It’s no secret that the grade improving, transcript burnishing, transcript mills that work to qualify students for NCAA division I athletic programs have been newsmakers of late.

The stories leave us all shaking our heads at the complicity and willful ignorance of coaches and schools. On the flip side, competitive men’s basketball and football teams mean revenue and this revenue drives the rest of large school athletic departments.

Recruiting and NCAA clearing house eligibility come together to form an imperfect, grey, often messy, world.

Dave Tavenner, Hargrave Military Academy

The NCAA has moved to improve accountability- limiting the number of credits from eligibility mills, requiring legitimate courses, core GPA, etc. These improvements are noteworthy and important in two ways. First, they limit, and discredit, the poor work of eligibility mills. Secondly, they shine some light on boarding school post graduate programs that have been doing their work well for years.

For an introduction into post graduate boarding education done right, I invite you read an article (Hargrave Football Delivers NCAA Eligibility: New NCAA Rules Effect Everyone, But Most Unprepared) written by David Tavenner, Varsity Football Coach, Hargrave Military Academy in which he explains the approaches of Hargrave’s work with their football PG students. Tavenner is blunt about the benefits of structure and accountability which, from most angles, are the two most important tenets of any PG program.

Learning to live a structured life helps one create opportunity.

Many boarding schools have PG programs or make post graduate students part of their twelfth grade programs.

As a primer on post graduate education I invite you to read an article I wrote several years back, “A Post Graduate Year; what’s that?” This piece provides an introduction to the post graduate year.