(U-WIRE) LOS ANGELES - The NCAA has long been criticized as an organization that pays little more thaMn lip service to academic success, an image the association has made a point of fighting in recent months. But its most recent proposal to get student-athletes to hit the books still sounds like little more than empty talk.

On Oct. 27, the NCAA announced a plan to pay colleges up to $100,000 if their student-athletes show significant academic improvement and have high graduation rates. Arguably its biggest move was in March, when the association unveiled its Academic Progress Rate formula that it said would provide a way to track colleges where student-athletes were falling behind the standards. But the formula came under fire from officials and groups (including this editorial board) for being arbitrary and imbalanced.

The NCAA is arguing that academic success should be rewarded with money. But the whole mantra of higher education is that academic success is its own reward. The NCAA should clear up which message it wants to send not just to student-athletes but to all members of the university community.

While the NCAA claims $100,000 is enough to help struggling colleges piece together tutoring programs, it's only a drop in the bucket for some of the big-name Division I athletic programs.

The NCAA has implied that programs at these universities aren't doing enough to enforce high academic standards, but it's hard to picture officials at perennial national powerhouses taking those standards any more seriously for the likes of $100,000, given that their athletic department budgets can swell into the tens of millions of dollars.

The plan also doesn't do much to dispel the notion that the NCAA's primary motivation is cash.

Perhaps the most telling statistic about this new plan is this: The $10 million a year the NCAA intends to set aside for colleges will come from money the association receives from CBS to broadcast the Division I men's basketball tournament, a deal worth $6 billion over 11 years, which comes out to $545 million a year. Put $10 million over $545 million, and you get a fairly good idea of how much the NCAA truly cares about academics.

If scholarly success were really as high up on the NCAA's list of priorities as athletic achievement, it would give concrete proposals that hold itself and universities accountable for the success - or failure - of the student-athlete in the classroom.

Instead, we get window-dressing - again.

Staff Editorial

Daily Bruin (UCLA)