The University of North Carolina "student-athlete" academic scandal

This week the U.S. is in the throes of its annual "March Madness" collegiate basketball mania, so it seems to be an appropriate time to provide some links about the recent scandal at the University of North Carolina.

Mary Willingham, a Learning Specialist teaching remedial skills at UNC's Academic Support Program for Student-Athletes, commented publicly on the abysmal educational skills of athletes enrolled at the school, most of whom had reading skills of grade-school children, some of them at a third-grade level and not having ever written a paragraph in their life.

The best video interview is this one from ESPN, for which I've been unable to find a embed code.  In it she reports her experience with literally illiterate college student-athletes who were unable to write.  They were enrolled in "paper classes" that didn't really exist (they just had to write a paper, not attend classes, and that help was given to them to write that paper).  The classes were typically in African-American Studies (AFAM).  She calls the situation a "scam," "a joke," that "everyone knew" and that the NCAA doesn't care about this.  The video is definitely worth a four-minute viewing.

Embedded at the top of this post is a screencap of a "final paper" she showed during the interview, one submitted by a student who received an A- for this work.

Here is a related video -

YouTube link.

- which includes the essence but lacks the punch of the ESPN interview linked above.

For the past three years, Ms. Willingham has been anonymously providing information about this academic fraud to the News and Observer in Raleigh, resulting in articles like this.

Until August, the university had resisted going back further than 2007 to investigate other potential academic problems in the department, so it’s difficult to assess exactly what was happening before then.

Difficult, that is, except in the case of Julius Peppers, whose transcript sat unnoticed on UNC’s website until this summer. Peppers had D’s or F’s in 11 of 30 classes, the transcript showed, and was barely eligible for football and basketball only because of a string of better grades in courses he took in the AFAM Department.

Read more here: http://www.newsobserver.com/2012/09/30/2379206/unc-players-needed-academic-help.html#storylink=cpy

Bloomberg Businessweek has an extended discussion.

It's worth emphasizing that this criticism does not apply to all colleges and certainly not to all student athletes.  The problem arises because of the rise of big money in collegiate sports.