Student athlete working group talks Wainstein report

Questions about student-athletes’ educations have dominated campus conversation in the aftermath of the Wainstein report, but one group has already been working to find solutions to these questions.

In August 2013, Provost Jim Dean and Bubba Cunningham, director of athletics, organized the Student-Athlete Academic Initiative Working Group, which aims to improve student-athletes’ academic experience at UNC.

“The qualifications of students when they come in are really important to their success, so we need to make sure that we are making smart decisions there,” Dean said during the group’s meeting Tuesday.

“A vast majority of these student-athletes aren’t going to play professional sports — not here or anywhere.”

The work group included Vice Provost for Enrollment and Undergraduate Admissions Stephen Farmer, who led a majority of the meeting with his discussion of the admissions process for student-athletes.

“The rough framework that we have has been around for a long time,” Farmer said of the process.

The Department of Athletics holds 160 spots in each class for athletes. Farmer told the group the admissions office has worked to raise the academic standards for these students.

Each year, some of the student-athletes admitted with the athletics department’s recommendation are so far from UNC’s admissions standards that they go through faculty review before receiving an offer.

“Starting in 2011 and 2012, we started to look very carefully at thresholds we had been using for faculty review,” Farmer said.

The admissions office developed an algorithm using student-athletes’ high school performances to predict their college success and began using that in their decisions in 2013. In 2001, 39 potential student-athletes were up for faculty review, while in 2014 only 8 to 10 were, said Farmer.

“Any changes that come about as a result of any report I hope will be thoughtful changes and deliberate changes that are based in evidence,” Farmer said. “I think that’s when we’re at our best, when we’re behaving thoughtfully.”

The group also reviewed how many hours student-athletes are allowed to spend on athletics each week and the number of excused absences for travel for student-athletes.

Starting in fall 2015, the athletics department will develop a more structured system for travel requests because there is currently no specific format, which makes it difficult to fully understand how much time students are giving up.

Andrew Perrin, professor in the Department of Sociology, said the buildup of academic pressure is what leads to events revealed in the Wainstein report.

“I’m 100 percent confident that something like this will never happen again, but I want to be careful that we find a way that the pressure doesn’t build like this again,” he said.

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