Introduction: This document describes the purposes of the College Sports Project and, in particular, the project on “representativeness” of college athletes and its related data collection.  For convenience, we describe the project using a question-and-answer format.

General Questions about the CSP and its Representativeness Project

1. What is the College Sports Project (CSP)?
2. How long will the College Sports Project last?
3. What does participation in the College Sports Project mean?
4. What does the CSP Program on Integration actually do?
5. Who are the individuals responsible for the CSP’s “Representativeness” project?
6. What is the CSP database and what is the purpose behind its creation?
7. What kinds of data are we talking about?
8. What is the purpose of requiring the collection of individually identifiable data?
9. What information will be used for initial identification of individual students?
10. Can colleges and universities share personally identifiable information, such as names, addresses, dates of birth, and institutional student IDs, in connection with research projects such as the CSP?
11. Where will the CSP database be maintained?
12. What is the CDCA's role? What kind of reporting will occur?
13. How will confidentiality and the security of data be maintained?
14. Who owns the CSP database?
15. Can a participating institution withdraw its data?
16. Will scholars have access to the database in the future?
17. What is the future of the College Sports Project beyond the first five-year grant made by the Mellon Foundation?

Technical Questions and Implementation (FAQ) 

18. How is a cohort determined for the data collection?
19. What is the timetable for data collection?
20. How will CSP institutional representatives know what data to assemble, how variables are defined, what codes to use, and what formatting is expected in the institutional data file they will submit?
21. What considerations influence the variable specification and the codes to be used?
22. How was the data collection instrument developed and validated?
23. How frequently and for how long will data be collected for a single cohort?
24. How will the CSP ensure the security of all data, whether in its submission, storage, updating, or analysis?
25. What is the role of standardized test scores taken by students in high school?
26. Aren’t measures of high school academic performance other than standardized test scores important?
27. How will we determine whether an entering student was a recruited athlete?
28. Won’t it be difficult to get the data on the Recruited Coach Factor variable?
29. Won’t it be difficult to get the data on the likelihood of admission for recruited athletes at RAF institutions?
30. In assessing college academic outcomes, what information will the CSP collect?
31. What group comparisons will the CSP analyses make?
32. How does the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) apply to this data collection effort?
33. What is an institution's notification obligation to the students who are included in the CSP data base?
34. What happens if a CSP institution and its Institutional Review Board (IRB) elect to pursue approval for participation in the CSP?
35. What information from the CSP data analysis can eventually enter the public domain?
36. Who are the individuals responsible for the creation and development of the College Sports Project?
37. Who should be contacted when institutional representatives have questions?

General Questions about the CSP and its Representativeness Project

1.                  What is the College Sports Project (CSP)?

The CSP is a national program initiated in June 2003 by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation (the “Mellon Foundation”).  The CSP represents over 130 participating institutions and has programs in two main areas:

(1) Representativeness–ensuring that intercollegiate athletes are representative of their student bodies, in part by collecting student data in a form useful for gauging progress toward closing the cultural divide between academics and intercollegiate athletics, and

(2) Integration–integrating athletics more fully into the educational missions of our colleges. The CSP offers these programs to interested members of NCAA Division III.

The Mellon Foundation has made a grant to Middlebury College to manage the data collection and analysis aspects of the Representativeness Project.  Middlebury in turn has made a sub-award to Northwestern University to create and run the CSP Center for Data Collection and Analysis where staff will assemble the database and analyze data, and report on it back to the participating colleges and universities.

2.         How long will the College Sports Project last?

The Mellon Foundation will fund the program through June 2010.  If the program continues beyond that date, the Mellon Foundation may elect, in consultation with participating colleges and universities, to have the CSP become an independent, self-sustaining entity.

3.         What does participation in the College Sports Project mean?

On a philosophical level, participation represents a commitment to two core principles: (1) athletes are first and foremost students; they should be “representative” of all other students, particularly in terms of academic outcomes and opportunities for engagement in campus activities; and (2) intercollegiate athletic programs must be properly aligned with colleges’ and universities’ primary missions; this requires the integration of coaches and athletic administrators into the mainstream of campus educational life, as well as the cultivation of greater faculty understanding of the potential educational values of athletic programs.

