Fordham President Rev. Joseph M. McShane's S.J.'s recent announcement that the school will begin pledging more money to its floundering basketball program is a welcome one, if not long overdue.
While sports may seem like a mere distraction or even an annoyance to some members of campus who are not in favor of McShane's decision, it is high time that everyone realize just how valuable having successful sports teams are to a school's prestige and national profile.
The proof of this point is a rather well-documented phenomenon called the "Flutie Effect," named after the diminutive Boston College quarterback whose famous Hail Mary pass in a 1984 game against the University of Miami Hurricanes helped launch an increase in both the quality and quantity of applications to BC in subsequent years.
Long considered a storybook example of coincidental correlation being interpreted as causation, recent studies have found that Flutie and the BC football team's success did indeed have a positive effect.
As chronicled in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer in March 2008, Jaren Pope, an assistant professor of applied economics at Virginia Tech, and his brother Devin Pope, and assistant professor at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School of Business, conducted such a study.
The two researches examined the statistics of freshman classes at 330 NCAA Division I schools, compared them to how the schools' sports teams fared between 1983 and 2002, and reached some pretty interesting conclusions.
According to the study, schools that make it to the Sweet 16 in the NCAA men's basketball tournament see an average three-percent boost in applications the following year, and the NCAA champion saw around a seven to eight percent increase.
In fact, simply being one of the 65 teams to make the tournament, which Fordham hasn't done since 1992, led to about a one-percent bump.
In a similar vein, the school who boasts the BCS national championship sees a seven- to eight - percent bump in applications, while finishing in the top 20 of the AP poll yields about a 2.5 percent gain.
"Certainly, college administrators have known about this for a while, but I think this study helps to pin down what the average effects are," Pope said.
A rather prominent recent example of this study was the bump that George Mason University received in admissions after its school miraculous Final Four appearance in 2006.
Freshman applications increased a whopping 22 percent in the following year, including a leap from 17 to 25 percent for the percentage of freshmen who were from out of state.
"You will certainly have critics who say it would have happened anyway, but I think the general consensus is that it happened faster because of this and that it allowed this university to reach new heights more quickly," Robert Baker, director of George Mason's Center for Sports Management, said.
This positive effect of having good sports teams is even more magnified with regards to Catholic schools.
Not only is Boston College the source of the namesake for this effect, but other Catholic schools have also benefitted.
Gonzaga University in Spokane, Wash., was essentially limited to being a regional university until its basketball teams started having national success in the mid-'90s. Since 1999, the Bulldogs basketball team has been in the NCAA tournament every single season, and enrollment has grown from about 4,500 to almost 7,000 in 2008.
Furthermore, inquiries about the school have jumped from 20,000 per year to over 50,000, including much more attention from the East Coast.
"There's no other way they would have heard about Gonzaga," Dale Goodwin, a university spokesman who reported the statistics, said.
A March 2009 piece in The Economist took a closer look at this effect on George Mason and also concluded that the success of the basketball team had a salutary effect on admissions numbers.
They warn that athletic success alone isn't enough to warrant such an increase: a school must already be considered as viable to have increased applications, but quality academics combined with quality athletics should have an impact.
What does all this mean for Fordham? Well, Fordham is already considered a solid academic school, and is generally considered one of the finest Catholic schools in the country.
However, a brief glance at the infamous U.S. News and World Report rankings shows that Notre Dame, Georgetown and, yes, Boston College, are all ranked well ahead of Fordham.
Now, it would be flat-out idiotic to posit that not only good athletics alone are what place the schools ahead of Fordham in the eyes of such ranking system but also that good sports programs will bring Fordham to the top of such lists.
Yet, as these studies have shown, having athletic success is beneficial to a school's national profile and admissions numbers.
Perhaps someday, a Fordham jump in the rankings can be attributed to the John Skelton or Chris Gaston effect.
Until then, the recent bump in our athletic budget should serve as a notice that Fordham is looking to increase its national profile and continue moving up the charts.
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