I dug around for some more information, the below spreasheet is from
http://www.edcentral.org/afps2014/, which is who the NY Times article referenced.
@PhillyGirl look at Boise States Male Overall Federal Grad Rate is 31%.
And look at Ole Miss, what kind of degrees are those 35% getting in football.
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Their methodology.
Explanation of New America’s Formula for the Academic Football Playoff Series:
GSR(|TGRFGR|^1.1)+Good School Bonus
Where:
GSR=Graduation Success Rate at the school
TGR=Total Male Graduation Rate at the school
FGR=Football Graduation Rate at the school
The Good School Bonus is a reward for schools with a TGR greater than 70. For every percentage point they are above 70, they get one extra point (up to 12 points). So a school with an TGR of 75, gets 5 extra points, a school with a TGR of 82 gets 12 points.
Justification:
Our new formula wants to judge schools on how well they serve their football players towards success. Mostly that should come in the form of a degree, since few players make it to the NFL. That's why the most important part of our formula is the Graduation Success Rate. Though an imperfect formula, the GSR is the best measure of a school's good faith effort to graduate their students.
But GSR alone isn't enough. We also want to see if schools are graduating their football players at rates close to their overall student body. We decided that a school that graduates their players at a much lower rate OR a higher rate are both bad. For instance, USC has an overall grad rate of 88, but only 47 for their football players. On the other end of the spectrum, Boise State has an overall grad rate of 31, but a football grade rate of 70. That's messed up as well. They are graduating their players, but the rates are so much higher that something looks suspicious. That's why the formula has an absolute value. We also raised the difference between overall grad rate and football grad rate to the 1.1. We did that because we wanted schools to receive a higher and higher punishment the more the football grad rate deviated from the overall grad rate.
Lastly we included a good school bonus. In past years, schools with low federal grad rates were at an advantage in our old formula, because it was more likely that their football grad rates would be close to their overall grad rates. That's unfair to schools that serve all of their students well. We corrected that partially by making the GSR more important than the difference, but also decided to add a good school bonus. Schools with particularly high overall graduation rates are given up to 12 points on a sliding scale. For each percentage point above 70 a school’s overall male federal graduation rate is, they get one additional point (up to 12).
