Academics At The Big Dance

This week, American productivity has declined—actually pretty dramatically—as everyone fills out brackets for their office pool.

We at ES are no different. But instead of making our decisions about who moves on by looking at three point shooting, free throw percentage, or the latest injury report, we’re basing our brackets on one factor—a school’s graduation success rate, or GSR. We’ve taken the top 16 teams as seeded by the tournament committee, and we’ll show you how this imaginary Sweet 16 would play out in a tournament. Watch our full video here:

Our theory is that the schools that enroll these student-athletes, as the NCAA likes to call them, should place at least as much emphasis on the student as on the athlete.

First a reminder about GSR. It measures the percentage of student athletes who earn a degree. As opposed to the traditional graduation rate measure, we’re using the GSR because it does not count players who transfer out or who leave to play professionally—as long as they are in good academic standing when they depart.  That’s important in this era of one-and-done players.

So let’s look at the brackets.

First decision – eliminating any school that does not meet a 40 percent GSR threshold. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan rightly called last year for the NCAA to set this as an absolute minimum, and we use it again this year.

With this year’s field of 16, that knocks out just one school – the University of Connecticut, with a GSR of 31 percent. UConn fans may be proud of their recent Big East title win, but their graduation rates are another story. Next, we eliminated the four teams with a GSR in the 40 percent range – which knocked out perennial basketball powers Kentucky, Texas, Kansas, and Florida.

By taking the schools with the highest GSR, we set up a Final Four match between two Tobacco Road rivals – Duke University, at 83 percent, and UNC at 88 percent.

On the other side of our bracket, BYU and Notre Dame, with impressive 100 percent GSRs, meet in the Final Four. We had to go to a tie-breaker in the battle between BYU and Notre Dame. For this, we chose the school’s overall graduation rate, or the graduation rate of the “fan base,” if you will. Notre Dame excels here as well, with a school-wide graduation rate of over 90 percent and no significant gaps between different groups of students.

On the other side of the bracket, Carolina ekes out a squeeker over Duke.

And in our championship game, Notre Dame– with a 100 percent GSR – is the winner.

Congratulations to both BYU and Notre Dame – who earned very high basketball seeds while also graduating 100 percent of their athletes. On the other hand, the NCAA released new data this week showing that, while graduation rates have increased across Division I basketball, there is still a 32 percent gap between white and black student-athletes. Clearly, many schools have some work left to do off the court. (UPDATE: Looks like Secretary Duncan agrees).

**Many thanks to Kris Amundson and, especially, Forrest Hinton and Renée Rybak Lang for their excellent work on (and guest appearance in) the video above.

Tagged as: Big Dance, College Graduation Rates, March Madness, NCAA Basketball