The Effects of Academic and Athletic Quality on Undergraduate Admissions

A great many factors influence students’ choices regarding which college to attend, including social concerns, financial issues, academic reputation, and sports environment. In order to examine how the demand for education varies by economic conditions, a cross-section of colleges and universities was examined by looking at a basic demand function that included consumption factors, such as Power Five conference membership, in both a “typical” year and a year at the end of the Great Recession. The data used for the current study was the College and Universities 2000 Project (Brint, Mulligan, Rotondi, & Apkarian, 2011) that included data from select years through 2010. The authors used a model including two years of cross-sectional data to test overall demand, demand for private and public colleges and universities, and demand for very high research and lower research institutions. Quality, using a Barron’s rating as a proxy, was an important influence on demand in all models. Membership in a Power Five athletic conference was also an important influence. Overall, the results did indicate that consumption factors were important inputs in the demand for colleges and universities, regardless of the overall condition of the economy.