...I KID, I KID!
You know, you can change your vote.
Someone help me with the methology here. They indexed point spreads and expected wins to donations. I downloaded the article and read most of it, skipping the pages of formulae. They also don't include bowl games in the analysis.
Here's a bit more from the paper itself, if you're interested:
One extra win is associated with a $340,400 increase in alumni athletic donations and a $960,100 increase in total alumni donations. Out-of-state and in-state enrollment increase by 34 and 91 students respectively. However, there is no significant relationship between wins and non-athletic operating donations, the average donation rate, academic reputation, applications, the acceptance rate, or the 25th percentile SAT score.An extra win is a win beyond the 5.4 win per year average that they assigned.
This is pretty interesting, but I would like to see a more detailed article. I've always used arguments like these when people ask me why I care so much about UM Football. The football teams' success makes people think more positively about the university, and I argue actually increases the value of my degree(s).
A comment below the article pretty much asks this question; I would have to assume as you do that wins lead to a better brand across all facets of the university which in turn makes your degree more valuable when you go job hunting from the sheer name recognition alone.
on donations as well as institutional prestige has been disputed by Murray Sperber in his book College Sports, Inc. Although it is a little old (published in 1990) I think that the material contained in it is still quite relevant.
I don't think that the University of Chicago lost anything by dropping out of active participation in Big Ten sports, and I don't think that MIT, Harvard, Cal Tech, Yale, Princeton etc. have lost any prestige from not having a major football program.
They all have plently of endowment and name recognition; if anything I think that having a successful D-1 football program would probably cost them in donations.
It seems like the big issue is getting the name recognition in the first place. Once that happens, it may not require sports to maintain it. Remember that the Ivies were once the great football powers of the country. The Big Ten was dubbed the "Western Conference" because at that time, all of the other good football programs were in the Northeast. Likewise, Chicago was once Michigan's archrival in football. By the time these schools decided to de-emphasize sports, they were understood to be nationally elite schools. Was that the case before they started playing sports?
Were all eight of the Ivy League schools considered highly prestigious all along? The Harvard/Yale/Princeton trio were, but I don't know about the others. The fact that they became associated with those three in an athletic conference may have helped their prestige.
As for historical powers, many of them actually have increased in prestige in recent years. PSU was nothing 50 years ago; now it's considered a pretty good school. USC and ND are now considered top 25 schools, which is a new development, and likely tied to the glamour of their football programs. It doesn't work that way for every school, but I think the general trend is that schools can put themselves on the map with sports and use that as a springboard to bigger things.
Regarding endowments, you have to keep in mind the public vs. private distinction. Historically, people have been much more reluctant to donate to public schools, presumably because they figured they were already giving to them through tax dollars. Private schools, lacking that source of revenue, have been more aggressive at raising funds.
There is definitely an angle that UM's football success UNDERMINES our academic prestige. Guilt by association.
For many snobby types who went to the aforementioned Harvard, Yale, Chicago, Columbia, or overseas places like Oxford, etc., being a "football school" is a BAD thing. We have dumb athletes who can't read or write getting degrees, patrolling the campus in packs, we'll let anyone in who can catch/throw/block/shoot etc. REAL school like Hahvahd and Yale don't let stupid athletics undermine the quality of the student body. Etc. etc. I've personally heard this from people at the office -- including those who go to not-so-well-known small snobby East coast prep schools not on the Harvard-level (eg Bryn Mawr, Haverford, etc.).
There's nothing to be done about it. Stanford seems immune to this, maybe because they have always sucked at the two college sports anyone cares about.
It can go both ways. Notre Dame is a school that was put on the map because of football. For a long time, it was not particularly selective in its admissions. It is now, presumably because of all the people who grew up ND fans who want to go there.
Of the schools you mentioned, keep in mind that some of them have big-time basketball programs. Some schools just are more geared to basketball. Indiana and Kentucky certainly are, but I don't see any correlation with academic quality there.I would imagine that UNC, Duke, Vandy et al. get donation boosts and application upticks after good basketball seasons. (I'd be pretty surprised if this phenomenon were restricted to football alone.)
Compare Duke with Davidson. Two schools in North Carolina with highly selective admissions, but one is nationally-renowned while the other is not that well known. What's the difference? Probably sports.
We have dumb athletes who can't read or write getting degrees, patrolling the campus in packs, we'll let anyone in who can catch/throw/block/shoot etc. REAL school like Hahvahd and Yale don't let stupid athletics undermine the quality of the student body. Etc. etc.
But it's a sham, because the Ivies actually lower their standards dramatically to admit athletes - not as low as the NCAA minimum, granted, but a good 200-300 points on the SAT (under the old 1600-point scale) on the average. If you are a talented athlete, your odds of gaining admission to an Ivy increase exponentially. Why they do this is hard to understand, given that they don't seem to reap the financial benefits of sports.
BTW, Stanford's historically been pretty good in basketball, or at least they have over the last 20 years or so. Under Mike Montgomery they were an annual NCAA tournament team and made the Final Four once.
As others have pointed out, the freakonomics article paints with too broad of a brush. Certainly in some cases, athletic success has helped to raise awareness of schools. Boise State was a community college 30 or 40 years ago. Now, with the football success, it's a least a school people have heard of, I would say West Virginia, too is helped by success in football to where many people don't realize what a crappy academic instituion it is.
And at some private institutions especially, success on the gridiron might actually hurt their academic reputation--or at least lack of athletic success isn't bringing them down. There are probably more people out there like Superstringer alludes to than we think, snobs who presume a school with a successful football school program is by definition academically inferior.