By 7 p.m., more than a hundred people were sitting in the bleachers to cheer on the Lourdes men’s soccer team. The Gray Wolves
Or subscribe now to read with unlimited access for as low as $10/month.
A free account provides you access to a limited number of free articles each month, plus newsletters, job postings, salary data, and exclusive store discounts.
By 7 p.m., more than a hundred people were sitting in the bleachers to cheer on the Lourdes men’s soccer team. The Gray Wolves won the match in a thrilling penalty shootout over Michigan’s Lawrence Tech. (A far smaller crowd got together to watch the results of the presidential election.)
Athletics is the main attraction at Lourdes, which offers 11 sports for men, 10 for women, and three that are co-ed.
Over the past dozen years, Lourdes has built a robust athletics program to bolster its enrollment. In one sense, that strategy has worked: In the fall of 2012, Lourdes had just 139 students who played in a varsity sport. In the fall of 2022, that number had grown to 448.
“The commitment was made to develop our athletic facilities so we could attract a certain kind of student athlete,” said William J. Bisset, who became president at Lourdes in June 2023. “I think we can check off that box right now.”
The problem for Lourdes, and many other small, private colleges, is that athletics has done little or nothing to attract students who don’t play sports. Despite more than tripling the number of students who participate in athletics, Lourdes saw its full-time undergraduate enrollment tumble from 1,285 in the fall of 2012 to just 691 in fall of 2022.
In 2012, athletes made up 11 percent of Lourdes’s undergraduate student body. Now that share is nearly two-thirds.
Adding sports might slow a decline, the data suggest, but at a cost — because athletic teams are expensive to stand up and support.
More than 80 percent of private colleges enrolling between 500 and 3,000 students increased the number of athletes on their campuses between 2012 and 2022. But, like Lourdes, 56 percent of those colleges lost undergraduate enrollment overall.
The athletics bet has seemed like a reasonable one, especially as youth sports has flourished and young athletes and their parents have clamored for opportunities to keep playing.
As an enrollment strategy, however, college athletics programs have a mixed record; in some cases, they’ve been little more than a Band-Aid on a gaping wound. Adding sports might slow a decline, the data suggest, but at a cost — because athletic teams are expensive to stand up and support.
A heavy focus on athletics may even deter students who have little or no interest in sports from attending, said Travis Feezell, a higher-ed consultant who has served as both a college president and an athletic director at private colleges. If the most prominent activities and facilities on campus are those dedicated to athletics, Feezell said, students who don’t play sports may not be able to see themselves in that culture.
It was relatively easy to build an athletics program at Lourdes, said Sister Barbara Vano, vice president for mission and ministry. “Now,” she said, “we’re realizing that we have more athletes than we have fans.”
The university — which is next to the current convent of its founders, the Sisters of St. Francis — has a large chapel for regular services, a smaller prayer chapel built as an homage to their patron saint’s spiritual home near Assisi, Italy, and a cemetery for the nuns. For most of its first 50 years, Lourdes catered mostly to commuter students and working adults.
As undergraduate enrollment boomed nationally during the Great Recession, the university’s board saw an opportunity to shift its mission and become a residential, liberal-arts university.
Key to that change was adding athletics, the board decided, as a way to attract students to live and study at the campus. Starting in 2010, the university created eight teams: baseball for men, softball for women, and men’s and women’s teams for basketball, golf, and volleyball.
Lourdes’s path to athletics was unconventional, but its strategy mirrored what was happening across small colleges: Administrators added a dizzying number of teams, including men’s and women’s bowling, lacrosse, soccer, track and cross country, tennis, and wrestling, along with co-ed teams for cheer, dance, and esports.
Among the colleges in The Chronicle’s data, athletes increased from a median of 21 percent of undergraduates in 2012 to nearly a third in 2022.
Adding athletics at Lourdes has been something of a success, at least in the kinds of students that Lourdes attracts.
Students come to us from other countries solely because of our experiences in athletics, and that has changed the face of who we serve.
“We have students from all over the nation, all over the world that most schools our size would not have without athletics,” said Vince Laverick, chair of the division of education and an associate professor. “Students come to us from other countries solely because of our experiences in athletics,” he said, “and that has changed the face of who we serve.”
Vinicius Lopes, a junior studying business administration, said he came all the way from Brusque, Brazil, primarily so he could continue playing volleyball. Lopes said he is one of three students on campus from Brazil. About 2 percent of Lourdes’s undergraduates were foreign students in the fall of 2023, according to federal data.
