EARLY ON A Friday evening in South Bend, Ind., Cory Albertson is among the small subset of students on the University of Notre Dame campus not prepping for a party, a date or both. At 29 years old, he is past his partying phase—he even gave up beer as part of a gluten-free diet he recently adopted. A graduate student in the business school, he is fixated on other, more lucrative extracurricular activities. From a small table near the window in his fourth-floor apartment, the Catholic school's iconic Golden Dome visible in the distance, Albertson sits feeding numbers into tens of thousands of rows and columns that populate...