Athletics and Alumni

Inside Higher Ed reports on a new study of the connection between college athletics and alumni giving, with some interesting findings:

First, they find that male alumni who played on teams while they were undergraduates are more likely to donate more (to the athletics department and to the university as a whole) when the teams they played on win conference championships (the researchers’ chosen measure of on-field success) in later years. The same is not true for women.

Second, male alumni who played on teams as undergraduates tend to donate more if the teams they played on won conference championships while they were in college. (A conference title in a male alumnus’s senior year, for instance, results in an 8 percent increase in giving to the athletics program.) Again, for women, the researchers found no meaningful impact of athletic performance on donations.)

Third, the researchers found that the success of the university’s football and men’s basketball teams had small and statistically insignificant effects on giving by non-athletes, and no effect — and in the case of men’s basketball, even a negative effect — on giving by alums who were not athletes in college. “[W]hen alumni see success among these teams, they may believe that the school is spending too much on the athletic program, and therefore reduce their giving,” the researchers speculate, echoing conjectures made by previous teams of researchers. Ditto, again, for women.

That all seems pretty plausible to me. People tend to maintain a stronger alumni connection to groups they were part of while in college– I know a lot of rugby players from classes other than my own, for example, and I do keep an eye out for news of the WRFC. I’d be kind of surprised if there weren’t a stronger connection between athletic success and giving by former athletes than for the general population of students.

The one catch here:

[The study] takes data about donations made by alumni at one “selective research university” referred to as “Anon U.” — clues in the paper point to Princeton, though the researchers decline to identify it — and matches them with extensive information from the development and registrar’s offices about the graduates, including their academic major, extracurricular activities and even SAT scores from their college days, as well as post-college information about their occupations and whether they married another graduate of Anon U.

That sounds like Princeton, all right, having that information right at hand. Well, actually, it sounds like Williams, too, but nobody is going to mistake my alma mater for a research university.

There’s a bit of a catch-22 here, in that the schools that are likely to have the kind of extensive alumni data that this study used are also the sort of elite schools that are least likely to provide generalizable results. I know I would hesitate to conclude anything about college alumni in general based on the Cult of the Purple Cow, and Princeton is in the same basic class as far as alumni relations go. The very thing that enabled them to do the study may keep the results from being generally applicable.

One idea that does occur to me about this, though: in some sense, the effect they see might create more of a correlation between success in “big-time” sports (basketball and football) and alumni giving in general– for schools with a less extensive alumni network, success by those teams may serve as more of a proxy for the general health of the athletic department, and spur giving by alumni who weren’t on those teams, but who don’t hear about the success of the teams they did play for.

(My general impression has also been that the identification with major sports teams is weaker at elite colleges and universities. People took football and basketball much more seriously at Maryland than at Williams, though that’s an extreme example…)