About the Project

The National Collegiate Athletic Association collects a wealth of data from its member institutions and their student-athletes. These data are collected to help answer research questions posed by college presidents, athletics personnel, faculty, student-athlete groups, the media, researchers and others in the higher education community and to assist in the development of national athletics policies. Late NCAA President Myles Brand recognized that these data represented a valuable source of information for addressing a variety of issues related to both intercollegiate athletics and higher education generally, and he believed that sharing it was important to the goal of fully integrating athletics into the broader university community. To that end, in 2008 he charged the NCAA staff with developing a program for providing this information to interested scholars.

The Student-Athlete Experiences Data Archive is the repository for the publicly available data that are part of this initiative. Beginning in 2010, this archive will grow to include a handful of user-friendly data collections related to graduation rates; team-level Academic Progress Rates in Division I; and individual-level data on the experiences of current and former student-athletes from the NCAA's Growth, Opportunities, Aspirations and Learning of Students in college study (GOALS), and the Study of College Outcomes and Recent Experiences (SCORE). In the long run, the NCAA expects to follow this initial release with the publication of as much data as possible from its archives.

The NCAA staff shares President Brand's belief that this data archiving initiative will enhance research directly benefiting student-athletes, colleges and intercollegiate sport, and will broaden the dialogue between NCAA research staff and outside scholars. Data-driven policy analysis has become a key part of decision making within the NCAA and broader access to NCAA data by others interested in education and sport can only improve those efforts.