March Madness College Victors Face Big Spikes in Applications

Michigan State went crazy over the weekend when the Spartans played in a Final Four basketball match for the first time since Magic Johnson led them to a championship in 1979.

Sure, they didn’t win. But making the Final Four has become an honor onto itself.

March Madness hasn’t been confined to the streets of East Lansing; it’s spread to the admissions office too.

Gordon Stanley knows the hoopla and soaring school spirit is enough to persuade more students than usual to enroll at Michigan State next fall. The admissions director just doesn’t know how many more. Enough to overrun the dorms? Overwhelm freshmen classes?

“We just can’t be sure,” he said.

There’s nothing quite like a championship game to play havoc with careful plans to control the size of a freshman class.

It’s often called the “Flutie Factor,” referring to Boston College’s surge in popularity after All-America quarterback Doug Flutie threw his Hail Mary touchdown pass to beat the University of Miami in 1984.

Northwestern saw its applications leap 27% when the Wildcats made it to the 1996 Rose Bowl for the first time in 47 seasons. They didn’t win. Didn’t matter.

“Once the Cinderella season got started, the applications poured in,” said Rebecca Dixon, associate provost for enrollment.

The university located just outside Chicago even saw a spike in theater majors. Why? Well, consider all the TV interviews with Darnell Autry, who besides being a star halfback was studying to be a thespian.

Predicting the behavior of high school seniors can be tricky business. Yet seasoned admissions officers know that a fresh-faced celebrity can have more drawing power than a dozen stuffy ol’ Nobel laureates.

Stanford was deluged with 2,000 more applicants last year after America’s First Freshman, Chelsea Clinton, chose to enroll there. Similarly, John F. Kennedy Jr. often gets credit for raising the public profile of Brown. Brooke Shields instantly made Princeton a more desirable destination for the nation’s best and brightest.

To be sure, the selection of a college can be a complex affair. Many students anguish over their choices, weighing factors that include academic interests, career goals, the campus’ distance from home, how much their parents are willing or able to pay.

Don Hossler, author of “Going to College: How Social, Economic and Educational Factors Influence Decisions Students Make,” has been studying the subject for two decades as a professor and vice chancellor at Indiana University in Bloomington.

Among his conclusions is that college choice is often highly idiosyncratic. Students can be swayed by little things: whether they liked the campus tour guide, if the dorms smelled clean, where a high school sweetheart plans to enroll.

In that context, he said, success on the basketball court often translates to greater numbers of applicants who accept offers of admission and enroll the next fall.

So the madness in March can be enough to drive an admissions director bonkers.

It comes at a particularly sensitive time for many colleges and universities--when their admissions offices are sending out their last batch of admission offers. These letters are the primary tool the admissions office has to regulate the size of the freshmen class.

At Michigan State, for instance, Stanley knows from historical trends that about 40% of students with offers of admission will pay their deposits and enroll in the fall. The rest will decide to go elsewhere.

So as the Spartans advanced in the basketball tournament, he tried to limit the number of offers to avoid exceeding the target class size of 6,500 freshmen.

“We don’t anticipate an extra 400 or 500 students, but we can’t be sure,” Stanley said. “You don’t want to come under the target because you’re counting on the revenue. You don’t want to go over it, because you can’t provide enough housing or classes.”

Such nail biting isn’t limited to the Final Four.

Last year’s Cinderella team, Valparaiso, made it only as far as the Sweet 16, but still wound up with a bigger than usual freshmen class and a record number of applicants for next fall.

That makes the admissions director Philip Ballinger of Gonzaga a tad nervous. Fanatic “Zagnuts” have overrun the 3,950-student campus in Spokane since its Cinderella team made the Elite Eight earlier this month.

“The normal laws of physics no longer apply,” Ballinger said. “We try to plan on historical trends. We don’t have a clue what is going to happen.”

The boost in applications or enrollment is usually short-lived, studies show. Swollen numbers usually recede the following year.

Furthermore, Duke reports that--like other perennial powerhouses--it no longer sees a bump in numbers from the semifinals the way it did when its basketball program burst onto the national scene in the mid-1980s. Duke plays the University of Connecticut for the championship today.

“It affects us in a more nuanced way,” said Christoph Guttentag, Duke’s admissions director. “It makes people more open to listening to what we have to say about Duke’s other great qualities.”

The marketing of colleges has become a major preoccupation on most campuses, as administrators jockey for better academic rankings, more research dollars and try to woo the best possible faculty and students.

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NCAA FINALS TONIGHT

Duke can lay claim to greatness with a victory over UConn. D1