(02-27-2017 11:39 AM)Attackcoog Wrote:  

(02-27-2017 06:26 AM)miko33 Wrote:  

(02-20-2017 12:20 PM)Attackcoog Wrote:  

(02-20-2017 12:11 PM)billybobby777 Wrote:  

(02-17-2017 04:05 PM)Frank the Tank Wrote:  I think a lot of people in this thread are taking a narrow view of who is "high income", though. I'm NOT talking about the one-percenters at the tip-top of the income scale. It's easy to dismiss that group as not caring about tuition prices and being outliers that can "afford" to be frivolous.

Instead, I'm talking about, say, the top 25% of income households. They might be "only" 25% of the US population overall, but they're making up the plurality or even a majority of the households that live in large swaths of suburbs in large metro areas, and they further make up an even larger proportion of those that attend college overall. They're the "mass affluent", if you will (or who most would characterize as "upper middle class"). This is a very large group (if not the single largest group) of college "consumers" and they DO have the ability to shape the higher education market overall. This group cares about price (as they can't just pull $60,000 in tuition per year out of thin air), but they do care about prestige, as well, and they'll balance the two heavily. I think people here are underestimating how large this group is when looking at them as a proportion of the college population overall. This isn't anecdotal - people in suburban NYC, Chicago, LA, San Francisco, Dallas and other major metro areas pay out-of-state tuition for other schools at VERY high rates and these aren't the richest of the rich kids.

Once again, I'm not saying that sports is #1 on their list for a school. It's one factor of many. However, whether a school does have big-time sports or not certainly does have a material impact on the overall culture and atmosphere of a school and the group that I described certainly cares about that aspect.

It's no different than why cities want pro sports teams. Even though not everyone in a city might care about pro sports, the point is that's an indicator that you're in a "brand name city" when it has pro sports teams. (And once again, you can have the argument that it's wasteful to subsidize pro sports teams, and you might be right. However, mayors typically get rewarded when they attract new pro sports teams and they typically get punished when they lose them. Similarly, look at the heat applied to administrators at even low revenue schools like Idaho and UAB when they dared to drop football levels or even football entirely. People don't get fired for adding a football team, whether it's college or pro, but they certainly can get fired for losing one.)

This could apply to things outside of sports, too. For instance, I only go to the Lyric Opera of Chicago maybe once every year or two and it wouldn't be on my top 10 personal reasons why I like living in the Chicago area, but the mere fact that the Lyric Opera is here adds to the overall cultural landscape that makes the entire city attractive. Chicago would certainly survive without the opera, but it's one less differentiator in its total package of a cultural experience. Not every person can visit every museum, attraction, theater or sports team all of the time in their respective home cities, but that doesn't mean that any of those people would actually believe that their cities would be better off *without* them.

Once again, we can go back to the "correlation vs. causation" discussion and say that it's all just correlation... and I wouldn't disagree. However, big-time sports at a school does add to the TOTALITY of the experience at a college that is definitely different when it's not there. I can see it with the difference between Northwestern and University of Chicago grads that I work with every day. They basically go after the same types of students with the same types of grades and they're elite institutions that are only a few miles away from each other. Northwestern is hardly Michigan or Alabama in terms of a great sports campus, but you better believe that there's a huge difference in the school pride that Northwestern grads show compared to U of C grads and that translates into how much enthusiastically Northwestern alums help out their fellow alums compared to U of C alums. I think most Northwestern alums would say that being a Big Ten school was a net positive to their experience even if they weren't big sports fans (similar to Stanford, Duke, Vandy, etc.). It's a major differentiator for Northwestern in competing for top students against a place like U of C, Washington University in St. Louis and Ivy League schools.

