More student or more athlete?

Date

Author

Metadata

Abstract

The intercollegiate athletics enterprise and the educational experiences of student-athletes, particularly those participating in the high profile revenue-generating sports of football and basketball, have been persistent sources of controversy within the setting of American higher education (Michener, 1976; Smith, 1988; Thelin, 1996). In addition to the byzantine NCAA regulatory structure, a growing number of forces exert additional pressures on institutions to ensure a greater balance between academics and athletics. In an attempt to legitimize the scholarly efforts of student-athletes, administrators have established a plethora of distinct student-athlete support services and regulatory policies.
The purpose of this study was to investigate the different approaches administrators used to communicate institutional support and compliance expectations to student-athletes competing at the highest level of college sports. In this examination, the utility of theories of power, bureaucratic theory, organizational control theory, and primarily, neo-institutional theory are explored using a content analysis methodology to conduct a cross-sectional examination of student-athlete handbooks within the Power 5 conferences.
A thematic human-coding process was utilized to explore the proportionate content of 59 handbooks issued to student-athletes between 2012-2014 to address the following research questions:
R1. What are the prevailing content themes found in student-athlete handbooks at institutions within the Power 5 conferences?
R2. To what extent do Power 5 institutions and conferences vary content within student-athlete handbooks?
R3. What messages do administrators convey within the content of student-athlete handbooks about institutional expectations and the purpose of the higher education experience at Power 5 institutions?
In the aggregate, the content focused predominantly on the themes of Athletics (mean = 32.13%, SD = 9.04%), Academics (mean = 25.12%, SD = 9.64%), and Conduct (mean = 21.89%, SD = 9.35%), with considerable variation between institutions in substance, language, and style. Additional statistical analysis using a logit transformation of proportions to conduct one-way ANOVAs and one-tailed t-tests to compare institutions based on quality rankings from the 2015 US News & World Report revealed that schools ranked in the top 50 placed a larger proportionate emphasis on athletics (t(57) = 1.597, p = .058) than lower ranked institutions. Further qualitative analysis substantiated broad differentiation between institutions.