I don't understand this at all. UTEP will basically allow anyone in as a student, and I'm not criticizing that. If they want to raise standards for admission, why would you start with the athletics program?
NCAA requirements for athletic admission (and participation) is HIGHER than UTEP's general admission standards, and has been for thirty years or so. This is nothing new, and the number of student athlete's on the Academic Honor roll is tied to performance bonus for the coaches, the AD, and such. UTEP does a good job keeping kids on track to graduate, and those that have any iota of intelligence, usually end up on said Honor Roll.
You might want to check their majors, though. Quite a few years ago, many universities created a generic
Interdisciplinary Studies major. The university I worked at certainly has one. It is essentially a liberal arts degree where students can pick courses in three our four areas that total to 120 hours. They need to have at least 42 hours of upper division work in their major. The cynic in me sees how it would be easy to have certain courses set that such students (athletes and non-athletes) could take.
When I was department chair, I once had to advise an incoming football player who was transferring from Texas A&M. He needed some advice figuring out what math class to take. Since he was an academic sophomore, I wondered why he had not taken a math class in his first two years. He told me he had been taking Ag courses for two years. I could not believe that, so I logged on to the admissions website and pulled up his transcript. Sure enough - two solid years of agriculture classes. No English, math, history, or other core classes required by the state of Texas were listed.
The student was honest, though. He knew this was messed up and wanted to get (in his words) a real schedule. Luckily, SHSU had a good academic compliance officer to help him.
Now, there are plenty of athletes that have more traditional majors and they work hard at them. Z is right about the requirements. Still, there are ways to play the system.
lieb