Frank, I agree that many Illinois kids go to Iowa and Wisconsin etc and that many California kids go to Oregon, Arizona etc. Yes, they'd rather do this than go to a directional school in state or a lesser city state school. I couldn't agree more. My buddy from Chicago went to Arizona for his BA and New Mexico for his Masters. I remember him once saying he would have never gone to a school without football. However, he doesn't know what P5 and G5 is. He went to the schools he went to because they are big state flagship schools. He likes going to big college games in Texas due to the party/tail gate, he rarely even goes to the actual game anymore. He understands that Texas and A&M are big time and North Texas and UTSA are small fry. No middle class high school kid is going to college because of the "P5". They are going to schools that have both University and the name of a state in them minus direction, that have all the things that make college, college. Sports, fraternity and sorority houses, medical school, law school, bussiness school, dorms, on campus apartments, parties, fun and the name of a state on their diploma that they do not have to describe/explain to family friends and future employers.
Cheers!

Exactly. lol....Anyone thinking 17-18 year old kids are all making their college decisions based on academics and future earning don't know many 17-18 year kids. Some ARE very mature and no doubt make their decision based on academics and future earnings----but far more make their decision based on things like being fans of certain college sports teams, which schools are more "fun", where their friends are going, where their boyfriend/girlfriend is going, and any number of other even more silly reasons that would probably appall Frank the Tank. We don't let this age group drink for a reason.

I would agree with this statement 100% - if we were talking about over 10 - 20 years ago. A number of factors have changed from the time I made the decision on where I was going to college vs today. Consider: 1) The price has gone up way beyond the cost of inflation, 2) Simply getting any old degree no longer cuts it in the real world and 3) Mom and dad plus the states are no longer kicking in the amount of money they used to be able to as in the past (related to point 1). Let's say for the sake of argument that the majority of kids still think the way you stated in your points above. There is still mom and dad who are no longer willing to foot the bill simply because college campus life is a "right of passage". I know for my own children that there are certain majors that I will never fund. If my kids want to become engineers, scientists or even teachers - I'll fund that. But not a humanities/social science major that does not include an education degree to teach it to HS and/or MS kids. And most definitely any majors that have the word "studies" as part of the degree name.

Kids may not care about finances and geography; however, parents do. And in today's university climate - everything is much different. I would wager that most parents would prefer the right price over university athletics - or in general "campus atmosphere". The links I provided earlier are bearing that out.

While some put a great deal of care into the decision, many more do not. I completely agree with you about the type of degree obtained. I also made it clear to my kids they had to major in a field that made college economically reasonable. Had to be business, engineering, math, computer, etc...

That said, getting a degree in a field with strong income earning potential is a totally different argument from where you go to get it. Additionally, getting good grades from just about any state school in a solid field will land you pretty decent job opportunities. Even schools with significant athletic subsidies aren't making any real difference in what you pay for your education.

Think about it---as an example the UH athletics budget is about 52 million. The subsidy was about 17 million---on a total University of Houston budget of around 1.5 billion. Nobody is making a school decision based on about one tenth of 1% of the budget. I cant say for sure, but Im willing to bet that the UH "athletic subsidy to overall university budget ratio" is probably reasonably similar of most FBS G5 schools. Bottom line---its just not that big a deal and given that athletics effectively serves as the marketing arm of the university as well as a student amenity, its probably not an unreasonable expense.

You make a number of points that bolsters my position. The original premise was that it was the P5 moniker and how these schools doing athletics are the significant draw to the detriment of the G5 and lower schools. My point is that university costs and geography trump the "P5 draw". Even with Frank's "Alabama is making inroads into Chicago" point, those students showed zero interest until Alabama kicked in enough money to make cost off attendance cost neutral for instate Illinois tuition at a minimum (and probably more money than that). Far from a ringing endorsement that sports is a great marketing tool for Alabama to reach so far up north if they have to ultimately kick in 10's of thousands of dollars to entice students anyways.

If you read my posts on this, I think I did a pretty good job dispelling that myth. Having said that, it's not the same as my philosophical view on how college athletics needs to go away in favor of D-Leagues being developed by professional sports. I did opine that there COULD be savings there - probably more than you think. The reason is that a lot of that budget is tied up in research endeavors if the school is a large research center. Those views can be discussed in another thread because that is not the crux of the original argument that the P5 draw is primarily sports related.