Participating institutions will provide data that measure several dimensions of their student athletes’ “representativeness,” and they will pursue “integration” activities that address campus-wide communication and decision making, hiring practices, performance reviews, and professional development opportunities for coaches and athletic administrators.

4.         What does the CSP Program on Integration actually do?

On many campuses, athletics is viewed as a separate enterprise, distinct and often disconnected from colleges’ and universities’ educational missions.  Coaches and athletic administrators, once a seamless part of the institutional culture, frequently find themselves outside of the educational enterprise.  In this context, the “integration” initiative represents a collaborative effort on behalf of faculty members, coaches, students, and academic and athletic administrators to restore athletics to a valued and complementary role within an institution’s academic and co-curricular life.  The process of achieving integration represents a fundamental cultural shift that encompasses an institution’s definition of athletic success, the “scorecard” used to hire and evaluate coaches, and the recognition among academic faculty and coaches of their shared roles as mentors and teachers.

5.         Who are the individuals responsible for the CSP’s “Representativeness” project?

John Emerson, the Charles A. Dana Professor of Mathematics and Dean of Planning at Middlebury College, is the Principal Investigator for the project that has established the CSP Center for Data Collection and Analysis at Northwestern University.  Dr. Rachelle Brooks is the Director of the CSP Center for Data Collection and Analysis.  She has served as Associate Director of the Center for Assessment of Higher Education (CAHE) at the University of Maryland and previously as Director of Research for the project, Assessing Quality of University Education and Research (AQUER) of the Association of American Universities.  Claudia Youakim, Associate Director of the Center, comes from a research background with a MA in Sociology. David Hoffenberg, a senior database engineer at Northwestern, is the CSP Database Developer.

A Technical Advisory Committee chosen for its members’ expertise in institutional and survey research, and chaired by John Emerson, worked with Dr. Brooks on designing the database and developing detailed specifications of the study variables.  A Data Security Task Force has provided an external review of procedures for the submission and storage of CSP data, with special attention to secure data transmission, secure storage of data, and special handling of personally identifying information in student records. A Board of Advisors representing presidents, provosts, athletic directors, faculty, and coaches advises Professor Emerson and Dr. Brooks on policy issues not already covered by the Mellon Foundation’s confidentiality agreements with Middlebury and Northwestern.  Michael McPherson, President of the Spencer Foundation and former president of Macalester College, chairs this Board.  The members of the Technical Advisory Committee, the Data Security Task Force, and the Board of Advisors are identified in FAQ #35.

6.         What is the CSP database and what is the purpose behind its creation?

Ideally, students who participate in intercollegiate athletics are similar to their classmates from the standpoints of academic preparation, educational outcomes, and participation in the life of the campus community.  The CSP database will assemble data from participating institutions on characteristics of all students in particular cohorts tracked longitudinally and supplemented with data from other sources.  The CSP database will consist of two separate schemas: one with personally identifiable information, and the second for research and analysis.  The CSP database research analysis schema will not include individual student identifiers– all names, addresses, dates of birth, and institutional student IDs provided by the participating institutions will be stripped from record-level student data, encrypted, and securely stored (see FAQ #9, #11, #13, and #24). 

The Mellon Foundation’s primary purpose in creating the CSP database is to enable participating colleges and universities to quantify student athletes’ academic outcomes in terms of their "representativeness,” and to track institutional changes over time.  These data will not be used to "police" institutional behavior, but rather to provide data that the president and other campus leaders may find helpful in meeting institutional goals.  Responsible tracking of outcomes that colleges and universities care about is increasingly recognized as a "best practice" in higher education, and the database should be viewed as a valuable resource in this effort.  The Mellon Foundation’s experience suggests that research is an important tool, not only for uncovering shortcomings and monitoring trends, but also for documenting and communicating successes.  The Mellon Foundation is optimistic that this database will serve such a purpose, and it encourages institutions to choose to share data at the conference level and among other mutually respected subgroups.

