Goldey-Beacom College Athletics Excels in the NCAA Academic Success Rate

General | 10/23/2019 12:00:00 AM

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The recently released Academic Success Rate by the NCAA once again shows the outstanding achievement of Goldey-Beacom College's student-athletes and how they compare both against national schools and fellow-Central Atlantic Collegiate Conference institutions.

The ASR is the percentage of student-athletes who graduate within six years of initial enrollment in college and includes virtually all Division II student-athletes, including transfers and those not receiving athletics scholarships.

The Division II ASR also captures about 50 percent more college athletes than the federal graduation rate. Unlike the federal graduation rate, the ASR also counts student-athletes who transfer to a school after initial enrollment elsewhere, removing from the rate academically eligible student-athletes who leave school. The national ASR is 73 percent for student-athletes who entered college from 2009 through 2012.

Of that group, Goldey-Beacom ranks 45th in the nation out of 308 active Division II members with 88 percent. The CACC saw five of its institutions place in the top 45.

The Lightning also represent five of the 41 athletics programs in the conference who earned ASR scores of 100 percent with that list including baseball, softball, men's golf, women's tennis and women's cross country/track & field. The five programs are tied for second most among the 14 teams in the CACC.

"It's been a long-held and documented understanding that college athletes typically persist and graduate at a high rate, often higher than the same rates in a college's general student body," Goldey-Beacom President Dr. Colleen Perry Keith said. "The positive effects of participating in college athletics lead to this: athletes often learn better time management and better coping strategies because of the demands on their time, and expectations for academic performance in order to stay eligible to compete in their sport. Goldey-Beacom's rates bear this out."

"The Athletics Department is so proud of this great accomplishment," Senior Woman Administrator/Assistant AD/Women's Basketball Coach Bethann Burke said. "It is truly a testament to the hard work of our student-athletes and the great recruiting by our coaches."

Outside of this analysis, Goldey-Beacom already had proven its mettle in the classroom. The College in 2018-19 produced 50 student-athletes who made the CACC Academic Honor Roll, a second team Google Cloud CoSIDA Academic All-America in women's soccer graduate Cliona Crammond (Wicklow, Ireland) and five picked Google Cloud CoSIDA Academic All-District.

GBC also saw men's basketball graduate Corey Taite (Sayreville, NJ) earn an NCAA Postgraduate Scholarship, for which the NCAA only awards 126 per academic year combined among all three divisions.

Goldey-Beacom in its history has produced six Academic All-Americans, all within the last five years, and 16 Academic All-District honorees over the last 10 years.

Goldey-Beacom last year saw its student-athletes record a 3.14 GPA, higher than the overall average of the college. The college also had four of its teams win an inaugural CACC Team Academic Award for having the highest team GPA in the league, tying for the most in the conference. This included women's tennis (3.61), women's soccer (3.58), women's volleyball (3.47) and men's soccer (3.26).

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