While not something I’d recommend to win your own office pool, there have been some creative and compelling uses of bracketology to highlight a serious problem: college graduation rates. Ted Mitchell (former President of Occidental College, president of the California Board of Education and chief executive of NewSchools Venture Fund) and Jonathan Schorr (partner at NewSchools Venture Fund) addressed it further in a Washington Post opinion piece on Sunday. They point out that while a study found only 53 percent of NCAA African American basketball players finished college, a mere 37 percent of black students overall graduated from those same schools. They note the attention and blame of the college athletic departments misses the bigger picture, and “it’s time we looked more deeply into why so many low-income African American students (and Latinos, whose dropout rates are slightly greater) don’t complete college. Clearly, the answers have to do with failures of academic preparation, affordability barriers and a lack of support in colleges. But colleges shouldn’t have to do this work alone.”
–Guestblogger J.B. Schramm