I’ve heard the claim that Penn State football players were held to rigorous academic and personal behavior standards. More so than players in any other college football program. Is this a verifiable fact or just PR puffery?
I believe the Military Academies would dispute this.
I don’t know about it being over any other school but Penn State does have a high graduation rate and I never heard of a any kind of NCAA violations.
As would Notre Dame and Stanford.
Penn State was among the top schools in the country for things like graduation rate; picking the top one is impossible, since it depends on how you weight the criteria.
The most recent numbers for graduation rates among Penn State football players are here:
Penn State graduates 87% of its football players, which ties them with Stanford among the schools that have high-level football programs.
It’s a bit hard to find rates online for football players only. I found many articles showing graduation rates for scholarship athletes as a whole, but that’s misleading. After all, nobody EVER worried that the men’s lacrosse teams or the women’s swimming teams weren’t doing well academically.
Basketball and football are the two big-money collegiate sports, and those are the sports where coaches have the most incentive to bring in kids who aren’t academically qualified.
As for Penn State’s reputation as a scandal-free program… for decades, that WAS true. But over the past 10-15 years, there have been enough troubling incidents to make one wonder… as the team started losing more, was Paterno lowering his standards and recruiting bad characters he WOULD have shunned when the team was on top?
Feel free to prove me wrong, but I never understood using graduation rates as a measure of high academic standards for high profile sports.
Couldn’t having a high graduation rate mean that your super-easy majors (which colleges may keep around for athletes) are really really easy. Not to mention all the extra academic assistance that the athletes get.
I mean, there are tons of people that graduate from HS, but can barely read.
It almost makes more sense to me the other way around: if few graduate then the academic standards are high and they aren’t lowering them for the athletes.
ESPN reported that between 2002 and 2008, Penn State football players faced a combined 163 criminal charges. The most obvious interpretations are that the school lowered its standards after a few losing seasons and that, like Bobby Bowden at the end of his career, Paterno just was not able to stay on top of everything.