Raise your glasses ladies! Once again ND has been ranked number one in the 2013 NCAA Graduation Rate Survey (and its largely thanks to you)!!
This is not the first time we lucky Irish have topped the charts either. This year marks the eighth time in the past nine years that ND Athletics has been given this honor. The rankings are based off the Graduation Success Rate (GSR), which measures the success of student-athletes earning a degree within a six-year period at their institution. ND topped off with twenty of its twenty-two athletic teams earning graduation rates of 100%, with none falling below the 94% graduation rate. This marks an improvement from the past four years, in which only nineteen of our teams were able to obtain this hallowed 100% rate.Â
Based on these scores, we beat out the likes of Duke (#2), Stanford (#3), Vanderbilt (#4), Northwestern (#6), and Boston College (#7). Also, the 2013 scores are a great indicator of the progress ND has seen with its students, who back in 2006, saw a graduation rate of .773 across all athletic programs. But even despite this lower score, ND was still one of the best on the college landscape that year, only falling behind the #1 U.S. Naval Academy.
What is most impressive is that ALL eleven of the Irish women’s teams achieved a 100% GSR! These teams included our basketball beauties, female fencers, lacrosse ladies, rowing goddesses, softball warriors, tennis aces, volleyball vixens, golfing girls, soccer sirens, swimming/diving nautical nymphs, and cross country/track sisters. Way to go girls! See all that hard work, extra hours in the library, and going to office hours really paid off. So help yourself to that extra jar of Nutella in the Huddle and download that last episode of the Kardashians before you start that next paper– you deserve it!Â
But these scores, impressive as they are, only re-enforce what we all already know: that the students on our campus are some of the hardest working individuals you will meet. And you don’t have to be a NCAA recruited student-athlete to realize this. Whether you are representing our school in the big game with “Notre Dame” embellished across your chest, or you are out on a chilly Monday night fighting for the number one spot in the RecSports flag football league, we all balance being full-time students at a academically rigorous university with the competitive edge that so many of us explore via athletics. So here’s to all our ND Athletes (but especially our ladies) for continuing a great tradition of excellence on and off the field!
So remember:
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