NCAA — Hoops and Hopes

April 3, 2016
Posted by Jay Livingston

March Madness ends tomorrow night when the student-athletes from the University of North Carolina match up against the student-athletes from Villanova. I’m being ironic about the “student” part, UNC providing one of the most recent and egregious cases. These players are different from most other students. When they were making their choices about higher education, scholarliness had little to do with it. The crucial variables was the quality of the basketball team.

When I ask my students why they came to college, the answer is usually, “To get an education.” When I ask why they would want an education, the answer is, “So I can get a good job.” When I ask what makes a job good, the first response is “money.” My students are student-earners.

How much will they earn? Take a look at the scorecard – the Obama administration’s recently created College Scorecard  (here). It shows median yearly earnings ten years after a student first enrolls. Here’s how the NCAA final four stack up.

(Click on a chart for a larger view.)

Villanova wins handily. But it’s a small private school. Its students come from better-off families, and when its graduates look for jobs nearby, the salary scale is going to be much higher than in Oklahoma. We need something like the Sabermetrics WPA (win probablity added). Fortunately, over at Brookings, Siddharth Kulkarni and Jonathan Rothwell rated the teams in the NCAA bracket on a sort of $PA that adjusts for family income, location, test scores, and other factors that might affect the income of graduates.

Now the NCAA final four look not so evenly matched,and UNC, only a 2½-point underdog on the floor tomorrow night, trails Villanova in the earnings-added tournament by a considerable margin.

College basketball is not life. It’s not even earnings ten years after freshman year. Kulkarni and Rothwell played through the brackets as drawn for the basketball tournament, using the earnings scores rather than basketball scores.  Only Villanova made it to the final four in both tournaments.

These four were not necessarily the highest-rated schools. Southern University, for example, scored a 95 – higher than Utah’s 94 – but the luck of the draw put them up against Duke in the Sweet Sixteen round. Here is the entire tournament.

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The Kulkarni-Rothwell article is here with links to the scores of lots of schools, both 2-year and 4-year.  Not all schools appear in the interactive function. If your school does not appear there, download the spreadsheet data and go to column CW.