As you likely know, every day this week we’ve been taking a look at every facet of the NCAA academic landscape, from the costs and benefits of the NCAA’s new initial eligibility standards to the effects those standards will have on secondary education, from the inner-workings of the transcript-deluged NCAA Eligibility Center to the pressure on individual schools’ academic support staffs to the ongoing mess at North Carolina and the NCAA’s strange tact therein.

We continue in that vein today with a hugely valuable contribution to ESPN.com from academics Gerald S. Gurney and Richard M. Southell. Gurney is assistant professor of adult and higher education at the University of Oklahoma, a past president of the National Association of Academic Advisers for Athletics and the former senior associate athletic director for academics at OU. Southall is an associate professor of sport administration and coordinator of the graduate sport administration program at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Together, they’ve penned a piece that clearly and unambiguously lays out the various strategies “institutions with financial means employ to bolster their APR scores and avoid penalties.” Those means include the liberal use of summer sessions and NCAA waivers (for everything from learning disabilities to good old fashioned lawyerly letter-writing persistence); arcane exceptions to APR penalty circumstances; bald recruitment of former team non-graduates to return to the university and earn degrees; “creative advising,” major “clustering” and UNC-style “jock docs”; and the NCAA’s questionable Graduation Success Rate methodology, which according to Gurney and Southall results in overall GSR rates 17–20 percentage points higher than the Federal Gradution Rate.

In other words, not only are resource-rich schools (spoiler alert!) doing everything in their power to get and keep athletes eligibile, but the resulting graduation rates and APR scores are barely accurate in gauging a program’s true academic success. To wit:

By consistently simply asserting the GSR “more accurately assesses the academic success” of college athletes and steadfastly referring to GSR rates, NCAA members have convinced the media to almost exclusively use the new, more-favorable metric. Intentionally or not, the NCAA’s APR and GSR metrics confuse the media, fans and the general public. Using the GSR and APR to tout graduation success and increased academic standards is undoubtedly savvy marketing and public relations, but these metrics are fundamentally nothing more than measures of how successful athletic departments are at keeping athletes eligible, and have increasingly fostered acts of academic dishonesty and devalued higher education in a frantic search for eligibility and retention points.

Throughout their piece, Gurney and Southall not only indict schools that spend millions of dollars in order to allow their revenue-generating athletes to essentially major in eligibility, but the NCAA itself, which has punished SWAC schools and historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs) that can marshall but a fraction of the resources available to their far more monied counterparts.

The end result is a portrait of a system where good intentions – if you play college athletics, you should be a real, actual student – are often trumped by harsh, cold reality. There is money to be made. Schools have a vested competitive interest in making sure their APR scores stay up, and that their athletes remain in good academic standing, caring little for whether the output is a better education or better optics.

This, of course, is nothing new. Revenue-producing athletes’ scholastic endeavors have long been a running joke on college campuses; we’re frequently impressed by the Cody Zellers and Aaron Crafts of the world – athletes who take an active interest in academics and don’t need an army of tutors to overcome that oh-so-daunting pass-fail freshman pre-Calc requirement – because they are the exceptions, not the rule.

Which leaves us with the impression that despite all of the NCAA’s admirable reforms under former president Myles Brand and current president Mark Emmert – which include the creation and adoption of the APR, the strengthening of its requirements, and the push for higher initial eligibility standards, among others – the richest Division I institutions still have dozens of ways to game the system. Meanwhile, schools with 10-person academics staffs and limited resources, where athletes are playing for their educations and little more, suffer.

Whether schools should have to game the system – whether national NCAA academics standards are valid, whether athletes should be paid or allowed to endorse products, and so on and so forth – is an argument for another time. The system we’re talking about is the system we have, and Gurney and Southall make it clear that despite all the reforms, few things have changed.

That may not matter much to most fans; as long as the boys are on the field Saturday you may not care how they got there, period. But it definitely matters to the NCAA. There is much work to be done.

(For more on the way NCAA academic standards affect poorer schools and HBCUs, see Myron Medcalf's piece here.)