Interesting discussion - no matter the impact if any of athletics on current applicant flow and yield the positive PR Miami is getting is very valuable . As I noted the Wall Strete article is an excellent example. In this era of a decreasing applicant pool Miami should be as active as possible in many different initiatives to attract applicants including athletics- professors need to have students in their classrooms if they are going to have a job!
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Fair enough. My question is what would drive applicants more? A 28M/year athletic subsidy or an annual pool of 28M/year for scholarships for kids with 30+ ACT scores? The latter is literally almost 2000 full in-state tuition scholarships every year. Iâm not against athletic subsidies. I just believe that the notion that they are some efficient way to drive applications and academic reputation is pure bunk.
What would drive donations more? Not meant to be a diss, just Miami has gotten more coverage this season than any time I rememberâŚ
On what evidence? Iâd need to see the year before the Flutie Effect as a baseline and then compare that to +2 years and +5 years numbers for average freshman SAT/ACT, acceptance rate, annual overall university fundraising and endowment. Maybe throw in some academic rankings too.
And if the studies that Iâve seen on a Flutie Effect are accurate, there will be a slight to noticable increase in athletic donations (based on how far the run goes and how many years it continues) but no real increase in overall university donations. Nobody is donating to Farmer, the general scholarship fund or the physics department based on how the basketball team is doing.
Anecdotal, as in I had never heard of Butler or Creighton (or Davidson and Santa Clara, for that matter) until they received exposure in the tourney.
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Never going to happen. Should athletes then have to pay for labs they donât need? Itâs not a grocery list of services you pay for. At the end of the day sports bring in eyes which bring in $$$$
OK, thatâs really effinâ stupid. Those labs are a fundamental reason why the university exists. Sports bring some âeyes.â Great. The question is do they bring enough $$$$ and applicants and prestigious faculty and rankings that they justify the investment versus just putting that money directly into academics.
Again, riddle me this, what moves the university forward better? A 28M/year athletic subsidy or a 28M/year direct investment in scholarships for 30+ ACT students?
In the long term, donations are driven by successful alumni who had a great college experience. The overwhelming majority of those donations go to academics â as they should. Consider that weâve spent the past two days marveling at the quantum leap to get to $8m in NIL funding in one year. Then consider that Miami provides $11m in donor-funded scholarships to students every year. And thatâs on top of the $800m+ already raised in the current capital campaign, most of which was pledged before any recent sports notoriety.
I love Miami sports. But I try not to forget the relative positions of tail and dog around here. And perhaps to elaborate before folks pile on, I have contributed to the sports fund, but my first priority for Miami giving is the Honors College, and thatâs never going to change.
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@Devil In fairness, I did not know about Duke University until they had guys like Abdelnaby and Danny Ferry. Illinois,Indiana, UCLA, UNC, Georgetown, yeah definitely ⌠but couldnât have told you where Duke was back in the late 80s.
If a school has a good sports program, it draws attention to to the overall reputation of the school.
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Yet, somehow, Harvard got about 48,000 applications last year for an entering class of 1100.
BTW, even at Duke, athletic giving is essentially an afterthought compared to overall university fundraising. They get plenty of donations for the AD, but I never get actively solicited for that. My graduate program, OTOH, checks in with me frequently. And one of my sons has already been IDâd for some ânext generationâ leader thing because they start cultivating future donors within the first five years after graduation.
Just interesting timing. The Iron Dukes just e mailed me asking me to rejoin after a few years absence. You are correct though. Our son gets a lot of requests from Duke. None for athletics.
Ideally a combination would be best, however the media and advertising for this historical basketball run for men and the amazing season for womenâ hoops is priceless.
I really believe that investing in athletics is the gateway, but not the end point.
Alabama was never really great academically, but in the last 2-3 decades, they have shot up.
NYU med school was always very good, but once it became FREE, do you think their application pool increased quite a bit and their admits were even better?
Need a bit of both.
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The last time someone tried to âinvestâ in NYU athletics, it turned into a national scandal.
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Funny, but my NYU example was for the academics.
Even prestigious/âeliteâ schools are getting hit:
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University of Chicago is in the middle of a tough stretch â theyâre sitting on a $160M deficit this year, though thatâs actually better than last yearâs $288M hole. To dig out, theyâre cutting $100M in spending, slowing down faculty hiring, and hitting pause on Ph.D. admissions.
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Stanford just announced $140M in cuts, mostly because federal research money has been drying up.
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Cornell is calling it a âserious financial crisis.â Lost a lot of funding when federal research contracts got cut, so theyâve frozen hiring and started trimming spending across the board.
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Harvard is feeling the squeeze too. Things have gotten tight enough that the president decided to take a pay cut.
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Northwestern says this is the hardest financial moment in the schoolâs 174-year history â which is saying a lot.
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USC is running in the red, so theyâve stopped hiring, put merit raises on hold, and cut back on travel.
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Brown is bracing for major cost cuts, though they havenât spelled out exactly what that looks like yet.
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Duke has been pulling more students off the waitlist than usual, largely to help shore up tuition revenue.
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There is some grey here. Harvard for instance has a 53 billion dollar endowment. Largest in the known universe. Just the interest generated alone has to be enormous.
Edit: they paid out 2.5billion last year on 11% interest. Yeah. Not buying they are hurting.
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I tend to disagree. Kids arenât necessarily going to Miami because of the success of the basketball team, but the success is providing the university millions of dollars in exposure to students who otherwise would have no knowledge about Miami. And I assure you that many HS students do also want to attend a university thatâs successful in athletics (in addition to being competitive, academically).
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Hawk 89- please do some research -the largest giving to Miami is for non athletic programs/ scholarships/ activities etc - I give to academic areas including the Farmer School- I also give to athletics- it is not an either or situation - you should embrace the free PR i Miami s getting and also not complain about the athletic giving - again this is not a mutually exclusive situation - for example the WSJ article may yet generate more overall giving to Miami. As far as applicant numbers and yield go success of athletic programs ( men and women )at a minimum cannot hurt applicant recruiting. My suggestion to you is to welcome the success of athletic giving and utilize it to get more overall giving to the University including esp for scholarships and academic programs
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I hope you are right, although the better syntheses of the literature on this suggest that athletic success has only a weak correlation with academic giving and may actually cannibalize it. (See the Knight Commission report linked below for a good overview.)
What gives me some hope in Miamiâs context is that while historically alumni giving has been pretty solid for a public university, we have a large pool of alums who simply are not in the habit of donating to the university for anything. Converting them to regular givers of any type is likely helpful, and we need more donors to help the university maintain its academic ambitions in this environment.
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