NU Leads Big 12 in Exhausted Eligibility Grad Rate for Seventh Straight Year

Nebraska athletic teams continue to pace the Big 12 Conference in the classroom, leading the Big 12 in the exhausted eligibility graduation rate for the seventh consecutive year with an impressive 94 percent rate. Several Nebraska teams also earned strong scores in the Graduation Success Rate (GSR) Report released Wednesday by the NCAA.

Nebraska continues to set the pace in the Big 12 in terms of Exhausted Eligibility graduation rates. The exhausted eligibility rate surveys the graduation rate of scholarship student-athletes in 10 incoming freshman classes who complete their eligibility at the university. Nebraska's exhausted eligibility rate has improved 22 percentage points since the inception of the rate in 1991-92.

The current exhausted eligibility rate includes members of incoming classes from 1993-94 through 2002-03. During that time period, 404 of the 430 Nebraska scholarship student athletes who completed their eligibility earned their degrees.

Nebraska's 94 percent exhausted eligibility rate ranks one percentage point higher than Texas Tech, which ranks second in the Big 12 at 93 percent. The national average for exhausted eligibility is 87 percent.

Five Nebraska women's programs achieved perfect 100 percent GSR scores, including basketball, golf, gymnastics, tennis and volleyball. This marked the third straight year that each of those programs posted 100 percent GSR scores.

Eight other Nebraska teams achieved GSR scores of 70 percent or better, including softball (94%), men's gymnastics (88%), soccer (83%), rifle (83%), men's basketball (83%), men's tennis (80%), women's track/cross country (77%) and football (72%).

Nebraska also led the Big 12 in GSR scores for men's basketball and football, with the men's basketball score at 83 percent and the football rate at 72 percent.

In all, seven of Nebraska's teams ranked first or tied for first in the Big 12 Conference in their respective sports, including men's basketball, football, women's basketball, women's golf, women's gymnastics, women's tennis and volleyball. Nebraska's institutional GSR score of 75 percent was sixth in the Big 12, with Iowa State the conference leader at 78 percent.

The Graduation Success Rate is an NCAA measurement that, unlike the federally mandated graduation rates, includes transfer data in the calculation. This marks the fourth year the NCAA has released GSR rates.

GSR scores released Wednesday are based on four classes of scholarship student-athletes who entered college from the fall of 1999 to the fall of 2002. They allow a six-year window in which student-athletes can earn their degree. Although GSR scores include student-athletes who transferred to Nebraska, they do not count student-athletes who transferred to another school and were academically eligible at the time of their transfer.