USA Today article:
Degrees of disagreement over NCAA graduate transfer rule
...The college athletics world has concluded that unpaid amateur athletes changing schools mid-stream — or even after earning an undergraduate degree — is a problem that needs to be fixed, so they're scurrying to fix it. Things are going to change, probably within the next year or two, and the end result is almost certainly not going to make it easier for those athletes to exercise what, in any other area of academia, would seem to be a fundamental right.....
...even though a 2012 study by the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center found that roughly one in three college students transfers at some point — that's not athletes, just regular students — the college sports community has come to the collective view that an athlete who makes that same decision is somehow a problem that needs to be fixed.
Already, the NCAA has eliminated hardship waivers that allowed athletes to apply for immediate eligibility based on things like family illnesses. And because there is a two-year window for all of Division I to address transfers before it could possibly become an area for just the Power Five conferences to deal with in the autonomy structure, more changes are almost certainly coming.
"Student-athletes are transferring at rates higher than ever before, and it's incumbent upon the membership to explore why and if there's a better way to look at the issue," UCLA athletics director Dan Guerrero said.
That's fair, but it's also not the crisis many make it out to be. In men's basketball, where much of the hand-wringing over transfers has occurred, ESPN counted 604 transfers in 2014, with the numbers likely to exceed that this year.....
Degrees of disagreement over NCAA graduate transfer rule
...The college athletics world has concluded that unpaid amateur athletes changing schools mid-stream — or even after earning an undergraduate degree — is a problem that needs to be fixed, so they're scurrying to fix it. Things are going to change, probably within the next year or two, and the end result is almost certainly not going to make it easier for those athletes to exercise what, in any other area of academia, would seem to be a fundamental right.....
...even though a 2012 study by the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center found that roughly one in three college students transfers at some point — that's not athletes, just regular students — the college sports community has come to the collective view that an athlete who makes that same decision is somehow a problem that needs to be fixed.
Already, the NCAA has eliminated hardship waivers that allowed athletes to apply for immediate eligibility based on things like family illnesses. And because there is a two-year window for all of Division I to address transfers before it could possibly become an area for just the Power Five conferences to deal with in the autonomy structure, more changes are almost certainly coming.
"Student-athletes are transferring at rates higher than ever before, and it's incumbent upon the membership to explore why and if there's a better way to look at the issue," UCLA athletics director Dan Guerrero said.
That's fair, but it's also not the crisis many make it out to be. In men's basketball, where much of the hand-wringing over transfers has occurred, ESPN counted 604 transfers in 2014, with the numbers likely to exceed that this year.....
