As Duke and North Carolina prepare to meet Wednesday in their first tilt of 2012, there will be lots of talk about which team has the better program. Most of these conversations will revolve around the same basic arguments: how many total wins, how many Final Fours, how many championships.

But what if you tried to measure the success of every college basketball team by another, more coldly practical measure: how much money its alumni have earned by playing the sport professionally?

The...