The negative effect of NCAA football bowl bans on university enrolment and applications

ABSTRACT

Universities provide consumption amenities to students in addition to their educational services. Collegiate sports programs have been characterized as one of these consumption amenities. Previous research has shown that athletic success has a positive impact on both the quantity and quality of students attending a university. Alternatively, we analyse if athletic malfeasance, as measured by NCAA postseason bans of football programs, negatively affects either the quantity or quality of student applications or enrolment. Our findings suggest that athletic malfeasance that results in a postseason football bowl ban lowers the quantity of applications, admittances and enrolment to a university. In addition, we find that universities respond to decreased application numbers by increasing their admission rates, while students who are admitted to the school enrol at the same rate as before the ban. Thus, the reduced enrolment is the result of a smaller applicant pool and not the result of a lower rate of enrolment. Lastly, we do not detect any reduction in student quality at the sanctioned university. Our results demonstrate that impropriety by an athletics program directly impacts a university’s non-athlete student enrolment by influencing the amenity mix provided by the university.

KEYWORDS:

• Higher education
• NCAA
• athletic malfeasance

JEL CLASSIFICATION:

• I23
• J24
• Z22

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

¹ As a robustness check, we included university endowment as a control variable and the results were essentially the same.

² The mean score was determined by summing the mean SAT verbal score of 490 and the mean SAT mathematical score of 508. When analysing the scores separately the results did not change.

³ The magnitudes of the coefficients on both lead and lags ban variables on mean SAT scores ranged from a 23 to 116-point reduction. Although not statistically significant, this is suggestive that NCAA bowl bans could lower student quality since our data is essentially population data.

⁴ We are not suggesting that a university can increase their enrolment of more academically qualified students by having their football team lose. Instead, we are suggesting that universities that choose to specialize in the academic quality amenity spend less resources on football and therefore have a lower quality football team as reflected in the lower win percentage.

Additional information

Funding

The research in this paper was funded by the Lee Barnes Benefaction for Learning Enhancement and Enrichment Fund.