7.         What kinds of data are we talking about?

The variables reflect two levels of measurement:  Tier I variables will measure academic outcomes such as college grade point averages and graduation rates.  Tier II variables, which are input or admission measures (test scores and secondary school grades and class rank), will be used in assessing the degree to which any differences in college academic outcomes for athletes are linked to differences in their entering qualifications.  Participating institutions will be expected to contribute student-level data on Tier I and Tier II variables for student cohorts in their first year of matriculation and to update the data annually until the students have graduated or left the institution.  In each subsequent year of the project, an additional new student cohort will be added to the participating institution’s data collection.

Although there are a number of other important educational measures that institutions may wish to study (such as students’ participation in campus cultural activities, study abroad, community service, internships, and senior projects), the CSP Center for Data Collection and Analysis will limit the focus of centralized data management, especially at the outset of this project, and perhaps indefinitely, to clear, unambiguous academic outcomes.  The Mellon Foundation encourages colleges and universities to examine other optional variables on their own.  Of course, the CSP could expand the project’s focus over time to include more of these data if participating institutions thought this was desirable and feasible.

8.         What is the purpose of requiring the collection of individually identifiable data?

The main reason for requiring individually identifiable data is to permit appending data from institutional records with data on the same students collected from other sources.  For example, data from the CIRP Freshman Survey and from the descriptive questionnaires completed by students when they take the ACT or SAT exams would allow the Center to compare the attitudes and motivations of athletes at the time of entry to college with those of other students.  Data from the National Student Clearinghouse, which permit tracking of college students as they transfer among institutions, would allow us to determine whether students (athletes and others) who drop out of a participating college graduate from another institution.  Data from the National Survey of Student Engagement can help colleges and universities understand the daily experiences of their students, including those that go beyond the academic performance measured by the CSP.  These linkages will enable the project both to develop stronger measures of representativeness and to better understand factors that may influence the degree of representativeness of athletes at particular colleges.  Acquisitions of relevant data from third-party databases will be made only with prior approval of the Mellon Foundation program officer responsible for this project in consultation with the Board of Advisors of the CSP Center for Data Collection and Analysis.

9.         What information will be used for initial identification of individual students?

The CSP will collect names, home addresses, dates of birth, and institutional student IDs to serve as a basis for verification of records with participating institutions, for the annual updating of such records, and for use in linking records to those acquired from external databases such as those assembled by CIRP and the National Student Clearinghouse. The personally identifiable information will be stripped and separated from other incoming data, and stored in encrypted form in a restricted schema of the CSP database. The CSP database server will be housed in a secure facility behind layers of firewall protection (see FAQ #11, #13, and #24). 

10.       Can colleges and universities share personally identifiable information, such as names, addresses, dates of birth, and institutional student IDs, in connection with research projects such as the CSP?

Some institutions have asked the CSP Center for Data Collection and Analysis (CDCA) for additional information relating to laws that may be relevant to the data collection effort, in particular, the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA). After legal analysis, the Foundation, in cooperation with CSP Investigators at Middlebury College and Northwestern University, has concluded that the CSP data collection effort is in compliance with these laws, provided that certain criteria are met.  These criteria and an additional discussion of relevant laws and regulations are included in FAQs numbers 31 through 33 and in the CSP Resource Toolkit, under the link “Selected Laws and Regulations Affecting the CSP Project.”

11.       Where will the CSP database be maintained?

The CSP database will be maintained and analyzed by the Center for Data Collection and Analysis at Northwestern University, a major research university (and NCAA Division I member) experienced with the design, maintenance, and security of complex databases. The physical servers will be housed at Northwestern's Information Technology Computing Services secure Data Center facility. Student names, addresses, dates of birth, and institutional student IDs will be separated, encrypted, and stored in a restricted data cleansing and matching schema, authorized only to database administrators.

12.       What is the CDCA's role? What kind of reporting will occur?

The CSP Center for Data Collection and Analysis (CDCA) will analyze student-level data from participating institutions and will mail confidential reports back to each college and university president based on the information submitted.  These reports will also include data that benchmark the institution’s results to those of all participants.  Upon request, the center will provide reports for conferences or other subgroups, but only with the unanimous consent of the institutions in the conference or other subgroup.  Presidents will determine those within the institution (other administrators, faculty members, trustees, etc.) who will have access to these statistical reports.  Beyond the level of the individual institution (which will, of course, have access to its own results), the College Sports Project will only report statistical findings that are aggregated over multiple institutions.  The center will periodically prepare public reports summarizing broad trends in various measures of representativeness. 