Laverick, who is also the faculty athletics representative and helps navigate any academic disputes between the faculty and the athletics department, said that along with diversifying the student body, athletics has had an academic benefit.
Athletes tend to be highly engaged students and also have higher grades, on average, than students who don’t play intercollegiate sports at Lourdes, he said. Because they are connected to their teammates, Laverick added, they also feel at home on campus as soon as they arrive, and that’s good for retention.
Winning teams may have piqued athletes’ interest in Lourdes. What probably secured their enrollment, though, was a scholarship that the university couldn’t actually afford.
Unlike the National Collegiate Athletic Association, where most colleges participate under Division III without the ability to offer athletic scholarships, the NAIA permits all of its members to offer such aid. Top-tier programs in the NCAA’s Division I can usually cover that expense — thanks largely to the enormous revenues from television rights.
But at places like Lourdes, scholarships are paid for by tuition-discounting that on average shaves about 50 percent off the price at most private colleges.
At Lourdes, Bisset said, coaches had been adding the discount of the athletic scholarship on top of the university’s normal merit aid to attract the highest-performing athletes. As a result, he said, the tuition discount for athletes averaged 74 percent, compared to about 34 percent for the students not playing sports. In other words, the university was spending far too much on financial aid for a large majority of its students.
On one team, the tuition-discount rate was a whopping 89 percent, said Bisset, who explained that he is working with the team’s coach to set different expectations.
“It’s been difficult for that coach to understand that we may need to change things there,” Bisset said, “and he may not be able to get the same level, from a talent perspective, of student-athlete that he’s been able to get in the past.”
We want to be competitive, but we also know we have to keep the doors open as well.
The university is among just 27 colleges where expenses outpaced revenues in at least eight of the years between 2014 and 2023, according to data compiled by Robert Kelchen, a professor and head of the department of educational leadership and policy studies at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville.
Lourdes is now setting net-tuition goals for coaches. Doc Kelly III, the head wrestling coach at Lourdes, said the limits on athletic scholarships have forced coaches to make hard choices. “We want to be competitive,” he said, “but we also know we have to keep the doors open as well.”
What’s more, the university isn’t really built for big-time athletics. Lourdes shares fields for baseball, softball, and soccer with the local high school, and has just one indoor court shared by the men’s and women’s basketball and volleyball teams.
Because of that, the university has had to increase the hours of the dining hall to accommodate team practices that may happen during the times other students are at breakfast or dinner.
A large share of Lourdes students are studying nursing. The clinical rotations that nursing students must complete for their degree are set by the hospitals, said Laverick, the faculty athletics representative, and often can’t be changed to accommodate a practice or competition.
Katherine P. Beutel, the university’s provost, said the size of the university means the institution must always be nimble to allow athletes to meet course requirements.
“What do you do when you’re small,” she said, “and really only have one section of organic chem lab running and the student needs this organic lab?”
Yet those colleges will continue to double down on athletics because it guarantees that some students will be enticed to enroll.
Participation in high-school sports is at an all-time high, said Alan Grosbach, director of the Return on Athletics program at the National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics, and the opportunity to continue playing a sport past high school can be a big motivation for choosing a particular college.
“We did a survey of our student athletes,” said Grosbach, “and 73 percent of them said they wouldn’t have attended their institution if it wasn’t for the sport.”
Many colleges are now adding sports that don’t require extra facilities or lots of equipment. For example, flag football, which requires little equipment and can be played by both men and women on an existing soccer or football field.
We did a survey of our student athletes, and 73 percent of them said they wouldn’t have attended their institution if it wasn’t for the sport.
Colleges have to be aware that there are still additional costs for those athletic teams, said Tim Walsh, managing director of the Huron Consulting Group, which specializes in higher education. Those extra expenses include transportation to competitions and uniforms.
Instead of extending dining hours, Walsh said, some colleges pile on costs by catering meals for athletes, or deciding that they want to broaden their competition to a larger region.
Another trend has been to add athletes by simply increasing rosters on athletic teams or adding several junior-varsity squads, said Feezell, the consultant with Credo.
But it’s hard to see how this will appeal to athletes in the long run, he said, because it creates enormous rosters with little opportunity for playing time.
Lourdes tried this in the past, growing the baseball team from 35 players in 2012 to more than 50 in 2022. But the effort has not been successful, said Jo Ann Gordon, the university’s athletic director.
