The College Performance That’s More Important Than March Madness

This year, like every year, the NCAA’s March Madness showcased the largest, richest, and most sophisticated basketball franchises outside the NBA. Sixty-seven games across five weeks culminated in the University of Michigan’s historic second title. This competition’s national importance cannot be overstated; Rounds 1 and 2 had an average viewership in the 10–15 million range, outclassing most games in the 2025 NBA championship. It is easy to see why viewers often conflate these two contests, yet the players on the court are not multimillionaire professionals. March Madness is played entirely by student-athletes. Student-athletes, not athlete-students. This distinction cannot be forgotten. While college sports make for stellar entertainment, the American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA) measures universities’ success by the strength of their general education in subjects like mathematics—a metric 24 of this year’s 64 schools failed, including the national champion.

Student-athletes possess a unique opportunity not just to play ball but also to pursue an education at these renowned institutions. Yet training for an effectively professional-level sport while advancing through rigorous coursework can be too much for many, so college athletes regularly choose or are pushed toward majors considered less rigorous, such as business or fitness and parks. These decisions, regardless of motivation, result in a dearth of STEM and humanities majors among collegiate athletes. This leaves general education programs to serve as many students’ sole exposure to subjects such as college-level mathematics, literature, and composition.

In case any faculty or administrators are reading, college-level does not just refer to any course taken in college. ACTA’s What Will They Learn?® and its Council of Scholars codified criteria for sufficient coursework across each of its seven core subjects. This rating system found that, of these seven subjects, the average school in the 2026 March Madness bracket only required three: a “C” grade. When measured by the strength of their general education, the tournament winner is not Michigan but a tie among Clemson, Kennesaw State, and the University of Texas–Austin, which require five subjects, earning them a “B+.” The most disappointing subject is mathematics, a subject necessary for every student in every major. Twenty-four of 64 schools received no credit; that’s 37.5% for those more mathematically challenged readers. It’s not that math is excluded from these schools’ general education requirements, but that they can be satisfied by courses with minimal math content. Some of the most egregious are below:

2025–26 National Champions, University of Michigan–Ann Arbor
COMPFOR 111: Computing’s Impact on Justice: From Text to the Web
May not be repeated for credit. A concept-focused introduction to computational methods for manipulating text, creating algorithms, and using these to generate and analyze Web pages, with a framing around justice and critical computing.

2025–26 West Champions, University of Arizona
MATH105: Mathematics in Modern Society
This course will examine how the mathematics learned in high school is applied to real life situations. Topics may include personal finance, statistics, elections, symmetry, and scheduling. Some of the applications may be how the site of the Olympic Games is chosen, why spirals occur in nature, and how statistical data is collected and how it can be used to mislead the public. The course is designed for elementary education majors, fine arts majors, humanities majors, and those social and behavioral science majors whose further courses do not require College Algebra as a prerequisite.

University of Miami
SPN 312: Introduction to Spanish Linguistics
This course is an introduction to Spanish linguistics. You will examine the sound system of Spanish (phonetics/phonology), which will include a practical focus on improving your pronunciation. You will also study word formation (morphology) and sentence structure (syntax) in Spanish. The course additionally includes an introduction to language variation and dialectal differences in the language.

Courses such as these are not accidents. Jake New, writing for Inside Higher Ed in 2015, summarized a series of collegiate cheating scandals, including that, “In 2011, Stanford admitted to providing athletes—and only athletes—with a quarterly list of ‘easy’ courses they could take, though the university said the list was based on ease of scheduling, not rigor.” University faculty and leadership might claim a need to cater to the lowest common denominator, yet this lays bare the central problem that universities are allowing students to skirt critical courses. It does not matter whether the discussion is about scholars, athletes, band kids, easy “A” seekers, or any other arbitrary split of the student body. The role of a university’s general education program is to ensure all students obtain the skills and knowledge that will empower them to excel in fields beyond their chosen major. With 11 months to go before March Madness 2027, plenty of time remains to reflect on the real metrics of collegiate success and how best to provide all students the academic curriculum they deserve.