The Impact of Collegiate Athletic Performance on Admissions Outcomes: Does a Winning Football Season Attract More Applicants?

Abstract

Few empirical studies have explored the effect of athletic performance at the college level on the application and admissions decisions of prospective students. In this paper, we create a model of college application and enrollment levels to determine whether successful football programs attract more first-year students in subsequent years. We exploit variation in athletic success across time by constructing a panel dataset that contains all schools with a Division I, II, or III football program during the 1998-2013 year range. We use several measures of athletic success, including win percentage, conference performance, and placement in the Associated Press College Poll. Using a school fixed effects model and accounting for general admissions trends across time, we estimate separate models for each division. Our results suggest that increases in a football team’s win percentage cause significant increases in applications for Division I-A schools. We find additional evidence suggesting that higher win percentages cause higher enrollment levels at the Division II and III level, but not for Division I schools.