Two reports released this week criticize colleges for failing to graduate their basketball players and lambaste the U.S. Department of Education for suppressing graduation-rate data for some institutions. The National Collegiate Athletic Association joined in the latter criticism, declaring that it would release the information this summer in defiance of the department.

The Knight Foundation Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics and the Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sport, at the University of Central Florida, both published reports showing that most teams in the "Sweet 16" of the Division I men's basketball tournament have lousy graduation rates. Eight of the 11 teams for which information was available had rates at least 20 percentage points lower than the rate for other students at their institutions.

Both the Knight Commission's report and the Central Florida report were based on data collected under the Student Right to Know Act of 1990 and published last summer by the NCAA. The rates are calculated by taking the number of freshmen in a given sport or group who earn degrees within six years of matriculation and dividing it by the total number of freshmen in the cohort for the given year.

The Knight report showed that 44 of the 65 teams in the men's tournament this year graduated fewer than 50 percent of their players. That statistic would have made them ineligible for the tournament if the NCAA had adopted a 2001 proposal to ban teams from postseason play if they failed to graduate at least half their players.

The Knight commission and the director of the Central Florida group, Richard Lapchick, both lamented that the graduation rates for many of the teams, including 5 of the Sweet 16, were unavailable because the Education Department had suppressed them. The department deleted the numbers because there were two or fewer graduates on those teams or because the squads had two or fewer total players in the appropriate class (The Chronicle, September 12, 2003.)

The data were suppressed when the NCAA had sought to obtain the information from the National Center for Education Statistics, instead of directly from its member institutions, according to Education Department officials. The center's rules forbid it to release data in such a manner that individual students could be identified, forcing a change in last year's graduation-rates report. Data on such small numbers of players would make them easily identifiable.

On Monday, the NCAA's president, Myles Brand, announced that the association would resume collecting institutions' data on its own and would publish the suppressed information in its next report, which should be out in August.

"There is no question that the publishing of graduation rates, especially those of programs where academic success has been lacking, has been an important impetus to the academic-reform efforts of the last 15 years," said Mr. Brand in a news release. "We cannot allow this decision by the DOE to blot the sunshine from how intercollegiate athletics is doing with its most important objective -- educating student-athletes."