ACC Universities — A Quantitative Analysis
My (completely unbiased) assessment of the elite Atlantic Coast Conference.
I didn’t just go about ranking the schools using standard percentiles. Here’s why:
Let’s say that we are assessing a metric wherein greater values indicate better performance. One school has a thousand, another ten, the rest zero. Percentiles generally indicate the percentage of entities that you outperform, in this case other schools. In this scenario, this would have the second-best school — i.e. the one with “ten” — yielding a percentile score of 100*(14/15) ≈ 93.
My particular algorithm utilizes a lower cumulative distribution function that assumes uniform distribution within the range of each parameter to properly control weightiness and account for fluctuations between variables.
Simplifying the calculus to arithmetic, the function takes the difference between a value in question and the poorest value in the range and divides it by the range itself.
(x-a)/(b-a)
This percentage is then multiplied by one hundred to yield a score between zero and one hundred. Thus, the aforementioned school from our previous case would yield 100*(10–0)/(1000–0) = 1.
This formula was executed for every university for each of the ten parameters in my analysis; they were then ranked by highest total score.
So, what does it take to get into these elite universities?
The ACC includes everywhere from Louisville — where they let in just about everyone with a pulse — to Duke, where fewer than one in ten applicants are accepted. Indeed, I can attest to this; the nine percent statistic was the exact number they touted in my rejection letter back in 2015.
I digress.
While universities usually do not explicitly report average standardized test scores as a relative admissions benchmark, I was able to interpolate approximate medians based on their respective upper and lower quartile ranges:
Every ACC school’s average student is within the highest quintile of scores, with the most competitive often exceeding two standard deviations from the national median — which is usually around 20 out of 36.
Moving on to athletics:
Each school has at least seventeen sports sponsored by the ACC, with Duke and UNC (in typical rivalry fashion) touting twenty-seven.
Just how good are these teams?
While neither Pittsburgh nor Virginia Tech have won a national championship since having joined the ACC in 2013 and 2004 respectively, UNC has garnered forty-five.
You read that correctly: 45 W’s out of the University of National Champions.
Surely, many will argue that the data is faulty considering that 21 of them are from the UNC Women’s Soccer team alone. Well, 45 minus 21 is still 24, and that’s still more than Duke — whose total is equally as unbalanced as seven of theirs have come from, you guessed it, Women’s Golf.
When these athletes actually decide to go to class, the amount of attention they’re capable of receiving from professors is often incumbent upon their respective schools’ student-to-faculty ratio:
This metric plays an important role in evaluating a school’s quality of education. However, I will cut the Seminoles some slack as they somehow manage to fit over thirty-two thousand undergraduates onto one campus.
What percentage of those with the honor of being a part of one of the best conferences in sports actually graduate in four years?
If you manage to come across a proud Cardinal or Yellow Jacket freshman, it’s actually more likely than not that the school they currently attend won’t be the same place where they end up walking.
For those who do make it out alive, they all have almost inevitably accrued debt in some capacity:
While Boston College is notoriously expensive, they do have a stellar financial aid program that allows their students to come out with usually around only twenty thousand dollars in student loan debt.
Then there is the case of my sister, who is about to graduate the University of Pittsburgh up to her waist in it. We aren’t particularly optimistic that she will be able to pay it back herself anytime soon either; that Children’s Literature certificate’s degree certainly won’t be much help.
So, what exactly is the return on investment here?
Unsurprisingly, these starting salaries all exceed the median individual household income in the United States; most college-educated folk do. However, the distribution tends to favor the more STEM-heavy programs.
Equally as important is where these alumni end up long-term:
Indeed, the average Blue Devil, ten years after graduation, more often than not winds up making six figures.
I would hope that I did too if I had the means to shell out $56k a year for tuition alone.
U.S. News doles out what is arguably the most reputable ranking of schools in the United States out there every year. Upon taking these into consideration as my tenth parameter of analysis, after tallying the scores I found that my custom hierarchy was actually pretty consistent with theirs (or at least our respective best and worst matched up nicely):
Duke University: 917
University of Notre Dame: 782
University of Virginia: 715
Boston College: 708
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill: 704
Wake Forest University: 521
Georgia Institute of Technology: 489
University of Miami: 484
North Carolina State University: 422
Virginia Polytechnic and State University: 396
Clemson University: 363
Syracuse University: 362
Florida State University: 361
University of Pittsburgh: 312
University of Louisville: 198
So there you have it, folks. The numbers don’t lie, but despite this…
…it’s still a great day to be a Tar Heel.
