UC Berkeley, the world's top-ranked public university, is admitting student athletes with shockingly low grades and scores if they show promise as revenue-generating football or basketball players, say two Cal scholars whose new study helps explain why athletes on campus have the worst graduation rates in the country.

While the highly competitive university routinely turns away applicants who earn straight A's in high school, it has also been admitting student athletes on full scholarship even if their average high school grade was a B-minus. Its policy, in fact, permits a C average.

Also disparate is the way Cal evaluates students' scores on the SAT college admissions test. While most applicants with low scores are turned away, athletes who average just 370 out of a possible 800 in each subject - math, critical reading and writing - are invited to enroll, according to the report by John Cummins, former head of intercollegiate athletics who retired in 2008 as associate chancellor and chief of staff, and Kirsten Hextrum, a doctoral student in the Graduate School of Education.

"Can a student with this profile truly maximize the UC Berkeley experience? It seems this question has not been taken seriously," say the report's authors.

The revelations about graduation rates and admissions standards come as Cal is in the midst of an athletic crisis, decades in the making. Winning games and selling tickets have become of utmost importance at the school, thanks to a confluence of factors: the high cost of rebuilding Memorial Stadium, leftover debt from the renovation of Haas Pavilion, decisions to hire and extend the contracts of highly compensated employees such as departed football coach Jeff Tedford, and the pressures from the recent economic crisis. And in the push for winning teams, some UC scholars question whether academic standards have been compromised.

Few underachievers

Overall, the number of underachieving student athletes admitted each year is relatively small, according to UC Berkeley's admissions policy for student athletes adopted in 2011. Of 300 slots reserved for athletes, 20 may be admitted under the most lenient category that allows the lowest academic rankings, and up to 80 more can be admitted with slightly better scores.

Yet those numbers may help explain why the Cal football and men's basketball teams recently ranked dead last in graduation rates, compared with the nation's 72 major intercollegiate programs. The National Collegiate Athletic Association announced in October that 38 percent of the men's basketball players admitted to Cal between 2003 and 2006 had earned a degree after six years. Forty-four percent of football players graduated during the same period.

Last year at Cal, for example, 22 athletes admitted with lower admissions criteria participated in a summer academic "boot camp" before starting their freshman year. Some attended voluntarily, and some had scores so low they were required to attend.

Although they were among 321 other talented but low-scoring students at the boot camp, it was the athletes who had the lowest scores, the report by Cummins and Hextrum reveals. The other "special admits" are generally skilled in dance, art, music or even math - but may not test well.

The entire boot camp averaged a high school grade of B-plus and a score of 544 for each SAT subject. By contrast, the athletes averaged a B and an SAT score of 470. Athletes who were required to attend the boot camp averaged even lower scores: B-minus and 427.

While those grades may sound acceptable to some, students at that level have a hard time keeping up at a prestigious school like Cal. Most freshmen arrive with high SAT scores and straight A's, ready for the rigors of UC Berkeley.

The admission of academically challenged student athletes coincides with skyrocketing achievement among other applicants to Cal. The school is so academically competitive that this year Cal rejected 4 of every 5 applicants. Of the record 67,665 freshman applications, Cal admitted 14,103.

'A disservice'

"While test scores are by no means the only way to measure whether a student will be able to succeed at UC Berkeley, it is worth considering if a student with (low scores) would be better served at a different institution," the report says. "This current policy seems to do a disservice by continuing to admit students who are well below any minimum standards held for students on this campus."

So why do it?

Within the past decade, collegiate athletics has evolved into a billion-dollar high-stakes game, a potential revenue stream for universities at a time when financial resources are increasingly scarce. Critics of the system often refer to the competition for money and top players as an escalating arms race.

Cal officials say low admission standards do not cause the dismal graduation rates. Instead, they say, the problem is the result of students' priorities.

"We do admit a very small number of students who struggle," said Bob Jacobsen, a physics professor who is the faculty athletics representative, a position required by the NCAA to oversee the academic integrity of the athletics program. "But in my opinion, the real problem with graduation rates is students who reach the end of their time here and prioritize their sport to the level that they do not finish their degree.

"It is a deeply held value that everyone we admit is able to succeed," Jacobsen said.

Goal not being met

But not every student is succeeding, as the graduation rates demonstrate.

Jacobsen was among faculty members, students and interested observers who crammed into a lecture hall on campus Thursday afternoon to hear Cummins and Hextrum present their findings.

The authors said Cal's problems have a long history, and their report details years of dysfunction in intercollegiate athletics: budget overruns, no clear mission statement, ignored recommendations, constant changes in direction.

Cummins and Hextrum not only recommend limiting coaches' salaries, they want Cal to raise admission standards for all athletes, integrate athletics more fully into the rest of the university, and ensure that athletes spend more time on their studies.

If the paper is ignored, say the authors, Cal might as well admit that "the reality of big-time sports of football and men's basketball (is) primarily a business enterprise."