Title

Does college football impact the size of university applicant pools and the quality of entering students?

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

4-9-2018

Publication Title

Applied Economics

Volume

50

First Page

1885

Last Page

1890

Keywords

ACT scores, college football, Student quality, university applicant pool

Abstract

© 2017 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. The role played by collegiate athletics in furthering the mission of institutions of higher education has been one of the more active research streams in the economics literature. Two areas of emphasis in this particular genre concern the relationship between athletics success and the size of a university’s applicant pool, and the relationship between athletics success and the quality of a university’s incoming class. This study extends both lines of research above by employing a unique panel data set consisting of 10 institutions that either added or eliminated college football between 1997 and 2015 in order to examine the impact of the presence of college football programme on both the size of university applicant pools and the quality of the students chosen for admission. Results from a panel data estimator presented here suggest that the size of their applicant pool shrinks the year following discontinuation of a college football programme. In the case of ACT scores, the results are similar, indicating that the ACT scores of incoming freshmen decrease after discontinuation of football.

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