UrsaMajor;842260027 said:
If they are dropping out of school before the end of the semester, don't they count against the APR and grad rate?
Depends on how they leave (ie do they enroll for spring). Depends on the academic procedures at Cal too. It's before the semester now, so if someone is training in Texas for the combine, presumably they aren't enrolled, which would mean NO APR hit if they were eligible to end fall semester. Remember KA21 was training in North Carolina last spring? I don't know the mechanics of the scholarship and how much power the head coach has, but many people have said that Dykes is trying to enforce a policy to keep people from enrolling and then just failing. But scholarship are for a year I believe, so I'm not sure how SD can do such a thing if a player really wants to enroll.
I had a couple of friends (early 2000's) that were kind of slackers and figured out ways to milk the withdraw system at Cal - essentially one could withdraw very late into the semester (well past the add/drop deadline) and the transcript would only say WD for each class - they could replace the grade if they took it again, and I believe if they were passing at the time they withdrew, it didn't even count against their GPA in the interim.
Anyway, if you didn't see it, another thread had a link to a summary by a couple of Cal professors that, among other things, says much of the APR issue was due to exactly what you are worried about - passing fall, enrolling for spring (get financial support and access to the gyms), but concentrating fully on the NFL draft, failing out ungracefully, and ruining a chance of coming back to get a degree and of course our APR. Given the consequences of this type of failure, and the fact that other peer schools seemingly have better methods of dealing with it, it's too bad it wasn't addressed way earlier.
One question would be whether there is any kind of support we can provide these players while preparing for the NFL though facility use or financial aid that won't be dependent on them enrolling in classes they never intend to complete. Or are there smoother methods of late withdrawing that won't trigger the NCAA APR hit? Just saying a player is cut off from campus if preparing for the NFL draft might work, but it seems heavy handed.
http://www.bearinsider.com/forums/showthread.php?t=81084http://newscenter.berkeley.edu/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/AcademicPerformanceFacts-2013-11-18.pdf
