Victories, donations not linked

I saw this story in the "Chicago Tribune". The first time I looked, I didn't find the CU press release on-line, but now it's there with more detail than I pasted here.
[www.news.cornell.edu]

PRESS BOX
Victories, donations not linked

Tribune news services
Published September 8, 2004

Victory on the playing fields of big-time college athletics has little, if any, impact on a school's alumni donations or on the academic quality of its applicants, according to a study released Tuesday.

The study was conducted by Robert Frank, professor of management and economics at Cornell University, on behalf of the Knight Foundation Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics, which was formed in 1989 to draft a blueprint for curbing financial excesses and academic failures in major college sports.

"Individual institutions that decide to invest more money in their sports programs in the hope of raising more funds or improving their applicant pools may be throwing good money after bad and would be wiser to spend the money in other ways," Frank wrote.

Given those circumstances, Frank suggested that universities abandon the "arms race" to build athletic facilities.

Frank reached his conclusions after reviewing numerous studies between 1979 and 2003 on the topics of student admissions and alumni donations.

He said athletic success may generate indirect benefits for universities but they are "almost surely very small."

Copyright © 2004, Chicago Tribune

I checked out victories vs. donations angle for the Cornell Daily Sun years ago and found the same thing. Dryden and Marinaro had no impact on Cornell donations. At Cornell, at most Ivy schools, at most schools nationwide, there is no or very little linkage. And yet ...

At some schools for certain periods, you do see donations go up when victories go up. You also see applications go up. UConn's prestige is way up in the wake of the Huskies' basketball championships. Maybe Rutgers would be more prestigious if its football and basketball teams weren't jokes; regardless, it's still an outstanding state school.

A backwater school like UTEP got on the map for beating an all-white Kentucky team in 1966. Not sure if that helped much beyond making it the answer to a trivia question.

North Dakota generates no small amount of civic pride over the hockey team.

I think individual schools can come up in the world with a seriously winning sports program. You can also screw yourselves with a program that gets caught trying to be highly successful (Baylor) and many, many others. Colorado, whose football team brought the school some distinction the past decade, may undo its fame because of the harrassment of women.

Would the money for the Cornell wrestling center have been given to some other purpose if it wasn't for the wrestling center opportunity?

I've been back to Ithaca more for sports events than anything else since graduation but I still give the same amount regardless of team records.

At the end of the season, the sum of all teams' records is going to be .500. If UConn wins more basketball games, then Providence and BC and Northeastern have to lose more to even things out. And there's only one overall champ, only four in in the final four, sixteen in the sweet sixteen, and some schools see that as the mark of excellence, not .500 plus one win.

If we could end the athletics "arms race," specifically end athletic scholarships, the Ivy Schools would become more prominent, since everybody else would be at parity with the Ivies again. Do we seriously think that will happen?

Stanford has shown you can do the opposite: Be an Ivy caliber school, give scholarships, and play big time sports.

You probably could extend the feel-good argument to government funding of stadiums. It brings pride to Green Bay and to San Francisco to have winning teams, but is there really much enonomic impact on a big city? Enough to justify a billion dollars in aid to build a stadium?

[q]Stanford has shown you can do the opposite: Be an Ivy caliber school, give scholarships, and play big time sports. [/q]
Having been at Stanford, I can tell you first hand that this is accomplished by dividing the student body into athletes and others. The basketball and football players I taught TA'ed at Stanford would have been right at home coasting at Nebraska or Florida State. I know people who had the same experience at both Duke and Michigan.

The rep of these schools as being attentive to classroom requirements for their athletes is 100% hype. If you are winning in bigtime athletics, you've given up on academic standards; res ipsa loquitor.

George Burns once said, Sincerity is everything, and if you can fake that, you've got it made.

I would like to go back and do a survey of the, say, 1969 Cornell hockey team and 1976 lacrosse team and match them up for life success vs. the average Cornell grad from those years.

And more recentlly, did we hear right that Mark McRae got into Yale Med? He must have had good coasting help from his TA's.

I'm thinking there are two kinds of people in the world: Those who think there are two kinds of people, and those who don't. More seriously, at Cornell, there are two kinds who are successful: the guys who grind it out because you've got to be smart to be a researcher at Merck or Pfizer, and the guys who aren't book learning smart but who have something else -- engaging mannerism, looks, decent ability to lead people -- that doesn't get taught in Chem 207-208.

[Q]billhoward Wrote:
And more recentlly, did we hear right that Mark McRae got into Yale Med?[/q]
Matt, too.

That's an awfully broad brush, Greg. I TA'ed at Michigan, and like non-athletes, some athletes tried harder than others. I had some football players in my sections, and although they wern't the very best students in my classes, several of them were among my hardest working kids. What impressed me about the athletic department was that their academic support staff was in regular touch to make sure these kids were keeping up with their work and were not in potential trouble. Their preference was to prevent problems rather than having to face consequences later. I wasn't asked for nor would I have given any special treatment to these kids, and I also got the same message from my department.

[Q]billhoward Wrote:

More seriously, at Cornell, there are two kinds who are successful: the guys who grind it out because you've got to be smart to be a researcher at Merck or Pfizer, and the guys who aren't book learning smart but who have something else -- engaging mannerism, looks, decent ability to lead people -- that doesn't get taught in Chem 207-208.

[/q]

Aw crap...looks like I'm screwed...

[Q]ninian '72 Wrote:
What impressed me about the athletic department was that their academic support staff was in regular touch to make sure these kids were keeping up with their work and were not in potential trouble. Their preference was to prevent problems rather than having to face consequences later. I wasn't asked for nor would I have given any special treatment to these kids, and I also got the same message from my department.[/q]A cynic would speculate that the athletic department at Michigan was in touch because they were worried about having the football team at full strength to play Ohio State and not out of actual concern for the academic well-being of the athletes. *shrug*

[Q]Will Wrote:

billhoward Wrote:

More seriously, at Cornell, there are two kinds who are successful: the guys who grind it out because you've got to be smart to be a researcher at Merck or Pfizer, and the guys who aren't book learning smart but who have something else -- engaging mannerism, looks, decent ability to lead people -- that doesn't get taught in Chem 207-208.

[/Q]
Aw crap...looks like I'm screwed...[/q]

A lot of us in your boat, Will. We're the ones whose tombstones will read, "A Great Face for Radio."