13.       How will confidentiality and the security of data be maintained?

The Mellon Foundation and the College Sports Project investigators at Middlebury and Northwestern recognize that building trust in a responsible, professional manner requires a keen understanding of institutional sensitivities about the nature of the data being shared. 

The CSP has adopted the following confidentiality principles and practices:

a.       Participating institutions initially submit data files to the CSP Center for Data Collection and Analysis over the Internet using a browser-based upload tool that will provide encrypted transfers.

b.      Data files will be received at Northwestern's secure, fire-wall protected Data Center facility and deposited into a special-purpose secure file transfer server.

c.       All sensitive data temporarily decrypted for processing by the CDCA will be overwritten using a secure delete program.

d.      The name, address, date of birth, and institutional student ID will be separated, encrypted, stored in a restricted and secure schema, and used only when necessary for record verification with a local institution, for the annual updating of the database records, and for eventual acquisitions of relevant data from third-party databases.

e.       As described in item #8 of this FAQ, the personal identifiers will be used for appending data from institutional records with data on the same students collected from other sources.  Note that in order to append data, the CDCA will need to disclose select personally identifiable information to third party database organizations.  Such third-party organizations will be allowed to use the data provided them only for the purposes of providing the CDCA with the requested supplementary data.

f.    When tabulating data and performing statistical analyses, CSP research personnel will not have access to student names, addresses, dates of birth, and institutional student IDs. 

g.    Names, addresses, dates-of-birth, and institutional student IDs will be destroyed when the research and project needs for them have ended.

h.   Periodic reports on broad trends will use aggregate data such that individual students and individual institutions cannot be identified.  To protect the confidentiality of students, no item will appear in any report where the data permit inferences about an individual student.  

i.    Persons at Middlebury College and at Northwestern University responsible for overseeing and conducting the collection of data and its analyses have signed detailed confidentiality agreements with the Mellon Foundation as a condition of the Mellon Foundation’s grant to Middlebury College.

14.       Who owns the CSP database?

The Mellon Foundation is the owner of the CSP database.

15.       Can a participating institution withdraw its data?

Should a participating institution wish to discontinue involvement in the project, it has the right to remove its institutional data from the CSP database.

16.       Will scholars have access to the database in the future?

The Mellon Foundation may elect to make future use of the stripped data for research on higher education that is consistent with FERPA.  Should the CSP Center for Data Collection and Analysis gain the confidence and respect of participating Division III colleges and universities sufficient to sustain its operation beyond 2010, the database may prove to have broader value to the scholarly community beyond the Mellon Foundation and the CSP representatives at Middlebury and Northwestern.  We do not wish to foreclose this possibility even though it is not a priority at this time.  Indeed, the Mellon Foundation has determined that no third-party scholarly use of the data will be made during the first five years of the Center's operation, and any future use would depend on judgments by the Mellon Foundation with input from the CSP Board of Advisors about the desirability of such research.  The research would be subject to rigorous confidentiality obligations, and researchers would only have access to data stripped of personal identifiers. 

17.       What is the future of the College Sports Project beyond the first five-year grant made by the Mellon Foundation?

The Mellon Foundation hopes that the participating colleges and universities will actively participate in framing the future of the College Sports Project.  If the integration initiatives and the reports of the Center for Data Collection and Analysis prove valuable and worth sustaining, the CSP might evolve into a separate entity, capable of seeking further funding, that would respond to the goals and interests of individual colleges and universities.  Alternatively, it is conceivable that the NCAA or another organization interested in strengthening the relationship between athletics and educational values might be interested in assuming leadership.  The future costs of maintaining the Center will depend on the frequency of data collection and analysis, and participants could eventually scale data collection and analysis back to an every-other-year cycle.

Technical Questions and Implementation (FAQ)

This section of the FAQ addresses additional questions that are technical in nature.  Many of the responses have been framed by the CSP’s Technical Advisory Committee (TAC).

