UMBC’s moment
Athletics brought the school some attention, but academics are the star
Our view:
In 2013, Harvard Businss School Professor Doug J. Chung sought to quantify what’s known as the “Flutie effect” — a phenomenon in which a college’s applications surge in the wake of a dramatic athletic performance, so named for the benefit Boston College got from quarterback Doug Flutie’s 1984 Hail Mary touchdown pass against the Univesity of Miami. He found a surprisingly robust and durable impact on colleges that show improved athletic prowess — applications not only increased, but so did applications from students with high SAT scores. This is, to use a technical term, bonkers. Parents, if your kids tell you they want to go to a school because it pulled off a big March Madness upset, send them to their rooms and don’t let them come out.
Unless they come to you this week and say they really want to go to UMBC, in which case you should thank your lucky stars.
All those who heard of the University of Maryland Baltimore County for the first time after its stunning upset of No. 1 seed Virginia in the NCAA basketball tournament could be excused for wondering: Is that a community college? No, it’s not. Actually, it’s something of a nerd factory (and proud of it) that churns out future research scientists, computer scientists, engineers and MD-Ph.D.s at an astonishing rate.
It’s a bit of a joke in Maryland that UMBC was repeatedly ranked by U.S. News and World Report as the top up-andcoming university in the nation. The truth is, it up and came quite a while ago. The magazine also ranks it as one of the top 20 schools for undergraduate teaching and one of the five most innovative national universities. Kiplinger’s Personal Finance has called it a best value university for eight years in a row.
UMBCPresident Freeman Hrabowski is something of a living legend among college presidents. He grew up in segregated Alabama — he knew one of the girls killed in the Birmingham church bombing and was part of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s Children’s Crusade — and become a mathematician. He’s led UMBCsince1992, where his research has focused on expanding opportunities for minorities in science. It’s a good fit for a school founded as an integrated institution in the 1960s as Maryland’s UMBC’s basketball success is great, but academics are the school’s real claim to fame. other universities were just desegregating. Today, UMBC produces more African-American MD-Ph.D. students than any other university in the country.
March Madness fans may not have previously heard of UMBC, but the graduate admissions departments at MIT, Cal Tech, Harvard, Stanford and so on sure had. So had the NSA, which is right down the road from UMBC’s suburban Baltimore campus. So had Facebook and Google, Northrop Grumman and Lockheed Martin.
What they know is that this university produces graduates schooled not only in science but also in collaboration, innovation and application of what they have learned. (There are also excellent humanities students there, too, though pretty much all of them can code.) Top graduate research programs knew UMBC students were overachievers long before the Retrievers trounced UVa. So, parents, if athletics got your kids interested in UMBC, have them stick around for the academics. They won’t regret it.