A different view on the BCS National Championships

Alabama may have beaten UT a week ago on national television, but The Washington Post’s Answer Sheet blog took a different stance.

The blog looked at standards at both schools in several entries last week. Here are some hi-lights:

Sheepskin vs. Pigskin
“… if graduation rates mattered on the football field, the University of Texas Longhorns would win tomorrow night’s national championship contest in Pasadena over the University of Alabama’s Crimson Tide.

The graduation rate for minority students at Texas is 70 percent, 13 points higher than that of its opponent, Alabama—but still 8 percentage points lower than the university’s graduation rate among its white students.”

(Although, the Dallas Morning News reports this week that although UT has increased its minority and low-income enrollment, the flagship institution still does not reflect state-wide demographics.)

U-Alabama by the numbers
For the 2008-2009 school year: “No bachelor’s degrees were given [at the University of Alabama] in: mathematics, engineering technologies, law/legal studies, physical sciences, philosophy and religious studies, social sciences”

The link between sports titles and college applications
“What will a championship do for the winning school?

Among other things, it will mean that more students will send in applications–almost 10 percent more than the previous year.

It doesn’t sound like rocket science, but two brothers researched the link and found a substantial connection between college applications and success of that college’s major sports teams.

The researchers were Jaren Pope, assistant professor of agricultural and applied economics at Virginia Tech, and Devin Pope, an assistant professor at The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.

They co-authored a 2008 paper in the Southern Economic Journal that said the school with the team that wins the national basketball or football title will probably see an 8 percent rise in the number of applications. Schools finishing 16th or 20th in either sports are likely to see a 2 percent rise, the paper said.

This is called the “Flutie Effect,” named after a last-ditch pass by Boston College quarterback Doug Flutie in 1984 that turned out to provide the winning score over defending national champs, University of Miami. The following year, applications to Boston College jumped 16 percent, and then 12 percent in 1985, though school officials said the championship was not the only reason.

Some educational leaders have denied such an effect exists, but the brothers’ research, which covered a period of 19 years, showed otherwise.”