18.       How is a cohort determined for the data collection?

The initial cohort will consist of all full-time undergraduate students whose first matriculation at the CSP institution occurred after July 1, 2005 but no later than June 30, 2006.  The second cohort will consist of similar students entering between July 1, 2006 and June 30, 2007, and so on for subsequent cohorts.  Each cohort includes new students who entered in the fall, winter or spring, and transfer students who entered at any time during this period.  Note that the dates used are the same as those used in the NCAA financial aid data collection project.  The entering cohort being used by the NCAA and the CSP is not identical with the fall entering student cohort collected by IPEDS for Student Right-to-Know graduation rate reporting. 

19.       What is the timetable for data collection?

The CSP Center for Data Collection and Analysis mailed requests for new data on the 2006-07 cohort, and an update on the 2005-06 cohort, in November 2007. We ask for data submission by all participating institutions by December 31, 2007. We will provide a report to CSP Presidents in Spring, 2008. For future data submissions, we plan to institute an annual August – November data collection schedule.

20.       How will CSP institutional representatives know what data to assemble, how variables are defined, what codes to use, and what formatting is expected in the institutional data file they will submit?

The CSP Center for Data Collection and Analysis will provide a detailed outline for data submission. Variables will be clearly defined and the desired codes and ranges will be specified. A sample data file will be available, and participants will send actual file submissions in delimited, plain text format.  A macro will be available from the Center for Data Collection and Analysis for those wishing to export their data from Excel.  Detailed instructions will also be included on the website used for uploading institutional data.

21.       What considerations influence the variable specification and the codes to be used?

Some variables are unique to the CSP, but whenever possible we have used definitions and codes existing in other data collection projects.  For example, a variable that specifies students’ majors is coded according to Classification for Instructional Programs (CIP) standard conventions (see http://nces.ed.gov/pubs2002/cip2000/ ); race/ethnicity is coded using Department of Education (DOE) standards.

22.       How was the data collection instrument developed and validated?

An Excel spreadsheet template was initially developed and revised by the members of the CSP Technical Advisory Committee, with advice from other individuals associated with the CSP including Dr. Rachelle Brooks, Director of the Center for Data Collection and Analysis, and institutional research officers at several participating CSP institutions.  Based on the experience with a pilot study carried out in the fall of 2006, further refinement of the instrument was made and current data standards are outlined in the Data Submission Guides available on the project website.

23.      How frequently and for how long will data be collected for a single cohort? 

Data for each cohort will be updated annually. Data collection on the cohort will continue for six years, unless all students have graduated or otherwise left the institution. When a student leaves college and does not return to that institution, the data collection from the initial institution ends for that student although the student remains a part of the cohort. The CSP has no plans at this time to survey former students, and it will not contact students in the future without the institutions’ prior permission.

24.       How will the CSP ensure the security of all data, whether in its submission, storage, updating, or analysis?

The CSP Data Security Task Force has assisted the Center for Data Collection and Analysis in technical aspects of addressing the need for high security of CSP data in its transmission, storage, retrieval, updating, and analysis; FAQ # 35 gives the membership of this group whose assistance has been invaluable. Please note that FAQ #13 summarizes background for the more technical discussion provided here.

The CSP has adopted the procedures and practices outlined below.  Of course, changes in these processes, and in their technical details, resulting from new developments in technology may be made in the future to provide still further improvements in security.

a. File Transfer Process

The CSP Center for Data Collection and Analysis staff will work with participating colleges to coordinate data file submission scheduling. Each college will be given its own login to upload submissions to a secure file transfer server accessed through the Internet.  The CSP selected MOVEit software because it enables highly secure data transfers while maximizing ease of use for the institutions that are contributing data.  The CSP CDCA's transfer server, located logically at the edge of the Internet, and physically in the ITCS secure Data Center facility, will utilize the MOVEit DMZ software package on a special-purpose Windows 2003 server, hardened using Windows and MOVEit tools. College staff will be able to use a browser to login and access a MOVEit client that will verify and upload file submissions through a 128-bit SSL encrypted HTTPS connection to the DMZ server. MOVEit also offers support for other encrypted transfer clients, such as SFTP. When files reach the DMZ server, MOVEit will store them in an AES256 strongly encrypted virtual file system. Submitted files will never exist on the DMZ file transfer server in unencrypted form, nor be recognizable as files. A separate MOVEit process on the CSP database server, behind additional firewalls in the ITCS secure Data Center facility, will transfer new file submissions, also using HTTPS, into the CSP database server.

