According to Article 6.3 of the NCAA’s Division I Manual, member institutions are required to conduct end-of-the-year exit interviews with departing athletes. We filed formal records requests with every D-I university subject to public disclosure laws, seeking documents relating to exit or end-of-season surveys that took place during the 2018-19 academic year. You can find a large selection of our findings below.
In many cases, schools denied our requests, in whole or part, citing federal and state student privacy laws or other public records exemptions.
Nonetheless, over the course of many months, we’ve been able to obtain thousands of pages documents relating to both exit and end-of-season interviews and surveys, coming from a broad cross-section of D-I institutions. While the institutions can dictate which athletes they choose to interview and which questions are asked, the collection of materials still provides a revealing window into the college athlete experience. It also demonstrates how divergent the exit interview process from institution to institution.
It is important to note that the assertions made in these documents have not been independently substantiated or corroborated by the schools or The Intercollegiate. As such, they should be understood to only reflect the input that athletes provided to their schools through written or oral exit or end-of-season interviews.
In submitting to these interviews, athletes are granted anonymity, which The Intercollegiate has endeavored to maintain. Therefore, in certain cases, we made additional redactions to the documents in order to further safeguard anonymities. We have also made redactions in places where unverified allegations or accusations of a factual nature are made against other individuals.
We will continue to update this page with additional documents as they become available to us and as we deem them publishable.
UPDATE (12/14/19): We’ve added Missouri and UC Berkeley