The effects of policy on intercollegiate football programs: the intended and unintended effects of proposition 48

Abstract

Numerous policies to make changes in educational practices in recent years have resulted from policymakers' perceptions that schools and universities were failing to give adequate attention to raising educational outcomes. Proposition 48 was implemented in 1986 to improve the academic preparedness of incoming freshmen student-athletes. It was a response to public outcry that athletic success and exorbitant financial profits were often at odds with the mission of higher education, and that students in "football factories" were not receiving adequate educations. Besides its intended goal, however, debate over Proposition 48 concerned how it might impact schools' abilities to attract skilled athletes. The purposes of this study were 1) to investigate the intended effect of Proposition 48 on the graduation rates of student-athletes over time; and 2) to identify possible unintended effects that Proposition 48 had on the recruiting practices of Division I-A football programs. Institutional data between 1983 and 1991 were obtained from 112 Division I-A football programs. Latent Change Analysis (LCA) was utilized to investigate hypotheses about changes in trends of entering freshmen and freshman graduates before and after the introduction of Proposition 48, as well as to examine changes in the numbers of entering junior college transfer student-athletes and their graduation rates after its introduction. Results indicated that Proposition 48 produced no significant increases in the graduation rates of freshmen or junior-college transfer student-athletes participating in Division I-A football. The results also suggested there was a significant decline in the number of freshmen recruited after the implementation of Proposition 48, and a corresponding increase in the number of junior college transfers recruited within Division I-A football programs. These results were mediated primarily by the institution's athletic prestige (i.e., on-field success), suggesting that coaches in less successful programs had to alter their recruiting strategies by recruiting greater numbers of junior-college transfers to fill their player rosters. In addition to its substantive findings, the study demonstrates the usefulness of LCA as a new methodological approach for investigating policy impact over time.