When the University of Oregon Ducks and the Florida State University Seminoles meet on New Year’s Day for the first college-football playoff game ever, the two teams will have more in common than just dominance on the gridiron and a place in sporting history.
They’ll also have an academic link: On each team about one-third of the players are majoring in social sciences, a multidisciplinary liberal-arts major.
At both institutions only about 3 percent of all students graduate with a bachelor’s degree in general social sciences. That means that Ducks and Seminoles football players are roughly 10 times as likely as their peers to be pursuing this general-studies major.
Coincidence? Unlikely.
The Chronicle analyzed the majors of athletes at 17 of the 25 universities whose football teams made the first college-football playoff rankings in late October. (The eight other universities declined to provide information or failed to respond to public-records requests.) At almost every institution, we found some athletes clustering in a small number of majors.
Of course, clustering is no surprise. Ask a few average students at a Division I college, and they are likely to be able to name the “jock major” at their institution. But the clustering can be awfully stark, and at its most extreme it illuminates the central tension of college sports—the push-pull between academics and athletics.
At the University of Arizona, for example, 23 percent of all athletes are majoring in general studies, another broad liberal-arts degree, which graduates just 3 percent of all undergraduates. (A note here: We’re comparing the overall number of students who graduate in a discipline with the smaller number of athletes currently majoring in that discipline. That’s not a perfect comparison, but it’s the best we can do with readily available data.)
As in most of the athletic departments The Chronicle analyzed, football players are especially likely to cluster in the top athlete majors: 34 percent of Arizona’s football players are seeking a degree in general studies.
Whether or not this is a problem depends on your perspective. But clustering raises important questions about the real status of college athletes. As those athletes have increasingly called for compensation, the National Collegiate Athletic Association and colleges themselves have doubled down on the image of the “scholar athlete” and the notion that a free education is more than fair pay.
But with one-third of the football teams at Oregon, Florida State, and Arizona working toward broad, general-studies degrees—and many other athletes clustering in majors that may be better for their practice schedules than their eventual careers—some experts question how much the degrees many of these students get are really worth.
“We have to ask ourselves, What is the long-term prospect of the student-athlete?,” said Peter Finley, an associate professor of sport management at Nova Southeastern University who has studied major clustering among athletes. “Where are they in 10 years? What is the logical outcome of the general-studies degree?”
The answer, he said, is that some athletes are “basically majoring in eligibility and little else.”
Not All Athletes, Not All Majors
Most investigations of athletes’ academic clustering—defined, in the first academic study on the topic, as 25 percent or more of the students on a single team in the same major—focus on the revenue-generating sports of football and men’s basketball. But The Chronicle’s analysis found some clustering in nearly every sport and across genders.
At the University of Alabama, home of the country’s top-ranked football team, there was actually very little clustering among football players. The most popular football major, general studies, accounted for just 13 percent of all declared football players, well below the clustering cutoff.
But 35 percent of the men’s baseball team, which barely cracked the top 30 in national rankings, are studying exercise science, a common major among athletes at several universities in our analysis. Half of all women’s softball players at Alabama are also exercise-science majors.
At Mississippi State University, clustering spans the entire athletic department. Half of all athletes, male and female, are pursuing just four majors: kinesiology, business administration, human sciences, and biological sciences. Those programs graduate just 20 percent of all undergraduates.
Clemson University, by contrast, exemplifies how clustering can be specific to both sport and gender.
One-quarter of women’s cross-country athletes, 29 percent of women’s soccer players, and 31 percent of women’s basketball players at Clemson are majoring in health sciences.
On the men’s side, health sciences isn’t the most popular major in a single sport. But parks, recreation, and tourism management—its website declares that its majors “study fun"—is quite popular. The department claims one-quarter of all football players, 29 percent of men’s baseball players, and 36 percent of men’s basketball players, but it graduates just 3 percent of all undergraduates.
Clustering doesn’t always involve a general-studies major. At Duke University, the men’s swimming-and-diving program exhibited the most pronounced clustering of any team in our analysis, but hardly anyone could make the case that these athletes are taking the easy way out. Ten out of 14 declared swimmers—71 percent—are majoring in some kind of engineering.
A Deepening Problem?
Athletes flocking to certain majors isn’t a new phenomenon, of course. Back in 2003, The Chronicle looked into the majors of the athletes who played in that year’s college-football bowl games and found evidence of clustering.
But compare the data collected then to the new numbers, and you’ll find a strong suggestion that clustering has deepened over the past decade.
In 2003, The Chronicle found, 14 percent of Oregon football players were studying pre-business. This year, 22 percent of team members are majoring in pre-business, which isn’t even the most popular football major. Social sciences, which didn’t register as a top major in 2003, now enrolls 29 percent of all football players.
