The nation’s largest college-sports programs rely heavily on special criteria to admit athletes, stocking their teams with students who don’t meet their institutions’ minimum academic standards, The Indianapolis Star reported on Sunday.

No one tracks how successful such “special admits” are in the classroom, the article says, and it isn’t clear how far institutions bend their requirements to admit athletes they really want.

The article cites colleges’ most recent reports to the National Collegiate Athletic Association, showing that they particularly depend on the lower criteria in profitable sports such as football. In 2004, for example, special admits made up 94 percent of Texas A&M University at College Station’s freshman football class, compared with 8 percent of the student body over all. That same year, 95 percent of the University of California at Berkeley’s freshman football players were special admits, compared with 2 percent of the entire enrollment.

The director of the athletic study center at Berkeley told the newspaper that his institution was strict about reporting the numbers, while some others were not as transparent. It’s “incredibly cloak and dagger,” he said. “Just admit what you’re doing.”

An NCAA spokesman told the newspaper that he wasn’t aware that any colleges had adopted a policy — to cap special admits — that was recommended two years ago by an NCAA panel of university presidents.

A Chronicle article last month looked at 10 years of spending on academic-services programs for athletes, fueled partly by a rise in the number of special admits. —Kate Moser