Thread: Do you remember when your mom said your eyes would stick that way if you crossed them?
And have you heard about the Flutie effect? Do you believe them? Follow along.
First, let's look at some NCAA Cinderella teams. Check out this article here: ncaa.com/news/basketbal…
Now let's look at admissions results in the years following, and in the longer term (where possible.)
George Mason, 2006, saw a bump in 2007, but a drop in 2008. It's admit rate has increased, and its yield and draw rates have fallen since then.
Davidson, 2008: Apps dropped in 2010 after increasing slightly in 2009. They've seen nice, steady increases since then, like almost all selective liberal arts colleges.
Butler 2010 and 2011. Nice bump the first year, which stabilized really quickly. Admit rates are still in the mid-70s and yield has been cut in half since then.
VCU, 2011. Not a lot of change (against the national backdrop).
Florida Gulf Coast, 2013. They got a nice bump and have sustained it, mostly. Their admit rate has gone up, and yield rate down. since then, as has their draw.
Loyola of Chicago, 2018. If Sister Jean can't increase your apps, well, who can? (I believe they just joined Common App, however, which will do more for them than basketball did.)
UMBC 2018. Not much to see here, either, although let's say COVID might have interfered with their plans.
Oral Roberts, 2021? Too soon to tell, of course (IPEDS data is only current up to 2020 as of this point.)
But, you say, some of these bumps, although small are real. Yes, they are.
What did it cost to get them? I don't think any of these institutions are among the small sample where athletics pay for themselves, which means they're subsidized. There is nothing wrong with that.
Colleges subsidize a lot of things, because they believe there is value. My point is this: If you want to believe your trip to the Sweet 16 "paid off" you need to tally the costs of several years or decades of getting there.
That's how finance works.
Colleges suffer from imitation complex. They want to be like the big, well known universities. That, I believe, is why most of them started requiring the SAT. That's why some of them invest heavily in athletics.
My gut tells me it's a fool's game.
*Maybe* alumni happiness is worth it. *Maybe* donations increase. But for those lesser-known, more regional institutions, it's hardly sustainable. You have to win year after year.
Yes, BC. Yes, Villanova. Yes, Georgetown. They started from higher places. Even Gonzaga, which has had years of good runs, isn't blowing the doors off of things. (These are good numbers...not outstanding ones.)
This, for instance, shows the Ivy League. *Those* are some numbers.
What about football? Alabama's admit rate is the same as it was in 2001
Clemson's is higher
So again, athletics is rightfully a big part of many small and large universities. That's not the problem.
Our collective fascination in fairy tales, specifically the value of Cinderella stories and their effect on enrollments, is.
Just. Look. At. The. Data. It's right there.
It's fun to cheer for St. Peter's. I'm cheering for St. Peter's. But it's unlikely St. Peter's is going to turn into Princeton with a few wins in a basketball tournament.
Even if they win the whole thing. Sorry, that slipper won't fit.
Thread: It seems I'm spending more time telling people why I'm not too interested in the Dartmouth decision than it would take to just put it here. So here goes. I hope this is the last I'll say about it.
First, I've long said that if a college finds value in the SAT, they would be foolish not to use it. I just ask that they do the research, which Dartmouth did. And the lowest-scoring students at Dartmouth end up with a GPA of 3.1 or something like that. Horrible.
I am--frankly--a little suspicious of analysis that shows the SAT is better than HS GPA, because you know damn well if College Board or ACT could make that claim, they'd have done so long ago. They've never even whispered it.
This is the result of the DOJ investigating the NACAC Statement of Principles of Good Practice, which would have allowed this if the student had not withdrawn, but would have forbidden it if the student had notified the offering school that they had deposited elsewhere.
The DOJ treated college just like any other consumer purchase: Suppose car dealers agreed the Subaru dealer could not call you while you were on the way to the Ford dealer to buy the car you had agreed to buy, and offer you a better deal?
Thread: When someone tells you about the big drop in high school graduates, remember 2014. Because by 2037, we'll be back to numbers like we saw in 2014.
What's really compelling is the mix: America will be more diverse, and because different ethnic groups have different college participation rates, that's the big thing going on behind the numbers.
And, of course, New England has known this for a long time.
I've never received so many emails about my writing in CHE as I have for the most recent one about "The Number."
But here's a little insight into that.
Sunday morning, I logged in and checked our Tuition Deposits for Fall first-year students.
By Sunday evening (12 hours later) that number had gone up by 3.7%.
By this morning, it had gone up another 3.2% over that.
Expressed another way, 6.5% of all deposits we currently have came in during the last 24 hours. And we still have a day to go...the day that is traditionally the biggest, or at least one of the biggest.
The Daily Caller (ugh) has memos from the Florida DOE suggesting they were influencing @CollegeBoard on the AP African-American Studies curriculum as early as January 2022, and at the very minimum, July 2022.
So, to everyone who somehow believed that College Board made its own, independent decisions about the framework/curriculum and wrapped it all up in December, 2022, before DeSantis went public: Read this.
I normally wouldn't trust Daily Caller, but this serves their right wing agenda well; it's believable, and, I suspect, even they wouldn't publish a fabricated memo from the Florida DOE.
In order to win the nomination in 2024, DeSantis is going to have to do two things Trump did: