletic reform groups such as the NCAA Presidential Task
Force and Knight Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics. The late NCAA
President Myles Brand, who placed academic reform of intercollegiate athletics
Articles
108 Nichols, Corrigan, and Hardin
high on the association’s agenda, encouraged the creation of COIA, collaborated
with its leadership, and endorsed its general approach—if not all of its specic
recommendations–of identifying “best practices” that individual universities might
adopt to better protect “the principle that academic achievement and participation
in athletics are not in conict.” He concluded, “The totality of the COIA recom-
mendations represents a signicant effort for a group critical to the success of the
reform movement” (Brand, 2005). New NCAA President Mark A. Emmert has
indicated that maintaining academic standards for athletes would remain high on
the NCAA agenda under his leadership (Sander, 2010).
COIA’s most recent white paper, Framing the Future: Reforming Intercollegiate
Athletics (2007), identies major challenges confronting intercollegiate athletics
and proposes best practices that individual universities might adopt to help ensure
that college sports are more fully integrated into their academic goals, values and
missions and remain a positive force on their campuses. The proposals—some
drawn from previous COIA reports, others newly developed—fell into four areas
of concern: academic integrity and quality, student-athlete welfare, campus gov-
ernance of intercollegiate athletics, and scal responsibility.
Framing the Future was formally approved by a vote of the COIA members
and promulgated in 2007 after a lengthy and inclusive deliberative process. The
initial draft was written by the COIA steering committee, cochaired by Professors
Nathan Tublitz of the University of Oregon and Virginia L. Shepherd of Vanderbilt
University, in consultation with the NCAA leadership. Subsequent drafts were
shared with the Association of Governing Boards, Faculty Athletics Repre-
sentatives Association, Division IA Athletics Directors Association, Division
IA Faculty Athletics Representatives, American Association of University Profes-
sors, College Sports Project, National Association of Athletic Academic Advisors,
Knight Commission, and NCAA, and many of their suggestions were incorporated
in the nal draft.
Purpose of the Survey and Research Questions
In 2008, the John Curley Center for Sports Journalism at the Penn State College
of Communications—in partnership with COIA—launched a research project
intended to assess the extent to which the best practices in Framing the Future
were implemented at FBS schools. COIA had invested a signicant amount of time
and effort to develop its recommendations for integrating intercollegiate athletics
more fully into the academic mission of universities but had no hard evidence
of the extent to which they were adopted and actually had positive benet at the
local level. A national survey of FBS schools would be the rst step in such an
assessment. Furthermore, benchmarking data would allow individual universities
to compare their practices of athletic-academic integration with those of peer
institutions. Such self-assessment could provoke internal discussions about what
might be done at the local level to foster improvement. A nal goal was to iden-
tify those universities that have effectively implemented COIA best practices, to
conduct detailed case studies seeking to better understand their local application,
and to acknowledge (with permission) their relative success in athletic-academic
integration. It is important to note that the goal was not to be prescriptive. A major
theme in Framing the Future and other COIA policy papers is the belief that best
COIA Survey 109
practices vary widely across institutions and that a one-size-ts-all approach would
not work for all FBS schools.
The following research questions were proposed for this study:
1) To what extent have FBS schools implemented COIA best practices regarding
athletic-academic integration?
2) What FBS schools have effectively implemented COIA best practices, and
what are the local circumstances that help to explain that success?
The second research question will be considered in a companion article in this
issue of the Journal of Intercollegiate Sport.
Method
The COIA steering committee, after discussion with the membership at a national
meeting, selected 20 best practices–primarily from Framing the Future and its other
policy papers–that best gauged the Coalition’s emphasis on the primacy of academ-
ics in intercollegiate athletics and on transparency and accountability in the conduct
and governance of athletic programs. The Curley Center then operationalized those
best practices into a survey instrument. (Discussion of the weight of each item and
the scoring system for reassembling the survey items into the original COIA best
practices appears in the companion article.)
Next, the Curley Center sought input from an ad hoc panel of experts and
incorporated their feedback into the nal draft of the survey instrument. Mem-
bers of expert panel were William Anderson of Michigan State University, Billy
Hawkins of the University of Georgia, Scott Kretchmar of Penn State University,
Robert Malekoff of Guilford College, and Allen Sacks of University of New Haven.
And, nally, the survey instrument was pretested with 12 FBS schools. Telephone
debriengs were conducted with those who completed the draft survey, and very
minor adjustments were made to the survey. The changes were minor enough to
allow the pretest schools to be folded into the larger pool of respondents.
In July 2009, the surveys were mailed to the chair or president of the faculty
governance body (or the closest equivalent) at all 120 FBS institutions. The chairs
or presidents were encouraged to consult with the institution’s Faculty Athletics
Representative (FAR) or the chair of the Campus Athletic Board–those most likely
to be familiar with the items addressed in the survey. The respondents were informed
that only aggregate data would be reported and that individual universities would
not be identied without their permission.
Five FBS institutions do not have faculty governance bodies, and, thus, were
removed from calculation of the response rate. Sixty-one of the remaining 115
FBS institutions completed and returned the survey for a 53% response rate. This
is a respectable response rate, especially for a mail survey of considerable length
and complexity.
