Northwestern University, the 20th-ranked college football team in the nation, won’t win a national title on the field this year. But the Wildcats are first in the classroom, according to the “Academic BCS,” the New America Foundation’s annual academic performance rankings of the top-25 college football teams. Northwestern’s top finish is not surprising. But the New America Foundation’s second-best academic team, Northern Illinois — which finished ahead of schools like Notre Dame, which will play for the national championship on Jan. 7 against Alabama, and Stanford — is a more curious case. The Huskies, who earned a bid to the Jan. 1 Orange Bowl, are a surprise both on and off the field. How did Northern Illinois finish so high? The New America rankings are not just based on raw statistics like graduation rates or the NCAA’s Academic Progress Rate, which indicate how well a team is keeping its players on track to graduate. If that were the case, a school such as Notre Dame, which graduates 83% of its players, according to federal data, would finish well above Northern Illinois, which has a 66% rate. (VIDEO: How a D.C. High School Football Team Beat All Odds) Instead, the New America Foundation bases its rankings on several factors: how a football team’s graduation rate compares to that of the school’s overall male student body, how a team’s black-white graduation gap compares to the male black-white graduation gap in the general student population, and the spread between a football team’s black graduation rate and the school’s overall graduation rate for black men. “Our formula is the only one out there that puts these statistics into context,” says Alex Holt, an education researcher at the New America Foundation. (New America’s formula gives less weight to a school’s Academic Progress Rate, which it considers a less rigorous test, than actually graduating). So Northern Illinois scores major points because football players graduate at a higher rate (66%) than the Northern Illinois student body at large (51%). At Northern Illinois, 72% of white players graduate, while … Continue reading The College Football Top 25 – As Ranked By Academics