The question matters because men’s basketball occupies a peculiar position in the economics of the National Collegiate Athletic Association. The sport generates billions of dollars in television and ticket revenue, anchored by the annual NCAA tournament, yet the players who produce that value receive no direct salary. Graduation success rate, the metric the NCAA introduced in the early 2000s, was designed to hold programs accountable for the academic outcomes of their athletes. Unlike the federal cohort graduation rate, which counts only athletes who graduate within six years of enrollment at the same institution, the graduation success rate credits transfers who graduate elsewhere and includes athletes who leave in good academic standing. It is therefore a more forgiving but also more comprehensive measure of whether a program is genuinely educating the young people it recruits.

The economic logic of why NIL might affect graduation rates runs in both directions, which is precisely what makes the empirical question interesting. On one side, the opportunity cost of studying has risen. A player with a large social media audience or a marketable personal brand faces a real trade-off: an hour spent filming promotional content or negotiating with a collective is an hour not spent in a study hall. If the marginal return to brand-building exceeds the perceived marginal return to a degree, rational agents may reallocate time away from academics. The explosion of the transfer portal has compounded this effect, since players who change schools multiple times in search of better compensation face disrupted credit accumulation, lost progress toward major requirements, and in some cases semester gaps that push graduation further away.

On the other side, several mechanisms push in the opposite direction. NIL income reduces financial pressure that has historically pushed some athletes to leave school early for professional contracts overseas or in the NBA G League. A player earning meaningful endorsement money may now be able to remain enrolled, complete a degree, and still support his family, something the amateur model never allowed. Boosters and collectives, whose contributions now flow partly through universities, have an institutional interest in keeping eligible players eligible, and academic eligibility rules still require satisfactory progress toward a degree. Programs with lucrative NIL ecosystems may therefore invest more heavily in academic support, tutoring, and degree-completion programs, not out of altruism but because a player who flunks out is a player who cannot play. In principle, then, NIL could raise graduation rates even as it lowers study time, and disentangling these forces requires careful data analysis.

This is the analytical terrain that Messina and Sommers set out to map. Their study, accepted by the Atlantic Economic Journal in September 2026 and published online on the first of October, examines graduation success rates across Division I men’s basketball programs in the period surrounding the introduction of NIL rights. The authors, both affiliated with the Department of Economics at Middlebury College, bring to the question a long tradition of sports economics scholarship that treats college athletics as a laboratory for studying incentives, human capital, and labor markets. The paper includes supplementary material detailing its data construction and statistical procedures, and the authors acknowledge comments from Annabelle Fowler in preparing the final version.

The methodological challenge such studies face is substantial, and it is worth spelling out why. Graduation success rates are reported annually by the NCAA for each program, but they are rolling four-year cohort measures, which means any effect of NIL, introduced in 2021, would only fully appear in data released several years later. A player who enrolled in 2021, the first NIL class, would graduate by 2027 at the earliest, so the earliest post-NIL GSR figures blend pre-policy and post-policy cohorts. Researchers must therefore be careful about attributing any observed change to NIL alone. Confounding factors abound: the COVID-19 pandemic disrupted academic life for cohorts graduating in the early 2020s, the NCAA granted an extra year of eligibility that extended many careers, and the transfer portal, which predates NIL but accelerated alongside it, independently reshapes graduation statistics by moving students between institutions.

There is also a deeper conceptual issue about what graduation success rates actually measure in the NIL era. The metric was designed for a world in which the primary exit option for a talented underclassman was declaring for the professional draft. Today, a player who leaves school after two years to pursue a full-time career as a paid athlete, whether through lucrative collectives, professional opportunities, or personal branding, counts against his original program’s rate unless he graduates elsewhere in good standing. Some economists would argue that this makes GSR an increasingly poor welfare measure: a player who forgoes a low-completion-probability degree for genuine earning opportunities may be behaving optimally, not failing. Others counter that the vast majority of basketball players will never earn a living from the sport, and that for them the degree remains the single most valuable asset college athletics confers, which is why any erosion of academic outcomes would represent a genuine social cost.

The stakes extend beyond basketball. Football has followed a similar trajectory, and the legal environment continues to evolve, with litigation challenging NCAA compensation rules and several states enacting or revising their own NIL statutes. If rigorous empirical work finds that graduation rates have held steady or improved, it would strengthen the case that athlete compensation and academic mission can coexist, and would undercut arguments for rolling back NIL rights. If the data instead reveal a systematic decline, particularly concentrated at programs with the most aggressive collective spending, it would give regulators and university presidents concrete evidence that the current unregulated market imposes academic costs, potentially justifying eligibility-linked compensation structures or enhanced academic support mandates. Either result would be informative, which is why studies of this kind are likely to multiply as cleaner post-2021 data become available.

What the Messina and Sommers paper ultimately contributes is a disciplined economic framing of a debate that has so far been dominated by anecdote. Coaches lament players who treat one-year stints as paid stopovers; athletic directors tout rising academic scores; commentators assert that money has ruined the student-athlete ideal. None of these claims, on its own, constitutes evidence. By assembling program-level graduation data spanning the transition into the NIL era and applying standard statistical tools to detect whether the policy shift coincided with a change in academic outcomes, the study converts a loud argument into a testable hypothesis. The answer it reaches will be scrutinized, replicated, and extended, but the mere existence of such analysis marks a maturing of the conversation around athlete compensation.

For the young men who dunk on national television each winter, the stakes are personal and immediate. College basketball players graduate at lower rates than most of their classmates, and the sport’s one-and-done culture has long strained the fiction that every scholarship athlete is primarily a student. NIL has added money to that equation without adding clarity. Whether endorsement deals become a bridge that helps more players finish their degrees, or a current that sweeps them out of the classroom and into a precarious gig economy of paid appearances, is an empirical question that economists are only now beginning to answer. The Middlebury study is an early and careful entry in what will surely become one of the defining research literatures of the post-amateur era of college sport, and its central question, whether dollars and diplomas can coexist on the hardwood, will shape policy debates for years to come.

Subject of Research: The effect of name, image, and likeness compensation on graduation success rates in Division I men's college basketball

Article Title: Has NIL Affected Graduation Success Rates at College Basketball Programs?

Article References: Messina, C. G., & Sommers, P. M. (2026). Has NIL Affected Graduation Success Rates at College Basketball Programs?. Atlantic Economic Journal. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11293-026-09863-5

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s11293-026-09863-5

Keywords: NIL, college basketball, graduation success rate, NCAA, student-athletes, sports economics, transfer portal, athlete compensation, academic outcomes, Division I athletics, Middlebury College, Atlantic Economic Journal