(02-15-2017 12:45 PM)miko33 Wrote: [ -> ]Frank wrote:
Quote:To be sure, Alabama is giving out some of the best academic scholarships to out-of-state students out of any public school anywhere. I live in a Chicago suburb that is about as prestige-college-obsessed as any place in the country, and our local high school districts have gone from sending zero people to Alabama to around 20-30 kids per year. Once again, we're NOWHERE near the South. That's just our own suburb's school districts - we're not even talking about the rest of the Chicago area. Alabama has simply stepped up its out-of-state recruitment game big-time and you see where they're suddenly getting a critical mass of students from the NYC and Chicago areas and elsewhere.
Alabama did not get that pipeline because of Saban and his program. Once Alabama went above and beyond to subsidize out of state tuition to attract out of state students - they showed up. I won't discount that a number of kids make school decisions based on college football. Although I think you would have to be a moron to make that your primary metric for where you go to school, it's a factor. I won't dispute that. What I will strongly question is how valuable a strong sports program is to the schools themselves. You made the argument that sports could be one of the distinguishing features that tips the scales in favor of one school vs another as an add on to my point about a number of degrees being commodities. Maybe in some cases that is a factor. However, I am of the opinion that costs, benefits and proximity trump sports in almost every case. IMHO, very few people would elect to eschew a liberal arts degree from a solid local school in order to pay out of state tuition just so they can go to a P5 school for the "college mystique of Saturdays". Your examples showcase Alabama and Michigan. Does that hold up for Miss St? Wash St? Do people feel that same allure for Kansas St? I'm going to say no.
That circles us back to the very first post I made in this thread. Sports may ultimately be a great marketing tool for the top 25 prominent athletic schools out there. But it breaks down for the lower level P5 who cannot compete without heavy subsidies and debt. Their bang for their buck is much much more muted. And in your example above the mighty Alabama didn't attract those 20-30 Chicago kids because of Saban's great CFB program. They went to where the financial breaks were. It wouldn't surprise me if the out of state Alabama tuition for those Chicago kids was lower than the U of I.
Oh yes, that Bama tuition is generally lower than U of I. Mizzou, Iowa and Indiana have targeted the same types of students in the Chicago area with various scholarships, too.
We'll just have to agree to disagree. Your argument is generally centered on that cost in and of itself is the driving factor behind college decisions. I think it's more nuanced than that - what you're willing to pay for Harvard is going to be different than what you're willing to pay for Michigan and what you're willing to pay for Alabama and what you're willing to pay for Mississippi State. There's a difference between being a good value and being cheap.
At the same time, and maybe it's just because of where I live, but I DON'T see just a strict fixation on cost in and of itself. It's definitely a very big factor, but it's also not THE factor, or else this entire discussion is pointless and every person would be going to community colleges for their first 2 years of school. Those upper middle class suburban kids that virtually every college (whether prestigious or not) falls all over themselves to recruit because they're the ones that largely pay DO want amenities. Maybe not all of them want great football or basketball teams, but they do want SOMETHING beyond just the material that they could learn at home via an online course for free.
For the bolded, the fact is (at least in the Chicago area) is that a very large number of people DO eschew degrees from solid local schools for out-of-state P5 schools. It's not just a token amount, either - it's enough to have the state of Illinois be the #1 net exporter of college students in the entire country! Our local school districts will absolutely send more kids to Wisconsin, Indiana, Purdue, Iowa and Missouri than they will to Illinois State and the non-flagship in-state universities this year. We see the same thing with New Jersey and California students. Forget about the University of Michigan - look at the number of out-of-state kids from Illinois and New Jersey at places like Indiana or the number of California kids that are inundating Oregon, Colorado, Arizona and Arizona State instead of going to their non-flagship in-state public universities (or even eschewing their in-state flagship options). Maybe it's not their football programs specifically, but there IS something about being a "major brand name" school that can attract students in a way that others can't.
Once again, you can point to "correlation instead of causation" and I wouldn't disagree with you, but you're trying to unwrap something that's pretty tightly intertwined between top tier public universities and P5 sports. I also think you're underestimating "school spirit" overall as a pretty potent "soft" factor for the affluent kids that have legitimate choices between different schools and it's a pretty high correlation between school spirit and P5 status. It's not rocket science: when a prospective student sees current students look happy to be at a school, then that's attractive. (And believe me - I've been to plenty of places where the current students clearly don't like being there. An 18-year old can tell right away.) Being out in the real world for many years at this point, I actually don't think "school spirit" is even a soft factor. I think it's pretty important. You'll learn from the same economics or chemistry textbooks whether you go to Harvard, Alabama or a community college, but the biggest differentiator between colleges is the connections that you make. If you're at an Ivy/Ivy-caliber school, then those connections might largely be academic or placement at prestigious firms or positions. Once you get past that level, though, then I do think the schools with better "school spirit" generally have much better alumni connections. That might not give a Kansas State or Mississippi State grad a leg up over a Michigan grad, but it could certainly give them a leg up over, say, a UAB grad.