More Division I student-athletes are graduating from college, according to the latest NCAA graduation success rate report released yesterday. Two teams from local universities, however, are performing below the standards set by the NCAA.

The NCAA has sent a benchmark of 60 percent for all of its sports teams. The Pitt basketball team has a graduation success rate of 56 percent; the West Virginia basketball team 33 percent.

"If I see something under 60 percent, I'm going to ask questions," said Walter Harrison, the president of the University of Hartford and the chair of the NCAA committee on academic performance. "That indicates that work is needed there."

Pitt, however, is not in danger of NCAA sanctions because the NCAA penalizes teams with loss of scholarships based on the Academic Progress Rate, which is released in March. The APR is a measure of the current academic performance of a school.

The data released yesterday evaluates the performance of athletes from 1997-2000.

"It's not irrelevant," Pitt interim athletic director Donna Sanft said of the report released yesterday. "It is historical. But the APR is a projection of what the graduation rates will be. You have to look at both measures, but we put a lot more emphasis on the APR."

To demonstrate how misleading the data can be, Sanft said just taking the last two years of the four-year period of the report as a sample produces significant change.

For example, Pitt's GSR in men's basketball in 1999 was 100 percent and 60 percent in 2000, which averages out to 80 percent.

That is important to consider because those two years represent the first two years of the Ben Howland era. The other half of the sample in 1997 and '98 are athletes recruited by Ralph Willard, who had a much poorer record for recruiting athletes who graduated.

"We're definitely way better than that currently," Sanft said. "And that's a hallmark of the Ben Howland and Jamie Dixon era. Both were committed from day one to recruiting athletes who would go on to earn degrees."

With more of an emphasis on academic performance in the past decade, Pitt's GSR numbers continue to improve every year.

The football team's GSR had the biggest increase, going from 54 percent to 63 percent.

The biggest decrease for a local sports team came from the West Virginia men's basketball team, which fell from 43 percent to 33 percent. The Mountaineers, however, likely are not in danger of being sanctioned by the NCAA because former coach John Beilein produced good APR numbers that will be reflected in March.

The Mountaineers' football team improved from 63 percent to 65 percent

Penn State's two major sports teams fell off slightly from last year. The football team's GSR is 76 percent, down from 80 percent a year ago. The men's basketball team is at 64 percent, down from 67 percent. Yet, 21 other Penn State teams posted graduation success rates of 80 percent or higher.

The report released yesterday is different from the federal graduation rate. The NCAA created the GSR three years ago to more accurately assess long-term student-athlete academic success. The GSR differs from the federally mandated graduation rate methodology because it counts transfers into and out of institutions.

The NCAA figures show the GSR includes 36 percent more student-athletes than the federal graduation rate.

Nationally, 77 percent of student-athletes who began college from 1997-2000 graduated within six years. That four-year graduation rate is unchanged from last year.

NCAA president Myles Brand has a goal of 80 percent in the near future.

The biggest jump nationally in the GSR came in men's basketball, which rose from 55.8 percent in 1995 to 63.6 percent in 2000. Men's basketball, however, continues to be the poorest performer when it comes to all Division I sports.

The NCAA has formed a special group to help men's basketball reach higher benchmarks for improvement. That group is just beginning to collect data and will not make recommendations to the NCAA for another year. It will take another two to four years after that for improvements to be seen, according to Brand.

Brand said yesterday that many more student-athletes graduated from college in 2000, the most recent figures available for the report, than previously.

"We are seeing traction for change in athletic departments," Brand said. "About 850 more student-athletes are graduating thanks to the reforms we have in place. We are changing lives for the better."