(05-10-2017 12:00 PM)BigDawg Wrote:  

(05-10-2017 11:43 AM)Captain Bearcat Wrote:  

(05-10-2017 11:32 AM)Bearcat 1985 Wrote:  

(05-10-2017 11:22 AM)crex043 Wrote:  

(05-10-2017 10:52 AM)Bearcat 1985 Wrote:  Ugggh! The increases in student quality didn't have a damned thing to do with the BCS bowls. They had everything to do with moving away from open admissions and rejecting a quarter of the kids that would previously have been accepted. That it also happened during a favorable demographic bump in the number of high school graduates in Ohio only added to the effect. Those moves were put into place before the bowl games.

The Flutie Effect has been studied up and down, and the general consensus is that, at best, it provides a temporary bump in the number of applications that a school gets but no increase in the quality of the applicant pool.

So why do UC's recent class sizes and total enrollment continue to grow every year despite rejecting a quarter of the kids that apply? I'm not saying athletics has everything to do with it - UC is definitely growing in stature from a campus quality and academic standpoint - but you can't discount it.

I think you answered your own question: "not because of football" since increases in applications/enrollment continued despite UC's football teams falling off a clif.

As for increases in quality, as I posted in a different thread, they have begun to plateau. The easy part is lopping off that bottom quarter of the applicant pool (presto, your average ACT jumps from 22 to 25), and it has separated UC's selectivity from the Bowling Greens and Kent States and taken it up to the level of OU. That was the easy part. The higher you go up on the food chain though, the more you're competing with better universities with higher rankings and richer endowments. And the higher you go up that food chain, the less football is going to matter to the best students you're trying to attract. A cool football program might make the difference for a kid with a 24 ACT deciding between UC and Bowling Green and Akron. For a kid with a 30 ACT deciding between UC, Miami and OSU (and maybe some privates and out of state schools too), not so much. What matter most is the school's overall academic reputation, quality of the student body and the amount of merit aid available.

Tell that to Butler, which has continued to see an increase in student quality/quantity that started with their Final Four runs and has continued with their Big East membership.

Or look at Notre Dame. My friends who are Notre Dame alums repeatedly insist that if it weren't for football, Notre Dame would be equal/below Marquette academically.

I remember Ono saying how the number and quality of our applicants kept increasing with each BCS appearance. Yes our requirements increased, but the better applicants that may not have even realized UC's existence certainly helped and was aided by the football success.

Well, Ono like to run his mouth about a lot of things. How is it though that the number and quality kept increasing after the football program slid into mediocrity? I'm not seeing the causality there, particularly when one considers the other factors at work, in particular an open-admission school making the jump to selective admissions at the same time.