Generic or Name Brand?

First off, excuse us for not running a shot of NCAA president Myles Brand, the guy who pulls down $870,000 a year, more than every public university president in this great land of ours. What we have here is an image of normal, everyday college students, clearly exhausted after another challenging day. Kids like these have to go it alone. They have to pay their way, often having to work while going to school, and don't have luxuries such as scholarships, top-flight tutors or state-of-the-art buildings where they can study away from the rest of the riff-raff. Those kind of perks belong to "student-athletes," the ones who bring in the cash and make it possible for Brand to "earn" his $870,000. So golly gee, imagine our reaction when Brand announced Thursday that the overall graduation rate for Division I athletes rose by one percentage point from 2005 to 2006. And 63% of all scholarship athletes who entered Division I colleges in 1999 had graduated within six years, compared to 61% of all students at those institutions. When you're the CEO, you have to let everybody know you are doing a great job. But we have to wonder what the graduation rate would be for the general student body if it had access to tutors and academic centers and everybody could be on scholarship and not worrying about paying the rent.