A Different Flavor of Madness

Another clever little entry from the Pope Center for the study of higher education, which uses a database compiled by the Chronicle of Higher Education that shows rates of degree completion and the instructional cost per degree awarded for different colleges.

The Pope folks ran the NCAA Men's Basketball Championship Tournament teams through the different databases to determine which college in this year's tournament would "win" in matchups based on those two statistics. That is, which college has the best value in terms of the cost per degree awarded, and then which college has the highest completion rate per 100 degrees.

In the cost per degree competition, Long Beach State's $37,780 spent per degree awarded crowns it the National Champion of economic efficiency. Harvard, as you might expect, is the goat of the tournament; its $343,004 spent per degree is the tops in the tournament field.

In degree completion, Florida State wins it all with a rate of 34.3. The number indicates that people often transfer into the university and earn their degrees there. A school that graduated every student it enrolled would have a completion rate of 25 per 100 per year. Long Island University of Brooklyn was the pre-eminent bubble team in this competition as its rate of 15.4 was the lowest in the field.

In real life, 12-seed Long Beach State was eliminated by 5-seed New Mexico Thursday night. Third-seeded Florida State is scheduled to play 14th-seeded St. Bonaventure University Friday afternoon.

And of course, the CHE database only determines whether or not students in general complete their degrees and the actual dollar cost of that degree. The rate of completion by the student athletes on the court, as well as what the degree is actually worth, are other matters entirely.