Double Standard for Cal Athlete Admissions, Study Says

UC Berkeley admits athletes with far lower grades and SAT scores than required of typical students, according to a critical study reported in the San Francisco Chronicle.

While thousands of students with straight A’s can’t get into the highly selective University of California flagship campus, the university admits athletes with grade averages of B-, according to the report. The minimum SAT score of 370 for freshmen athletes is far below the SAT ranges for freshmen as a whole, the Chronicle reported.

The newspaper featured the study Friday as its lead front-page article, which began, “UC Berkeley, the world’s top-ranked public university, is admitting student athletes with with shockingly low grades and scores if they show promise as revenue-generating football or basketball players, say two scholars whose new study helps explain why athletes on campus have the worst graduation rates in the country.”

The graduation rate for UC Berkeley’s football team (40 percent) was dead last among the nation’s top 72 football schools, and its basketball team was in the bottom five, according to a recent ranking by the National Collegiate Athletic Association.

The study showing Cal’s dramatically lower admissions standards for athletes was authored by John Cummins, UC Berkeley’s former head of intercollegiate athletics and associate chancellor, and Kirsten Hextrum, an education Ph.D. student.

UC Berkeley’s athletic program faces extraordinary financial pressure.

 “Winning games and selling tickets have become of utmost importance at the school, thanks to a confluence of factors: the high cost of rebuilding Memorial Stadium, leftover debt from the renovation of Haas Pavilion, decisions to hire and extend the contracts of highly compensated employees such as departed football coach Jeff Tedford, and the pressures from the economic crisis,” the Chronicle said.