b. Data Storage Security

The CSP database server is located behind additional firewalls in Northwestern's ITCS secure Data Center facility, and is protected from outside networks as well as from the secure DMZ file server. A MOVEit transfer client will be invoked from the CSP database server and used to contact the DMZ server to move files into the database server. This transfer client will move each file using HTTPS with SSL; it will decrypt the file and perform verification again to ensure the file is exactly what was submitted. An encrypted archive copy of the verified file will be created. An SQL*Loader program will use the verified file to load the file’s enclosed cohort data into staging tables in a separate Oracle database schema used exclusively for storage, matching, and data-cleansing of personal identifying information. After their use, unencrypted copies of submitted files will be overwritten using a secure delete program, and the encrypted archive copies will be stored for each college.

c. PII Data Separation

The CSP CDCA staff will take special precautions to ensure the security of personally identifiable information (PII) -- student names, addresses, dates-of-birth, and institutional student IDs -- all of which will be stripped from the database schema that is used in CSP analyses.  A  PII storage and data-cleansing database schema, separate from the research and analysis schema, will be used to house PII data. This highly-restricted schema will be protected to allow access only by the CSP database administrator. As an additional layer of protection, all PII data appearing in tables of the PII database schema will be kept in Oracle-encrypted data fields in order to prevent their contents from being read by unauthorized staff, or their operating system data file representations from being exposed. Inside the restricted PII data schema, cohort data submissions will undergo a PII separation process using authorized stored procedures. The PII data will be read from the staging tables and placed along with CSP-assigned student identifiers ("project IDs") in master lookup tables. Different tables will be used to substitute the project IDs in place of the original PII data, along with the corresponding remainders of the original less-sensitive cohort staging data.

d. Data Tabulation and Statistical Analysis

After the data cleansing, another stored procedure, authorized and controlled by the restricted PII database schema, will be used to copy the PII-stripped, project ID-substituted, data from the cleansed tables in the PII schema over to a set of tables with the same structure in the separate less-restricted research schema. Only the cleansed data in tables of the research and analysis database schema, with PII-stripped cohort data, will be made available for analytical extractions by authorized CSP research staff.

25.       What is the role of standardized test scores taken by students in high school?

The CSP Center for Data Collection and Analysis will collect data on either SAT scores or ACT scores when available.  Effective in 2005-2006 the SAT examinations have three parts and all three scores will be collected. The ACT now also has a writing component, which is optional; where possible we will collect data for it. The Center will also collect information on whether the submission of standardized test scores is a required part of the admissions process.  The standardized test scores, like secondary school grades, are what the Center identifies as “Tier II” variables; their primary use is to help determine whether any differences in college academic outcomes for athletes are linked to differences in their entering qualifications.  Test scores may help investigators identify and understand academic underperformance, if this becomes a consideration.

26.       Aren’t measures of high school academic performance other than standardized test scores important?

Yes, and the CSP Center for Data Collection and Analysis will also collect data on students’ secondary school academic performance.  Of course secondary schools differ in their quality, their student bodies, and their grading conventions. But other data collection projects have indicated that both test scores and secondary school grades are useful predictors of college academic performance.

27.       How will we determine whether an entering student was a recruited athlete?

The answer is somewhat complicated by differences in the meaning of “recruited” across participating institutions.  For this reason the CSP has identified two different ways of defining a recruited athlete.  Each institution is asked to use just one of these definitions—the first one if it applies and the second one otherwise:

Recruited Admission Factor – An institution is classified as Recruited Admission Factor(RAF) if their coaches or athletic department staff identify students as prospective student-athletes to the admissions office prior to (or at) the time the admissions decision is made.

Recruited Coach Factor – An institution is classified as Recruited Coach Factor (RCF) if their coaches and athletic department staff make no contact with admissions representatives about specific students’ status as recruited athletes. Coaches may make contact with students directly and encourage them to apply and/or enroll and play on the team. This contact may occur before or after the admissions decision is made, but cannot influence the admissions decision in any way.

