SPECIAL REPORT: ‘Clustering’ Among UTEP Student-Athletes

By ABC-7 Reporter Darren Hunt

EL PASO, Texas — It’s called clustering when a large percentage of student-athletes from the same college team end up studying the same major. But does it happen by choice or by design?

The thrill of victory, and the agony of choosing a career.

“My mayor is communication and electronic media,” said UTEP junior basketball guard Randy Culpepper. But Culpepper isn’t in the majority when it comes to his major.

“Many athletes, they just want to play basketball and the majority of them really don’t like school so, I guess multi-disciplinary studies is the easiest degree to get,” Culpepper said.

Multi-disciplinary studies, a degree plan UTEP established just three years ago, has become the place to go to stay eligible to play, according to some student-athletes.

“That’s mainly why athletes picked that major,” Culpepper said.

Clustering is not against NCAA rules, but its practice has come into question at some schools, including UTEP.

“I can truly say we never bring somebody in and say you need to take this just to stay eligible,” said UTEP Athletic Director Bob Stull.

Georgia Tech, Texas and Kansas were among the schools found guilty of clustering in a recent USA Today report.

The NCAA classifies extreme clustering as having more than 40 percent of the athletes on any team majoring in the same field.

According to an Open Records request, during the 2008-09 season, 34 of 65 juniors and seniors on the UTEP football team majored in multi-disciplinary studies. Three out of four juniors and seniors on the men’s basketball team were also majoring in multi-disciplinary studies, and four out of five of the juniors and seniors on the women’s basketball team had the major as well.

“What really skews the numbers is almost every junior college transfer that comes in has to go into it because in order to be eligible after their junior year, they have to have 40 percent of their degree credit,” Stull said.

Junior college students used to arrive at UTEP with a collection of credits that didn’t match any major. Then in 2006, the school ratified multi-disciplinary studies.

“Really, the university did that, not as a reaction to athletes,” Stull said. He said it was a reaction to assist transfer students from Mexico and the military.

“That was a much easier way to transfer credits in and be able to graduate,” Stull said.

In response to the rash of clustering among student-athletes, NCAA president Miles Brand said schools have to ask themselves a very important question.

“Do you feel there is an advisor that’s pushing students into this? No, and again, I feel it’s very important to talk to the people in the department to explain their process.”

ABC-7 asked Heather Smith, the director of the two-year-old Student-Athlete Advising Center, about the advising process.

“We have student-athletes who struggle and who really want to be a pharmacist … but they struggle in math and chemistry and so on so we have the conversation with them … But do we say, you really ought to do this degree? … No!”

Any way you pitch it, clustering is a dirty word at some universities.

A professor at fellow Conference USA school Central Florida called it “having a major in eligibility and a minor in beating the system.”

“I don’t believe that…if our athletes are beating the system then so are the people at Fort Bliss and so are the people from Juarez…Everybody is beating the system…I just think that there’s a lot of kids who go through college that don’t know what they want to do but they want this college degree because it’s going to help them get a job,” Stull said.

And perhaps for some schools, that’s all that’s important. “I’m on pace right now to graduate,” Culpepper said.

At New Mexico State University, the Aggies showed no signs of clustering in their three major sports last season.

The biggest cluster among the 67 junior and senior NMSU football players was 11 student-athletes majoring in business.

In men’s basketball, all three juniors and seniors had different majors, and in women’s basketball, the six juniors and seniors had five different majors.