(09-05-2017 03:33 PM)Wedge Wrote: (09-05-2017 02:31 PM)Captain Bearcat Wrote: (09-01-2017 04:03 PM)JRsec Wrote: But before you single out Missouri for this mess, you better start checking your own school's enrollment criteria and their enrollment numbers, because you just may not realize the demographic shift in your own school that is spotlighted at Missouri.
I looked at IPEDS data on the size of incoming freshman classes at P5 + American + Big East + Mountain West schools. From 2014-2015 (the most recent year available), the average school's incoming freshman class went up by 2.3%. From 2013-2015, it went up 5.2%.
Cincinnati has set enrollment records in each of the past 2 years (actually I think for most of the past decade). We're not alone.
The smaller number of high school grads is being counterbalanced by 3 things:
1) The increased separation of "good" schools from "bad schools. In other words, the decreases in enrollment will be at lower-end schools that (mostly) don't play D-1 sports. Only 11% of the 3,000 4-year colleges in the USA play D-1 sports, and they (mostly) tend to be the ones with better academic reputations.
Would be interesting if there was a reliable way to determine if having any kind of D-I athletics helps student recruiting at public universities over other public universities that are not in D-I. I suspect that having Alabama football or Kansas basketball helps a lot more than just being a random D-I school that doesn't excel in any popular sport.
Enrollment has been documented to spike when a surprising team does well in the NCAA tournament. I think that's as reliable as you'll get.
I'm sure the same is true in football, although it's a much rarer occurance.
However I suspect that it's regional. In the Midwest and the South, every public school over 15,000 students is in D-1. Nearly all of them play FBS football (UW-Milwaukee, Illinois State, Illinois-Chicago, Northern Iowa, MO State, UMKC, Wayne State, and Texas-Rio Grande are the only exceptions I can think of).
I think that's because it would be suicide to enrollment NOT to be D-1 in those regions.
But in California and the Northeast, many of the largest 4-year public schools aren't in D-1 at all (UC-Santa Cruz, SF State, CSU-LA, CSU-Pomona, CSU-Chico, CSU-SB, Western Washington, the entire CUNY system, CCNY, UMass-Boston). Some of them (UC-SF, Thomas Edison State University in New Jersey) don't even have ANY athletic program. All of those would probably need to be FBS if they were located in, say, Alabama.