Last week’s verbal sparring between football coaches Tom O’Brien and Everett Withers certainly shed a light of truth on N.C. State’s athletic graduation rates—they leave much to be desired.

An investigation conducted by the NCAA that spanned over a six-year period from 2004-2010 found N.C. State had the lowest graduation rate of student-athletes in the Atlantic Coast Conference. State’s federal graduation rate measures out to 72 percent for all students and 54 percent among student athletes.

According to the NCAA report, Duke led the conference in both the federal graduation rate of student-athletes at 81 percent and among all students at 94 percent. UNC-Chapel Hill has an 88 percent federal graduation rate among all students and a 72 percent rate for student athletes.  

The report also took the Graduation Success Rate (GSR) into account, which doesn’t penalize schools when student athletes transfer or leave otherwise if they are in good academic standing. For N.C. State, the rate stood at 74 percent.

Among the 19 varsity sports State competes in, rifle, softball, women’s golf and tennis each have a GSR of 100. The sports with the lowest GSR rates include baseball at 58 percent, football at 56 percent and wrestling has the lowest GSR rate at 50 percent.

Despite having the second-lowest GSR of all the sports at State, O’Brien claimed his program’s annual percentage rates of graduation had “bottomed out” and are “headed back to where it should be” at a press conference last Thursday.

According to N.C. State Provost and Executive Vice Chancellor Warwick Arden, retention is one of the main issues that affect the graduation rates of student athletes.

“Some of it is a little by virtue of who we are as an institution,” Arden said. “We have a very high proportion of our students in STEM disciplines. Especially with student athletes, we have a little bit more turnover of our athletes in terms of going to other programs… There are a number of different factors there, but none of those should be an excuse for not doing better. I think we need to be doing better across the here.”

Arden also pointed out a strategic plan in the process of being implemented by the Board of Trustees to increase graduation rates across the board, but student-athletes are not specifically targeted in this plan.

“If you look at our recent strategic plan, one of the key elements of that strategic plan was student success. At this Board of Trustees meeting, we’re [going to] talk about the implementation plan for the strategic plan,” Arden said. “What we’re getting down to talking about now is specific actions that we think that we can take that will significantly impact retention rates, graduation rates, those kind of things in our general student body as well as our student athletes. This has been a major topic of discussion over the past athletes.”

Arden also mentioned his discontent with the aforementioned graduation rate.

“There’s a lot more that we can be doing, there’s no doubt about that,” Arden said. “Am I happy about our overall graduation rates or our student-athlete graduation rate?