The Drake Group: ‘We Endorse 2024 GAO Report Detailing Title IX Enforcement Failures’

In April 2024, the United States Government Accountability Office (GAO) released a report, “College Athletics: Education Should Improve Its Title IX Enforcement Efforts.” Requested by U.S. Representatives Robert C. Scott and Suzanne Bonamici, both ranking members of the House Committee on Education and the Workforce, the GAO audit covered 14 years of the Department of Education Office for Civil Rights (DOE-OCR) Title IX enforcement activity (from 2008-22).

The GAO found that 93 percent of all intercollegiate athletic programs were not offering athletics opportunities to females proportional to their percentage in the full-time undergraduate student body. The overall athletic participation rate for females was 14 percentage points lower than their enrollment during the 2021-2022 academic year. At two-thirds of all colleges with athletic programs, the rate of females’ athletics participation was at least 10 percent lower than their undergraduate female enrollment. Forty percent of the colleges with these large enrollment differences had not added a new female sport over the last 14 years or had dropped one or more female sports during that period.

OCR and the general public had access to this data, updated every year via the Equity in Athletics Disclosure Act database (EADA) that is maintained by the Department of Education. Yet OCR continued to depend on a paucity of athlete complaints and handful of random compliance reviews rather than investigate those institutions with annual EADA reports revealing huge female participation gaps and scholarship expenditures that significantly shortchanged female athletes.

The GAO made three major recommendations strongly endorsed by The Drake Group: (1) that OCR expand its use of readily available EADA data for oversight, (2) when OCR monitors schools pursuant to a resolved complaint or review (“resolution agreement”), it should establish timely response goals, avoiding communication delays that may prevent colleges from making timely progress in correcting the inequity, and (3) OCR staff should be required to record due dates for Title IX monitoring activities. However, this long overdue audit of OCR barely scratches the surface of what must be changed in order to accomplish effective enforcement of Title IX.

The Drake Group convened a group of Title IX experts to review the GAO report, identify those areas that deserve further attention with regard to OCR performance improvements, and make recommendations on alternative mechanisms that would more effectively realize the athletics equal opportunity promise of Title IX. That Drake Group report may be accessed here.

David C. Hughes, President of The Drake Group, commented: “Given the huge power differential between athletes and their coaches and institutions based on fear of loss of scholarships, playing time, and coaching attention, OCR must recognize that its current almost sole reliance on investigation of female athlete complaints is woefully inadequate. The GAO report indicated that only 424 Title IX athletics complaints were received over the 14-year period (from 2008-2009 to 2021-22) of the audit with 61% percent dismissed due to insufficient evidence or no violation. During this period, OCR undertook only 19 random compliance reviews (with 4 of 12 OCR regional offices serving more than 30 percent of all college athletic programs conducting no reviews).

More concerning is that the GAO report failed to address that the OCR did not find one institution in violation of Title IX during this period because of OCR’s dependence on ‘voluntary resolutions’ – a mechanism OCR created that enables an institution to avoid any penalty for a Title IX violation if it agrees to remedy its violation in the future. What is the incentive for any institution to comply with the law if a school knows it can discriminate on the basis of sex until they are caught by OCR and only then must comply? Thus, for over 50-plus years OCR operated a system that effectively eliminated significant institutional risk for violating Title IX. Only if athletes have the financial resources and bravery to stand up to powerful coaches and their educational institutions, have they turned to the courts for relief. Female athletes deserve better than this.