EASTON, Pa. -Â Lafayette College's athletic programs ranked seventh in the nation in Graduation Success Rate (GSR) as announced Wednesday by the NCAA in its annual report. Lafayette boasted a 98 percent GSR overall for its 18 sports measured. A total of 15 Lafayette programs achieved a graduation success rate of 100 percent.
Lafayette's GSR of 98 percent placed the school with 10 others (Brown, Gonzaga, Holy Cross, Manhattan, Northwestern, Notre Dame, Princeton, Seton Hall and Belmont) in seventh place with only Harvard (100) and Columbia, Dartmouth, Evansville, Loyola-Chicago and Yale (all at 99) ranked ahead of the Maroon and White athletic teams.
The NCAA's GSR includes transfer students and student-athletes who leave in good academic standing, unlike the federal graduation rate, which does not count transfers. The GSR and federal rate calculations measure graduation over six years from when a student-athlete first enrolls.
The 15 programs to receive perfect GSR scores were baseball, men's basketball, men's golf, men's soccer, men's tennis, men's cross country and track and field, women's basketball, field hockey, women's lacrosse, softball, women's soccer, women's swimming and diving, women's tennis, women's cross country and track and field and women's volleyball. Â
In addition to those 15 programs with perfect GSR scores, the Leopard football program continued to set the tone for the conference, sitting atop the Patriot League standings with a mark of 97 along with Holy Cross and Georgetown and ahead of Bucknell (91), Colgate (91), Fordham (84) and Lehigh (78).
The federal graduation rate, while less inclusive than the GSR, provides the only measure of historic academic comparison between student-athletes and the general student body. By this standard, student-athletes consistently outperform nearly all their peers in the student body.
Lafayette student-athletes have a federal graduation rate of 86 percent (four-class average), placing them 11th in the country and well-above the national rate of 68 percent.