The same trend can be seen at Oregon’s Rose Bowl rival, Florida State, where the percentage of football players studying general social science has almost tripled, from 13 percent in 2003 to 34 percent this year.
At the same time, Mr. Finley’s research has found that clustering increases over an athlete’s time in college.
“When these folks arrived on campus, they had dreams of majoring in things from education to finance to you name it,” Mr. Finley said of his study of football players at Virginia Tech from 2000 to 2009. “And then over time—and far, far more for the minorities than the white players—they just migrate to the one clustered major. I think that left us with some real concern about how much free will was being exercised by the student-athlete.”
Why has clustering grown more entrenched over time? Mr. Finley and Brian Davis, who was the associate athletic director for football student services at the University of Texas at Austin for 16 years before being dismissed in June, both place some blame on an unlikely target: the NCAA’s stricter eligibility requirements, which went into effect in 2003.
Under the revised rules, in order to stay eligible to play Division I athletics, students have to show adequate progress toward a degree at the end of each semester. Athletes must complete 40 percent of the coursework needed for a degree by the beginning of their third year, 60 percent by the beginning of their fourth year, and 80 percent by the start of their fifth year.
“Prior to 2004, people in athletic academic-support roles could advise students to take some risk and to do more-thorough exploration and to challenge themselves,” said Mr. Davis, who is now a consultant. But the NCAA’s updated academic-progress standards “make it nearly impossible for a student to run the risk of challenging themselves, because the consequences are too dire.”
The new requirements encouraged coaches and, by proxy, academic advisers to “find the path of least resistance on your campus,” said Mr. Finley.
And the standards can make clustering look worse than it really is, according to Oregon’s head of athlete academic services. Some Oregon football players who appear to be majoring in social science may actually be planning to switch to biology or business, said Steve Stolp, executive director of the John E. Jaqua Academic Center for Student Athletes, the 40,000-square-foot, $42-million home for athlete academic support at Oregon.
Officials at Florida State and Arizona also made the point that athletes who declare their intention to major in social science or general studies may have other plans down the line. In the meantime, however, declaring those majors makes it easier to meet the degree-progress requirements.
The Blame Game
When the academic achievements of athletes don’t stack up to expectations, people like Mr. Davis and Mr. Stolp—and their legions of academic-support staff members—often take the blame.
In some extreme cases, that blame may be justified. Academic counselors were knowing participants in the scandal at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill: They helped to perpetuate a system of “paper classes,” which never met and were directed entirely by an administrative assistant in the department of African and African-American studies, according to a comprehensive report released in October.
But Mr. Davis balks at the idea that academic-support professionals are generally responsible for clustering. Instead, he points the finger at coaches.
“The problem is that nobody has put the onus and responsibility where it belongs, which is on the coaches that recruit these students to these universities,” Mr. Davis said. “We seldom talk about the original sin, which is that athletes who are recruited and admitted to the university are far lower in terms of preparedness than the average student.”
Universities also bear plenty of responsibility for clustering, according to Mr. Davis. “If a campus has a general-studies major, then that’s an institutional decision,” he said. “You can’t blame the athletics department or academic advisers or coaches or even students for taking a major that is offered.”
Which gets back to the core question: Is clustering a problem? Some academic advisers argue that concern over “athletes’ majors” is overblown.
“When we talk about clustering, I think public perception is that it’s an easy major where you don’t have to do that much work and the classes are easy,” said Brian Evans, senior associate athletics director for student-athlete academic services at Utah State University. “But whatever that major may be, it’s a duly accepted major by the regents of the institution. They still have to meet all of the metrics to graduate.”
Academic-support professionals are quick to point out that not all clustering lumps students into general-studies or other multidisciplinary majors. Indeed, many athletes cluster in majors that seem to align with their sports interests, such as kinesiology or sport management.
Still, hardly anyone will dispute that some proportion of college athletes choose majors with NCAA eligibility—and their already-busy schedules—in mind. “We’re just kidding ourselves that they’re only practicing 20 hours per week,” Mr. Finley said.
He suggests a radical, but rational, solution: Allow athletes to take fewer credits during the five years when they are eligible to play, and to use their scholarships to complete their degrees once they’re done competing.
“Maybe if we lower our expectation of courses per semester,” he said, “we would come out better in the long term.”
Jonah Newman is a journalist in Chicago and a former Chronicle database reporter.
Correction (12/18/2014, 11:15 a.m.): This article originally misidentified the Clemson women’s team in which 29 percent of players are majoring in health sciences. It is soccer, not softball. The text has been corrected.
