INDIANAPOLIS — Fans rush the court, dance in the streets and sing their alma mater’s fight song.
The enthusiasm generated by a Final Four run brings a lot of excitement to a campus — and a lot of publicity. But success in the NCAA tournament doesn’t necessarily inspire an increase in schools’ enrollment.
For Kansas sophomore Charlie Stock, the school’s basketball team’s success was a perk, but not a deciding factor in his choice of college.
“The athletics serve as a good way for people to hear about the university before, and then get them interested,” Stock said. “But then students should go look at other things, like if it’s a good price for them, if it will fit their program that they’re looking for.
Raised just 30 minutes outside of Lawrence, Kan., Stock’s entire immediate family went to the University of Kansas.
On April 7, 2008, Stock watched as blue and white confetti fell from the Alamodome in San Antonio. The Jayhawks had won their third national championship.
Although Stock was not yet a student on campus, he had already received his acceptance letter to one day officially Rock Chalk chant, and there was no way he was missing out on the festivities.
“I actually watched the national championship game at home in Topeka, and then I ended up driving to Lawrence that night and joining the party on Mass Street,” Stock said. “It was that important to me to go experience what it felt like to be a part of that crowd. It just made me all that much more excited to go there.”
Sophomore Allison Hawkins is a fan of a different blue and white. She was born and bred into University of North Carolina blue.
“Both my parents went to Carolina, so they raised me right. So, since I could talk, basically, I have been cheering for Carolina,” she said.
On April 6, 2009, she was one of thousands flooding the main street in Chapel Hill. The end of her freshman year was coming to a storybook close – with a national title win.
Although she will cheer for her Tar Heels until the day she dies, she said the basketball program was only a bonus to the academics North Carolina offers.
“I don’t think that it’s the determining factor for anyone, but I think it’s something that initially attracts prospective students and kind of gets our name out there – in a good way,” Hawkins said.
For this year’s Final Four teams, there is a variety of criteria academically — there are two public schools, one small private school and one even smaller private school.
Christoph Guttentag, dean of admissions for Duke University, has looked into the effects of the Blue Devils’ Final Four appearances on his application rate. His findings show an influence in the late 1980s, when Duke basketball became more than a group of guys dribbling a ball: It became a recognizable basketball team. Since then, though, Duke basketball has become a powerhouse, and Guttentag said success on the court has no bearing on admissions.
“Whether or not the men’s basketball team has been in the Final Four, whether or not they’ve won a national championship, does not seem to have affected anything,” Guttentag said. “The trends seem to be independent of that. My theory is that because Duke is such a known quantity in sports that people … they have a sense of what kind of place we are, that this is really a place where the academics and the athletics are at a particular balance.”
About 10 miles away, the director of admissions for North Carolina, Stephen Farmer, could have had the effects of rising applications just last year, but he said no numbers sky-rocketed.
“From the point of view of admissions, I don’t know that our making it to the Final Four and winning a national championship has a dramatic impact on the number of students who apply or the number of students who enroll from year to year,” Farmer said.
The Tar Heels’ success on the hardwood has not made numbers decline either.
“I would say that students don’t come to this university just because of our success of the court,” Farmer said. “This is a basketball-crazy place. It’s just that we’ve got a lot of other things here to hang our hat on to. And we’ve been playing basketball at a pretty high level for a long time, so the boost or the bounce that we get from any one particular year is just much, much harder to measure. And, in fact, we’ve never been able to measure it.”
Freshman Bridget Patzer is not what one would call a diehard basketball fan. In fact, the Michigan State student became a true Spartans fan while the team was in last year’s Final Four. She said she based her decision to become one of Sparty’s students was not on the basketball team’s advancement in the bracket, but the establishment of her program at MSU.
But, post-admission, Patzer said the Final Four has definitely changed campus.
“I was at the bookstore and they have the Final Four T-shirts on sale,” she said. “The whole bookstore was packed with people. I’ve never seen that many people in our bookstore, except for the first week of classes.”
It’s the students attending classes, not the students attending games, that helped Michigan State earn a No. 29 ranking in the Best Colleges: Top Public Universities list compiled by U.S. News and World Report. Robert Morse, director of data research for U.S. News & World Report, said the scores are not based on athletics.
“It’s based on academics,” Morse said. “We’re trying to use factors that are relative to academic quality. Athletic prowess, at least, we haven’t seen any measures or proof or studies that there’s a link between academics and athletics.”
Measuring the impact of a Final Four or even an Elite Eight on Butler University is something Butler’s Dean of Admissions Scott Ham has never had to worry about.
But love for one’s university is something he knows well. Pride in the Bulldogs is a Butler tradition.
“School pride is something Butler has been very strong in over the years,” Ham said. “I think what this trip to the Final Four allows for is us to show the world, ‘Really, we’re Butler. We’ve got the ‘Dogs. We’ve got Butler pride, and we want to let everybody else know how great a place this is.'”
The media attention surrounding the Final Four is something new for the Bulldogs and it’s focused attention on the school’s athletics and its 60 different degree programs.
“Recognition is certainly going to help us as students are looking over lists of college and universities that offer programs in their area of interest,” Ham said. “That name recognition certainly helps to make a connection from, ‘Oh, I think I’ve heard of them’ to ‘Oh, I’ve heard of them.'”
A team of Indiana University journalists is reporting for the Final Four Student News Bureau, a project between IU’s National Sports Journalism Center and the NCAA at the men’s tournament in Indianapolis.
