America’s institutions of higher learning should not expect to Hail Mary—or simply hike—their way out of the national college enrollment crisis, according to new research.
A study published this month in the academic journal, Research in Higher Education, based on a data analysis at the University of Georgia, concluded that adding a football team has not proven to give a university a leg up in attracting new students (and their dollars).
The study’s authors looked at NCAA and U.S. Department of Education data for 36 NCAA member institutions that added football to its athletic department between 2002 and 2018—from public Division I universities such as South Alabama to private D-III schools such as Becker College (Mass.), which ended up shuttering in 2021. They found that, on average, adding football did not have any positive effects on long-term enrollment—or the enrollment of Black students, specifically—nor did it have a “significant effect” on tuition and fee revenue.
To the extent that there was any football-related enrollment boost, the authors wrote, it “appears to be concentrated in the year that colleges added the team. Subsequently, it simply fades out. This would appear to make the promised gains of football evanescent at best.”
The study adds to the liturgy of academic work over the last few decades attempting to ascertain how a school’s investment in varsity athletics redounds to the benefit of its larger mission—and business model. Most famous among this research genre, perhaps, is the so-called “Flutie Effect,” named for the upsurge in applications at Boston College following BC quarterback Doug Flutie’s iconic, game-winning heave against Miami in 1984. The latest study did not take into account how well newly added football programs performed on the field, nor did it control for other factors that may have impacted enrollment at schools during the same period of time.
“This is the closest we can come to saying, what would have happened to a college if it never added football,” the study’s lead author Welch Suggs, an associate professor at Georgia, said in a statement. “It’s often said that sports is the front porch of the university. But what we’re seeing is that colleges that didn’t build that front porch are likely getting the same number of students and tuition dollars as those that recently did.”
This conclusion cuts against conventional wisdom—and some previous research—about the institutional benefits of adding a football program, particularly for tuition-dependent schools. An oft-cited 2015 study in the magazine, College Planning & Management, found that among six small universities, adding football and a marching band helped boost the student body. That same year, an article in Strategic Enrollment Management Quarterly, drew a similar conclusion. A 2021 study in the Journal of Higher Education Athletics & Innovation found a correlation between small private colleges that recently added football and spikes in minority and male student enrollment.
In light of this research and their leaders’ intuitions, schools have been steadily launching football teams in the hopes of offsetting enrollment declines. As of last fall, 772 collegiate institutions (from D-I to NAIA) nationwide were offering the sport, according to the National Football Foundation. That number includes another 10 new programs that are set to be added by the end of 2025.
“No other sport contributes more to the vibrancy of a college campus than football,” NFF President & CEO Steve Hatchell said in a statement last year.
But that vibrancy may have its practical limits, warns the new study, which notes that the concussion-producing activity is also not without its legal liabilities or ethical quandaries.
“Football is not a pigskin panacea for colleges and universities,” the study stated. “The health risks of competing in the sport are real and may well increase. These will create significant moral questions for college leaders to consider if they anticipate starting teams or resuming competition in the face of declining enrollments.”