• Sunday, February 19, 2012
  • Print

The Road to the Final Four-Year Degree

Having trouble filling out your brackets for March Madness? Bounce on over to Think Progress, where you’ll find another way to take part in the NCAA’s wildly popular men’s basketball tournament, which tips off on Thursday. The site features a conventional set of regional brackets listing the tournament’s 65 participating teams, but it also highlights—in failure red—that 30 of them are failing to meet the NCAA’s academic-progress standards.

To encourage more teams to improve their graduation rates, officials at the American Progress Action Fund, which runs the site, want fans to send e-mail messages to the NCAA’s corporate sponsors urging them to use some of the millions they spend on commercials to reward teams that do well in the classroom as well as the court.