Student-Athletes Rank High in NCAA Report, OVC |
 EKU student-athletes ranked high in NCAA graduation success rate and also earned OVC academic honors earlier this year. From left, Alex Das Izquierdo, a member of the tennis team; Garnett Phelps, football; and Aaron Barrows, baseball, hold the OVC 2007-08 Team Academic Achievement Awards presented to those teams this summer. |
In the recently released annual NCAA graduation success rate (GSR) report, EKU ranked first in the OVC in two GSR reports – football and women’s golf – while ranking among the top five in six other sports – baseball, men's golf, men’s tennis, women’s basketball, softball and women’s volleyball. |
According the NCAA’s graduation success rate (GSR), Eastern graduated 77 percent of its student-athletes who entered college between 1998 and 2001. The GSR measures graduation rates at Division I institutions and includes students transferring into the institutions. The GSR also allows institutions to subtract student-athletes who leave their institutions prior to graduation as long as they would have been academically eligible to compete had they remained.
This year marks the seventh year that GSR data have been collected. The NCAA began collecting GSR data with the entering freshman class of 1995. The latest entering class for which data are available is 2001.
The department’s federal graduation rate number was closely aligned to its GSR counterpart, with 80 percent of 2001-02 first-time freshmen obtaining their degree within six years. The federal graduation rate does not account for transfers in or out of an athletics department.
Additionally, the athletics department’s 2001-02 graduation rate was more than double the University’s graduation rate (39 percent).