By directly contacting university ofcials and independently checking publicly
available information about athletic programs, the researchers sought to verify the
responses to selected survey questions. These checks indicated that the survey
respondents reported accurately and, therefore, the data summarized below are
reective of actual university practices in 2008–2009, the academic year studied.
110 Nichols, Corrigan, and Hardin
Of the 61 institutions that responded to the survey and were included in this
analysis, 39 (63.9%) were COIA-afliated. Eleven conferences were represented.
The responses came from 4 institutions in the Atlantic Coast Conference, 7 in the
Big-12 Conference, 4 in the Big East Conference, 9 in the Big Ten Conference, 8 in
Conference USA, 5 in Mid-American Conference, 3 in Mountain West Conference,
5 in the Pacic-10 Conference, 9 in the Southeastern Conference, 4 in the Sun Belt
Conference, and 3 in the Western Athletic Conference. Fifty-three (86.9%) of the
institutions that responded were public and 8 were private. Thirty-eight (62.3%) of
the responding institutions were participants in Bowl Championship Series (BCS)
conferences and 23 were not.
FBS schools that participated in the survey did not differ signicantly from
nonparticipants in terms of conference membership, public or private status, or
whether the school competes in a BCS conference. COIA afliation was signi-
cantly related to participation in the survey, X
2
(1) = 19.66, p < .001; however, only
one survey question (D5c regarding whether the chair of the Campus Athletic
Board reported in person to the faculty governance body) produced statistically
signicant different answers between COIA members and nonmembers, X
2
(1) =
5.07, p < .05. In other words, the results of the survey have considerable external
validity and can be reasonably generalized to all FBS schools.
Results
The survey results indicate that most FBS schools have not implemented most
COIA best practices for academic integration of intercollegiate athletics. There
was some variability in practices among universities depending on their conference
membership, public/private status, or whether they were BCS participants, but most
universities appear to have considerable latitude for adopting—if locally appropri-
ate—additional practices that might improve the transparency and accountability of
intercollegiate athletics and protect the primacy of academics on their campuses.
A comparison of COIA best practices in eight areas (admissions and recruiting,
academics, student-athlete integration, campus governance of athletics, scholar-
ships, governance aspects of scal matters, student-athlete welfare, academic
advising) and actual practices by FBS schools follows.
1
Admissions and Recruiting
As a general proposition, “student-athletes should be admitted based on their
potential for academic success and not primarily on their athletic contribution to
the institution” (COIA, 2007, p.7). They should not be admitted if they cannot per-
form academically at a university level or do not have a good prospect of earning
a degree. Consequently, the academic proles of entering student-athletes should
be similar to those of nonathletes, and any special admissions of student-athletes
should be in accordance with the same standards applied to nonathletes. To achieve
these goals, faculty and academic administrators should be integrally involved in
the admissions of student-athletes.
COIA Best Practice: “General admissions policies should be the same for
all students, student-athletes and non-student-athletes” (COIA, 2007, p.7). Survey
Result: The admission of student-athletes was integrated into the existing admis-
COIA Survey 111
sions process at nearly all FBS universities and was subject to the same admissions
policies for nonathletes at a large majority of them (Tables A1 and A2).
COIA Best Practice: “Data on the academic proles of entering student-
athletes and non-student-athletes should be reviewed at least annually by the Campus
Athletics Board or the campus faculty governance body... Data on the academic
performance of student-athlete special admits should be reviewed at least annually
by the Campus Athletic Board or the campus faculty governance body” (COIA,
2007, p.7). Survey Results: A large majority of faculty governance bodies at FBS
schools did not review academic proles of entering student-athletes and the aca-
demic performance of student-athlete special admits during 2008–2009, the year of
Table A
Admissions and Recruiting %(n)
1. The admissions process for student-athletes
a. is integrated into the university’s existing (non-student-athlete)
admission services ofce.
95.1(58)
b. is under the purview of admissions ofcers in the existing admissions
ofce.
96.7(59)
2. Admissions applications from athletes are subject to the same
admissions policies as those from non-athletes.
88.5(54)
3. Comprehensive data on the academic proles
a. of all entering student-athletes were reviewed during the 2008–2009
academic year by
i. the campus faculty governance body. 26.7(16)
i
ii. the Campus Athletics Board. 45.0(27)
i
b. of all entering non-student-athletes were reviewed during the
2008–2009 academic year by
i. the campus faculty governance body. 29.5(18)
ii. the Campus Athletics Board. 13.3(8)
i
4. Data on the academic performance of student-athlete special admits
were reviewed during the 2008–2009 academic year by
a. the campus faculty governance body. 27.5(14)
i
b. the Campus Athletics Board. 64.6(31)
iii
5. The recruiting processes for student athletes were reviewed during
the 2008–2009 academic year by
a. the campus faculty governance body. 18.6(11)
iv
b. the Campus Athletics Board. 45.0(27)
i
c. the Faculty Athletics Representative. 73.3(44)
i
i
1.6(1) missing
ii
13.1(8) N/A; 3.3(2) missing
iii
13.1(8) N/A; 8.2(5) missing
iv
3.3(2) missing