Every March, millions of people tune in over a two+ week period to the NCAA men's college basketball tournament. In 2015, a ratings peak, games averaged 11.3 million viewers. By some estimations, March Madness is second to only the Super Bowl in terms of biggest sporting events in the U.S.
College students are arguably the biggest fans of the Big Dance – even if their team isn't in the 68 selected. With a high volume of weekday games in the first week of the tournament, skipping class increases. A couple years ago when the first round had four games on a Thursday in San Jose, I'll even admit pulling my 6th grader from school and sharing an exciting day of hoops. So if college students follow suit, how much tuition is being squandered to those who'd rather skip class and watch basketball? Using Alteryx, we blended a variety of data sets and combined the results with the latest advanced predictive algorithms from Facebook. In just hours of analysis using Alteryx, we determined that college students will waste $2.5 million of their education in 2017!
So, how did we do it?
Cost of College
First, we established what the cost of college is on a credit hour basis, using NCES IPEDS statistics. NCES is the National Center for Educational Statistics. IPEDS is the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System. Once we established what the "credit hour" cost of college is, we derived the cost per class for four categories of student, in-state and out of state undergraduate and in-state and out of state graduate.
A single individual skipping a single class wastes anywhere from $32 to $51.
NCAA
Next, we looked at the NCAA March Madness tournament dates for 2017 and 2016 to understand what days the games occur. We inferred that there's no need to count weekend days after a game night for class skipping calculations, just the days after a televised broadcast that fall on a weekday.
Sleeping in/skipping class for the entire tournament is 8 days of the month; for the Sweet 16, it's 3. For the Final Four, it's 1 day, because one of the two games is on a Saturday.
Percentage of Students Who Skip
Based on a 2014 Brown university study, 14% of college students skip at least one class a week. We used this number as the baseline for people likely to skip class the day after an NCAA broadcast.
Total Students
Using IPEDS data, we obtained the total number of enrolled college and graduate students as of the most recent IPEDS survey year, 2015.
- 230,133 undergraduates
- 65,752 graduates
At a 14% skip rate, on any given week, this many students skip class:
- 32,219 undergraduates
- 9,205 graduates
Social Media
We then grabbed 365 days of Twitter conversation data using a complex query to assess the number of students who mentioned skipping or missing class.
Using this level of conversation as the baseline for those 14% students, we then measured the 2016 period before and during March Madness for conversation volume about missing class.
The differential of those two periods in 2016 was 116%, a sizeable jump.
Inferred 2016 Costs
Using the social conversation data, we applied a 116% increase to the 14% skip rate and calculated the baseline cost per student of skipping class for 3 weeks (the length of the tournament) and the waste in 2016 during the tournament.
In total, students wasted an additional $11,048,794 on the extra skipping classes — not a small sum of money.
Predictive Analytics
Using the R Script Developer module in Alteryx, we imported the Facebook Prophet ARIMA predictive analytics module (BRAND NEW from Facebook) to project forward likely skip volume in 2017 based on all social data available since 2/1/2016.
- Prophet projected a 27% increase in skip rate for the coming year during the NCAA tournament compared to baseline.
- Looking ahead, this will result in an additional $2,571,702 wasted by students on the extra skipping of classes in 2017
So in conclusion, I'm a bit torn as a parent who plans on helping pay for my kids' tuition, yet love the annual thrill of the best tourney in sports. But at least with Alteryx we are now eyes wide open on the value of the Madness!
