Alma Mater Matters
There exists a historic, symbiotic relationship between university academics and sports programs throughout recent American history. The Knight Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics (KCIA) seeks to keep that history alive and thriving. Made up of experts in the fields of athletes, academics, and journalists, the Commission was formed in 1989 to monitor collegiate spending with an eye toward reform. Balance was needed.
The Spread
To help the commission meet this challenge, we utilized open-source framework Drupal 7 to display these relationships in a visual way, along with complex trending and graphing data visualization. More specifically, the architecture allowed for specific capabilities, such as:
- Sorting universities into easily indexed and searchable groups. The index itself is based on data self-reported by each institution and related data gathered from official government, newspapers (e.g. USA Today), and NCAA sources.
- Index data includes institutional information (school state/region, conference, Carnegie classification), academic expenses per full-time student, per player expenses in football and other athletic programs, scholarship costs, coach salaries, and much more.
- Spending trends over time can be observed with data going back as far as 2005. Projections of athletic spending are also available, ahead as far as 2020.
Fostering Academic Achievement in Postseason Planning
The necessity of transparency in this arena cannot be understated. The balance between academic and athletic achievement needs to be maintained in order for universities to serve their purpose. The opportunity to help promote transparency and open data has made this one of our favorite projects.