For RAF institutions, all students who are identified to the admissions staff by coaches as potential athletes should be classified as recruited. For RCF institutions, students with whom the coach communicates and encourages to enroll should be classified as recruited.

Further clarification, and examples for each recruitment factor, may be found on the project website in the Recruitment Factor Examples document.

Irrespective of which definition better applies to a particular institution, the determination should be made at the time of the admissions decision, and not at some later date.  Note that at least a few students will be identified as recruited athletes even though they may not ever play a sport in college.

28.       Won’t it be difficult to get the data on the Recruited Coach Factor variable?

It may be difficult for some institutions, but after the initial round of data collection it should become a more routine process.  NCAA officials have advised that many institutions that do not use athletic talent as a selection factor in admissions are accustomed to using the stated definition of Recruited Coach Factor.  For colleges without the Recruited Admission Factor variable, this alternative specification should prove useful.

29.       Won’t it be difficult to get the data on the likelihood of admission for recruited athletes at RAF institutions?

It may be, but we encourage data submitters to consult with admissions staff about the likelihood of admission for their recruited student-athletes had they not been identified as such. We have included a “Don’t Know” option for use when the likelihood of admission cannot be estimated.

30.       In assessing college academic outcomes, what information will the CSP collect?

Each year the Center for Data Collection and Analysis will ask for each student’s cumulative grade point average (GPA) and the scale used.  The Center will convert the GPAs to percentile rank in the cohort.  Thus if a group of women athletes at a college has a collective grade average that places it at the 52^nd percentile, this means that 52 percent of the students in the entire cohort ranked below the average GPA for the specified group and 48 percent ranked above the average GPA.  The use of percentile rank enables comparisons and pooling of data across CSP institutions, and it helps to take into account the different grading standards used by institutions. Other outcomes will include choice of major and bachelor’s degree attainment.

31.       What group comparisons will the CSP analyses make?

The Center for Data Collection and Analysis will compare academic outcomes for recruited athletes, other intercollegiate athletes, and non-athletes both for men and for women.  These comparisons will have interest at the level of individual institutions, the conferences, and for all participating institutions.  The Center will also consider outcomes on a sport-by-sport basis, and here the aggregation of data across institutions or over multiple cohorts will be especially important for avoiding any inadvertent release of personally identifiable information.

32.       How does the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) apply to this data collection effort?

FERPA permits colleges and universities to disclose personally identifiable data about its students for specified research purposes. After legal analysis, the Mellon Foundation, in cooperation with CSP representatives at Middlebury College and Northwestern University has concluded that the proposed research is in compliance with a research exemption to FERPA non-disclosure requirements.

In addition, FERPA permits colleges and universities to disclose some personally identifiable data that is classified as "directory information" except when an individual student or his or her parents have filed a written request that his or her directory information not be disclosed. When linking student data with data from third party databases, the CSP will rely on this exemption. Therefore, the information shared with third parties will be limited to "directory information" as defined by participating colleges and universities, and records of students who have elected to withhold their directory information will not be disclosed. The CSP database will therefore flag the records of students who have chosen to opt out of the disclosure of their own directory information, and linkage to third-party databases will not be possible for these students.

Note:  An additional discussion of certain relevant laws and regulations is included in the CSP Toolkit under the link “Selected Laws and Regulations Affecting the CSP Project.”

33.       What is an institution's notification obligation to the students who are included in the CSP data base?

Colleges and universities are not required to gain permission from students or their families to disclose data under the FERPA research exemption.  However, CSP institutions are still legally obligated under FERPA to place notification of the CSP’s access to student information in their student educational records.  The required placement of notification can be in electronic form, and a one-time notice is sufficient.  The CSP Center will provide a template for the information that should be placed in student files; this template will be available in the CSP’s Resource Toolkit on the CSP web site.

Under FERPA, colleges and universities may also disclose, without consent, "directory information". However, a school must inform parents and current students about what types of personally identifiable information it has designated as directory information and give parents and current students a reasonable amount of time to request that the institution not disclose directory information about them.

