College Football and Student Quality: an Advertising Effect or Culture and Tradition?

In 2009, D. Randall Smith published an article in which he proposed that the previous studies were all too broad in their scope and arrived at different interpretations because they were all using different data and could not agree on standard measures of academic or athletic success. Attempting to remedy this, Smith proposed a more methodological approach by breaking down “success” into measureable categories, such as “December bowl appearance, “season winning percentage”, “national championship victories”, etc,  compared data for all these individual categories with SAT scores of incoming freshmen. Smith found statistical support for every category but one, appearing on the surface to support the claim that football programs have a real, measurable impact on the average SAT scores of incoming applicants. However, he also presents some different ideas to think about and claims that other factors may be attributable to this rise in SAT scores. Smith points out that schools who pay their profesors an average salary of $90,000 a year increase their incoming class’ SAT profile by 130 points, schools who keeps costs under $35,000 have a 32 point increase, and institutions classified nationally as research universities receive another 129 point increase in their SAT profile. According to his findings, he determines that while some students chose schools based on athletics, most are driven by more traditional evaluations of factors such as academic reputation, faculty, and cost of attendance. Smith concludes that while some earlier data and even his own research appears to show a correlation between football success and academic prosperity on the surface, investing in academic measures rather than athletics is a much better way for universities to raise the stock of their students and creates much stronger results for them in the long run. 

·      Smith, D. Randall. (2009). “College Football and Student Quality: An Advertising Effect or

Culture and Tradition?” American Journal of Economics and Sociology 68(2): 553-579.