“We’ve tried some expansion with JV programs, and we just haven’t been able to retain the students,” she said, “because we’re not able to give them the best experience.”
A December 2023 report from the Urban Institute concluded that, among colleges in the NCAA’s Division III, institutions that did not increase their investment in athletics were more likely to see enrollment increases.
A study published in the Economics of Education Review found that adding a football team at the Division III level of the NCAA results in no statistically significant increase in enrollment, and no positive impact on revenues or endowment. It also coincides with a decline in the share of women enrolling at the college.
The author of that study, Bryan C. McCannon, a professor and director of the School of Economics and Business at Illinois Wesleyan University, said he can’t tell from the research why the gender balance changes at colleges — whether a shift in resources or recruiting strategy or even that football is actually deterring women from enrolling — “but some crowding-out effect is going on.”
College presidents are keenly aware that they need to balance athletics with other activities on campus to remain relevant to a broad population of potential students.
“All of us right now are in a period of time where demographics are pushing us,” said James A. Troha, president of Juniata College. “We’re looking for more opportunities to gain market share.”
At the same time, Troha said, Juniata doesn’t want to be pigeonholed as a place where the emphasis is entirely on athletics. “We want to be known for our academic heft,” he said, “academic quality, first and foremost.”
All of us right now in a period of time where demographics are pushing us. We’re looking for more opportunities to gain market share.
Jimmy Kolopajlo, a senior accounting major, and Malachi Johnson, a sophomore studying business administration, are two of the few Lourdes students who don’t play sports.
The pair are president and vice president of the student government, and have struggled to get more students involved in activities off the playing field. Last year, they said, there were only three students involved in student government; this year it’s up to 20.
Johnson, who is from Toledo, played basketball during his freshman year. But what brought him to campus were the university’s values that emphasized service and community. He touted the university’s Labre Project, where students meet each Wednesday to prepare and distribute free meals in the community.
Kolopajlo, who lives nearby in Sylvania and came to the university because the small campus required less travel between buildings in his wheelchair, said students who aren’t athletes can definitely feel left out.
“When I was a first-year student at Lourdes, I kind of felt a little bit disconnected,” he said, “but that’s just what I’ve been told a lot of nonathlete commuter students felt like.”
Bisset, the president, said the university has added some new programs in fields that are in high demand with the region’s employers, such as cybersecurity, supply-chain management, and data analytics.
The university is also adding a minor in artificial-intelligence literacy, according to its website.
At the same time, the university is cutting programs with low enrollments, such as degrees in craft beverages, human-resource management, and health-care administration.
Even the athletics department has not been spared from the budget ax. The university eliminated women’s lacrosse in the fall of 2023, and both men’s and women’s tennis are under consideration, said Bisset, because it has been difficult to recruit enough players.
To attract more students who don’t play sports, Bisset acknowledges, the university will also have to find ways to help them feel connected outside of the classroom. While athletes have an immediate support network in their teammates, he said, students who don’t play sports at Lourdes can feel left out.
Campus leaders are saying we need to attract more full-pay students. One way to do that is through athletic programs, but at the same time, we are eviscerating the liberal arts and sciences.
Unfortunately, declining revenue has also eliminated some of the activities that might appeal to those students.
“I was told there was supposed to be a pep band,” said Kolopajlo, the student-government president, “but when I actually started out at Lourdes, the pep band fell apart.”
Lourdes had a small music department and offered two choirs and a pep band, all led by two adjunct faculty. The department and ensembles were eliminated because of budget constraints and low enrollment, Bisset said in an email. The offerings still appear on the university’s website.
The music department “was one part-time person,” Bisset wrote, “and the numbers of students in our choir and performing-arts programs were so low, in order for plays and concerts to happen, area high-school talent needed to be brought in.”
Budget is mission, said Lynn Pasquerella, president of the Association of American Colleges and Universities, which advocates for liberal-arts education. College leaders say they are interested in supporting the liberal arts, she said, but the cuts to academic programs and nonathletic extracurricular activities tell a different story.
“Campus leaders are saying we need to attract more full-pay students,” she said. “One way to do that is through athletic programs, but at the same time, we are eviscerating the liberal arts and sciences.”
“It gets back to the question of what we value and what our institutional missions are,” said Pasquerella, “which should always be driving our allocation of scarce resources.”
Kolopajlo believes the university could revive the choir and band if they advertised those activities as much as they do athletics.
Brian O’Leary, The Chronicle’s interactive news editor, contributed data analysis.
