Athletic Success and Academic Selectivity in Postsecondary Institutions: A Longitudinal Analysis

Abstract

While there are many obvious advantages to a college or university in cultivating a strong athletic program, one potentially overlooked benefit may be its effect on the school's ability to be academically selective. If stronger athletic programs lead to more first-year applicants, an athletically successful school may have the opportunity to be more selective in its admissions decisions, without causing a decline in enrollment. To test this theory, we use school-level longitudinal admissions data available from Peterson's Undergraduate Dataset for the years 1998-2013. We match this data with publically available measures of collegiate athletic performance, including school win percentage, indicators for conference and national championships, and the number of consensus All-Americans on the team. We estimate our model using school fixed effects to eliminate unobserved school-level heterogeneity, and we allow for heterogeneity in selectivity effects across different divisions. We find evidence suggesting that schools with more successful football teams experience simultaneous decreases in enrollment of lower-scoring ACT students and increases in enrollment of higher-scoring ACT students. These effects exist primarily for Division I-A and Division II schools.