Institutional Reforms and the Recoupling of Academic and Athletic Performance in High-Profile College Sports

University officials and stakeholders continue to debate the role of athletics in the mission of higher education. Reforms promoted by the National Collegiate Athletics Association (NCAA) to promote academic integrity reflect this tension. This research investigates whether the most recent means for monitoring a team’s academic success, the Academic Progress Rate (APR), has led to changes in the academic and athletic outcomes of high profile football and basketball teams. Neo-Institutional theory provides a framework for understanding how regulations translate into organizational change through the coupling of organizational practices to institutional goals. Predictions that metrics used to assess academic progress among high profile student athletes will reflect increasing isomorphism among sports teams at the same school received support. Specifically, analyses of seven years of NCAA’s APR and athletic performance data found that APR scores became more similar among Division 1 programs, and increasingly correlated for high-profile sports within the same schools. Using Hallett’s ‘inhabited institutions’ framework and research on academic and athletic success factors, we also investigated whether improvements in APR could be attributed to coaches and if these changes impacted team athletic success, while accounting for resource differences between schools.