Athletes' academic choices put advisers in tough balancing act

B. David Ridpath has a confession to make. As the athletics department's compliance director and liaison to academic services for athletes at Marshall from 1997 to 2001, he often told athletes to avoid tough majors if they wanted to play their sports.

"Academic advisers say that all the time," he says. "You'd do it in more subtle kinds of ways, but I have directly told kids myself, 'You can be in this major if you want to be, but if you want to play football, or want to play basketball, you may want to look at this major.' And that's what happens."

These days Ridpath is an assistant professor of sport administration at Ohio University and a member of the Drake Group, a national network of faculty members and others who advocate broad reform of college sports, particularly in terms of academic integrity.

"These kids are getting steered into these less rigorous majors, or majors with friendly faculty," Ridpath says. "I do admit I did it myself, and I'm ashamed of it, and I wish I'd never done it."

A USA TODAY study of the majors of juniors and seniors in football, men's basketball, women's basketball, baseball and softball at 142 of the NCAA's top-level schools shows athletes at many institutions clustering in certain majors, in some cases at rates highly disproportionate to those of all students.

- USA TODAY