INDIANAPOLIS, Ind. (Dec. 21, 2022) – Mercy College was one of 44 athletic departments across the country to earn the NCAA Division II Presidents' Award for Academic Excellence. The honor is bestowed upon institutions that achieved an Academic Success Rate (ASR) of 90 percent or higher in the most recent set of data that was released Nov. 15.

Mercy College registered an ASR of 93 percent, which tied for 16th best in the country out of 310 institutions. The award, in its 12th year of being given, was collected by three ECC schools. Mercy had the highest ASR of all ECC schools, and this is the first year Mercy has earned the honor.

The Presidents' Award for Academic Excellence is awarded to Division II schools that have achieved a four-cohort (2012-15) Academic Success Rate of 90% or higher. The NCAA and the federal government measure time to graduate within a six-year window of first-time enrollment. Thus, the graduation rates for the 2012-2015 cohorts would have been reported from 2019 to 2022.

The Division II ASR includes transfers into a school in the calculation and removes those who transferred out while academically eligible. The ASR also includes the more than 30,000 non-scholarship student-athletes who were enrolled in the four years covered in the most recent data.

Even when using the less-inclusive federal graduation rate, student-athletes are outperforming their peers in the general student population by eight percentage points. For Division II student-athletes, the federal rate is 60%, while the general student body federal rate is 52%.