Athletes at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor are “steered” into independent studies with a professor who helps them with their “learning styles” and are “dumped” into certain snap majors, according to a series of articles in The Ann Arbor News on athletics and academics at the Division I university.

The four-part series, which began on Sunday, says that in one such major, kinesiology, roughly half of the slots in each new freshman class are reserved for athletes.

During the newspaper’s seven-month investigation, which included interviews with 87 people and a review of thousands of pages of records, “we discovered that the intersection of athletics and academics doesn’t always fit the map drawn for the public by the university,” Ed Petykiewicz, editor of the News, wrote in a column introducing the series.

The allegations about Michigan’s independent-study program resemble those made in a New York Times article in 2006 about a similar program at Auburn University. The resulting scandal led to an investigation by Auburn and attempts, later dropped, to dismiss the professor who led the program.

In today’s installment of the Michigan series, a News reporter asked Jay Basten, a lecturer in kinesiology at the university, if Michigan “could offer its student-athletes an academic experience similar to that of a typical student and still compete at the highest levels athletically.”

“No,” he answered. —Libby Sander