Dave Scott, associate vice president for intercollegiate athletics at the University of West Florida, can remember a 2014 conversation with Judith Bense, president of the university then. It hadn’t been long since the university announced it would be adding a football program, and she had just returned from an economic conference where attendees had heard the news.
“You’d have thought our university had grown by 4,000 students,” Bense said of the crowd’s reaction, according to Scott. He added, “It created a buzz and interest.”
For the University of West Florida, adding football was part of a larger effort to grow from the two-year commuter campus it had been in the 1980s to a residential four-year university where students stick around on the weekends because there are games to attend. Football, Scott said, has helped the university establish name recognition around the state as coaches visit high schools looking for recruits.
Other universities have chased that success story. But new research, published Wednesday in the journal Research in Higher Education, shows that tangible benefits from adding football are hard to find. Colleges that added football in the last two decades did not see the long-term benefits they may have sought, such as sustained higher enrollment, more tuition revenue, and growth in their male and Black student populations, the study found. The paper’s authors noted at least one short-term benefit — growth in enrollment — but it was limited beyond the first year.
“We’re not saying no school experienced an advantage,” said Welch Suggs, an associate professor of journalism at the University of Georgia and one of the study’s authors. But they could not establish a pattern where colleges saw gains beyond a year or two after adding the program. (Suggs studies sports media and previously reported and edited for The Chronicle.)
The researchers — Alex B. Monday, Jennifer May-Trifiletti, and James C. Hearn, in addition to Suggs — analyzed 36 public and private colleges in the National Collegiate Athletics Association that added football programs between 2004 and 2016, including the University of West Florida. It was common to see a spike in enrollment at these colleges in the year football was added and one year before. But by one year after adding the program, the change was not statistically significant among the colleges studied. Similarly, the researchers did not see significant increases in tuition and fee revenue at colleges that added the sport compared to those that did not.
The short-term enrollment spike the researchers found does appear to be made up of male students (football teams can have about 100 male players). But colleges that saw this spike did not increase their male populations more than their peers did in the long term. The researchers found a similar trend when it came to Black student enrollment, which they attributed in part to the fact that outside of Division I, most football players are not Black.
The researchers noted that there may still be some enrollment benefits to colleges that adopted football. They suggested the institutions that did so may be attracting a larger pool of potential students, thanks to the sport. The University of West Florida is one such campus. Scott said its student population has grown since football was added. The new team is likely not the only reason for that; the institution also added academic programs, and Florida is not facing the decline in high-school students that other states are. But football has been a part of the growth, Scott said. “It opens you up to a set of students that would not consider a college that didn’t have football,” he said.
Old Dominion University, whose football team played its first season in 2009, has a similar story. Camden Wood Selig, its athletic director, said adding the sport was part of the university’s push to move from a commuter college to a four-year institution. He said that Old Dominion sold out its 20,000-person stadium for more than 60 of the team’s first home games.
To gauge a program’s success, “I would look at revenue from philanthropy, ticket sales, and corporate sponsorships,” he said. Football games have also brought community leaders, politicians, alumni, and potential students to campus, Selig added.
“There’s no better place to recruit,” he said, whether it’s a prospective student or hire, “than in a sold-out football stadium on Saturday afternoon.”
Still, even a successful program comes at a cost. Suggs said when colleges make football a part of their push to move from a commuter campus to a four-year institution, they often have to raise athletic fees, which can be steep.
“They’re trying to attract full-pay students,” he said, by charging their current student body more.
