COMPARE AND CONTRAST.

Inside Higher Education reports on the collegiate sports bubble.  "Seeking an Enrollment Hail Mary, Small Colleges Look to Athletics."  There's nothing miraculous about the trans-substantiation.

Over the past sixty or seventy years, that "upwardly mobile" has been a way for empire-building administrators to convert state teachers' colleges and former seminaries into universities.  On the academic side, sometimes that translates into additional graduate and professional schools, and on rare occasions grant-getting and the indirect cost returns therefrom, the better to be plowed back into fancier development offices.

So has it played out at Calvin University.

Calvin University bet big last year on a new NCAA Division III football team, as well as a three-wing athletics complex to house a stadium and facilities for other new teams such as acrobatics and men’s volleyball.

The private Christian university in Grand Rapids, Mich., wasn’t losing students, but it wasn’t growing much, either. Faced with strengthening headwinds, including regional demographic shifts and a shrinking market for small liberal arts institutions, Calvin hired a former University of Oregon offensive analyst as the head football coach, broke ground on the new field and started recruiting players in earnest.

This fall, first-time enrollment grew by 15 percent, from a little over 1,000 students in 2022 to a historic high of 1,150.

Calvin provost Noah Toly said student athletes made up about half of that gain and that the program has already paid for itself. The football team, a 62-man squad that is playing only practice games this year as it prepares for its first season in 2024, drew a crowd of over 3,500 to its inaugural homecoming scrimmage—larger than Calvin’s entire student body.

“It’s a great outcome for us,” Toly said. “It positions us well to recruit more players and nonathletes who just want to come to a college that has football, that has that kind of spirit.”

Older readers might remember Calvin College in Grand Rapids. That was once a Dutch Reformed Church theological seminary, named after John Calvin.  I have to wonder what he would make of mission creep that could involve beer 'n' circuses rather than good works and predestination, although he would no doubt approve of the work ethic of St. Vincent of Green Bay.

But will the mission creep work as a survival strategy?

David Ridpath, a professor of sports business at Ohio University, said the trend has been a rare reliable lifeline for higher ed institutions in an age of increasing precarity. Coaches at small colleges often double as regional recruiters, complete with set quotas that are as vital to their success as their season records.

“With sports teams, you’re bringing in a definite number of students: however many are on your roster, that’s your yield,” he said. “If you’re a Division II or III athletic director or head coach, you’re essentially graded on how you’re helping the school in enrollment.”

The strategy is working, for now, at Calvin U. (why do I keep thinking of a six year old and a stuffed tiger) as well as at nearby Alma College, yes, still a college despite the correlation of forces being unfavorable.

The article is in Inside Higher Ed, which means author Liam Knox has to hoist a virtue signal.

But there can be drawbacks to investing heavily in sports, including unexpected changes to campus culture and falling academic standards—such as the drop in average incoming GPA at the New College of Florida, which made up for an exodus of students after Governor Ron DeSantis’s politically charged takeover by spending lavishly on new athletic programs.

“You just have to be careful not to let the athletics tail wag the academic dog,” Ridpath said.

OK, I got it. Turf out a nest of culture-studies faddists in Florida and it's wagging the dog. Change the weekend culture at a former Reformed Church seminary, it's inclusion.  Well, maybe not.

Steve Ross, executive director of Pennsylvania State University’s Center for the Study of Sports and Society, said that for small colleges that don’t offer athletic scholarships, spending on athletics can yield a “big economic reward,” attracting full-paying students who aren’t quite skilled enough to play big-time college sports but don’t want to give up their passion.

“Without scholarships, the only cost is coaches, some equipment and modest travel,” Ross wrote in an email. “Now a bunch of high school athletes not gifted enough to get an athletic scholarship somewhere can choose: have their affluent parents pay $40-60,000 per year to attend college where they can play basketball, or come to Penn State at $13,000 a year where they would be limited to intramurals? I suspect many will choose the former.”

Let's make that "affluent parents with scruples." But I digress.  Last week's post noted athletic retrenchments at another upwardly mobile institution, Fontbonne University in Clayton, Missouri.  Apparently even a former Catholic women's college couldn't get divine intervention as the Festive Season approached.

Last year Fontbonne University, a Roman Catholic institution in St. Louis, established its first “sprint football” program—a version of traditional football that’s faster, since it does not permit players over 178 pounds. The university recruited 45 students from across the country, offering competitive scholarships and hiring coaching staff.

“Football is one of those sports that, because of the size of the roster, can really help with enrollment and bringing in tuition revenue,” said Fontbonne president Nancy Blattner. “Track is like that, too. But there’s something about the rush of football that also invigorates the campus.”

The new enrollees helped narrow the gender and racial gaps on campus. Fontbonne was founded as a women’s college, and its student body runs about 60 percent female. But this fall, for the first time in its century-long history, male enrollees outnumbered women—a shift Blattner attributes to the football team. In addition, nonwhite enrollment at the predominantly white institution rose by 10 percent.

Ridpath said that diversity will likely become an even bigger driver of the growth in small college athletics in the wake of the Supreme Court’s affirmative action ban.

“I’ve always been uncomfortable with the rationale for athletics ‘giving’ students of color the opportunity to go to college, which plays into dangerous stereotypes,” he said. “But schools are looking for a back door to diversity now, and sports are certainly one way to do that.”

But sometimes new athletics programs give rise to unexpected hurdles: at Fontbonne, for instance, nearly half the football squad failed their classes after the first season, and the majority of players on its initial squad quit before the start of this academic year.

And its Hail Mary investment in football hasn't prevented major program and personnel cuts. Facing a nearly $14 million deficit, the university announced Thursday that it would eliminate 21 degree programs and dozens of faculty and staff positions following a 60 percent enrollment decline over the past decade.

The best the university's president can do by way of spin is "our retention rate isn't as bad as it is at the other members of the Midwest Sprint Football League.

The article concludes with a veteran of Alma's mission shift having a Ralph Budd moment.  (You keep the window clean, or you cover it with a dark shade.)

Steve Rackley, a professor of sports management at Rice University, worries about liberal arts colleges losing their own identity in the pursuit of athletics-driven enrollment gains.

Rackley spent 20 years as an athletic director for two private liberal arts colleges: first at the University of Findlay in Ohio, and then at Alma College in Michigan, which he left in 2019. At both institutions he said he was required to give his coaches enrollment goals, and he felt pressure to keep adding programs to draw new students. Both eventually offered more programs than many D-I institutions.

“I really think it can be unhealthy to have too many student athletes on campus, where the ratio is so far out of whack,” he said. “What are we doing here? Playing sports or getting a degree?”

Focusing too much on athletics can lead to a kind of mission erosion, he said, changing a learning community into a sporting one. He saw that at both Findlay and Alma and said he regrets the changes they underwent.

“Is it so important to keep the school open when to do that it has to become something else entirely?” he said. “Is that really what higher education is about?”

The extension from "transition to beer-'n-circus" to "transition to access-assessment-remediation-retention" is straightforward.

The same day, a quick take noted the downsizing at Lindenwood that Cold Spring Shops brought to your attention first.