What if the NCAA tournament was based on academics? Congratulations, Clemson Tigers!

Inside Higher Ed does this every year and it’s great.

Here is Johanna Alonso:

To determine the winners, we used the NCAA’s key academic performance metric, known as the academic progress rate, for the 2022–23 academic year, the most recent data available. The academic progress rate measures student athlete retention and academic eligibility, though some outside experts have said the metric paints an imperfect picture of a program’s academic performance…

If two colleges had the same APR, we used 2023–24 graduation success rate, the proportion of athletes who graduated within six years of entering an institution, as tiebreakers. If teams tied again, we turned to the institutions’ overall federal graduation rates, which the U.S. government collects and which includes all students at a college, not just student athletes.

Read more here.