34.       What happens if a CSP institution and its Institutional Review Board (IRB) elect to pursue approval for participation in the CSP?

IRB approval is required under federal law only for certain federally funded research projects. The CSP is not federally funded.  However, as an added measure of data protection, Middlebury College and Northwestern University have sought the approval of their own IRBs for the CSP Representativeness Project. Depending on their local practices, some colleges or universities may still elect to consult their IRBs regarding this project.  For example, some institutions may have adopted local policies that subject all projects relating to people or personal information to a review by their local IRBs.  For those institutions that elect to gain approval by their own IRB, the CSP Resource Toolkit provides considerable background information and other support that may be useful in this process.

35.       What information from the CSP data analysis can eventually enter the public domain?

Reports about the students at a particular institution will be provided directly and exclusively to that institution’s president, leaving any sharing of those data within or outside the institution to the president’s discretion.  All reports that include aggregate data across institutions will be carefully scrutinized by the CSP Board of Advisors and the Mellon Foundation program officer responsible for the Middlebury grant or his designee, to ensure that no inadvertent release of data that identifies an individual institution occurs (as might be a worry in sports where only a few students participate).  To protect the confidentiality of students, no item will appear in any report where the data might permit inferences on an individual student.  Occasional reports from the CSP Center for Data Collection and Analysis about general findings and broad trends in the aggregate data may be publicly released, but only after a careful review by the CSP Board of Advisors and the Mellon Foundation program officer responsible for the Middlebury grant, or his designee.

36.       Who are the individuals responsible for the creation and development of the College Sports Project?

The College Sports Project Coordinating Committee first explored possibilities for initiating such a project with Division III presidents, administrators, athletics directors, and others.  The members of the CSP Coordinating Committee are: William D. Adams, President of Colby College; William G. Bowen, then President of the Mellon Foundation and President Emeritus, Princeton University; Amy Campbell, Special Assistant to the Vice President for Campus Life, Princeton University; John D. Emerson, Charles A Dana Professor of Mathematics and Dean of Planning at Middlebury College; Robert Malekoff, Assistant Professor of Sport Studies at Guilford College; Mary Patterson McPherson, Vice President of the Mellon Foundation; Michael S. McPherson, President of the Spencer Foundation; and Eugene M. Tobin, Program Officer for Liberal Arts Colleges and Director of the College Sports Project at the Mellon Foundation.

The members of the Board of Advisors of the CSP Center for Data Collection and Analysis are: John Emerson, Charles A. Dana Professor of Mathematics and Dean of Planning at Middlebury College; Pamela Gann, President of Claremont McKenna College; Charles Katsiaficas, Athletic Director at Pomona College; Jack Rossmann, Professor of Psychology at Macalester College; Oscar Page, President of Austin College; Samuel Schuman, former chancellor of the University of Minnesota-Morris; and Michael McPherson, President of the Spencer Foundation (Chair).

The members of the CSP Technical Advisory Committee are: Alan Caniglia, Senior Associate Dean of the Faculty, Vice Provost for Planning and Institutional Research, and Professor of Economics at Franklin and Marshal College; James C. Fergerson, Director of Institutional Planning and Analysis at Bates College; Eric Hartung,  NCAA Associate Director of Research; Michael McPherson, President of The Spencer Foundation; Douglas T. Shapiro, Director of Institutional Research, The New School; and John Emerson, Dean of Planning and Charles A. Dana Professor of Mathematics at Middlebury College (Chair).

The members of the CSP Data Security Task Force are: Rob Loren, Database Developer at the CSP Center for Data Collection and Analysis (Convener of Task Force); Doug Falk, Chief Information Officer at the National Student Clearinghouse; Edward Freeland, Associate Director, Princeton University Survey Research Center; Ira Fuchs, Vice President for Research in Information Technology at The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation; David Kovarik, Director of Information and Systems Security/Compliance at Northwestern University; Mary C. Weisse, Manager of the MIT Data Warehouse at Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Rachelle Brooks, Director of the CSP Center for Data Collection and Analysis (ex officio); John Emerson, Middlebury College (ex officio).

37.       Who should be contacted when institutional representatives have questions?