<p>This is a more recent report than that cited by texastaximom and includes 2004 statistics as well:</p>
<p><a href=“Cardinal 247 - Stanford Cardinal Football Recruiting”>Cardinal 247 - Stanford Cardinal Football Recruiting;
<p>The baseball draft also claims many of the players at the end of their junior year in college. At the schools with high graduation rates, the players are pushed to load up on units and many of them are close to completing graduation requirements after the 3 years. For example, I know one sophomore who had junior standing at the end of his first quarter of sophomore year, through a combination of a few extra units each quarter and AP credits coming in. This is a player who is likely to be drafted at the end of his junior year but will also probably already have enough credits to graduate. At Stanford, the coach meets with each player individually at the beginning of each quarter to review their courseload.</p>
<p>The comment above about how athletes can be extremely successful later in life really resonated with me. Athletes are not necessarily just about brawn (although some are, including a few who recently appeared before Congress…). The top ones have qualities that will win them personal and professional success in life beyond what many purely academic types will ever know: leadership skills, interpersonal skills, extraordinarily good time management and organizational skills, a sense of working collaboratively with their team as well as having that desire to win and to achieve, an ability to think clearly under enormous pressure.</p>
<p>OTOH, I know a bunch of former college scholarship players who really didn’t ever get the grades or the skills to succeed in a non-athletic environment and are struggling, despite their great athletic skills, to succeed in their post-sports worlds. This is probably a combination of the schools focusing too much on their athletic skills only, and the individual students putting all their eggs in the pro-sports basket, which of course will only apply to a very tiny percentage of college athletes.</p>