UConn applications have risen when Huskies basketball teams perform well, numbers show

As the UConn women’s basketball team advanced deeper into the NCAA Tournament last spring, there may have been more at stake than a chase for a 12th national championship.

The outcome of the Huskies’ games could have, at least in some small way, affected how many high-school seniors applied to attend school in Storrs ahead of this past Tuesday’s application deadline.

An analysis of data from the UConn admissions department shows that the school has seen sharper increases in applications to its Storrs campus following years when the Huskies’ men’s basketball team has won a championship or posted a strong win-loss percentage, when the women’s basketball team has won a championship and when either program has improved significantly from the previous year. Conversely, year-over-year application increases have been more modest following years when those programs have performed poorly or regressed from previous levels.

Association between basketball performance and increase in applications to UConn appears to have been particularly strong during the 1990s, when both the men’s and women’s programs were first establishing themselves as national powers.

“It’s difficult to quantify the value of having a team go to the Final Four,” UConn vice president for enrollment planning and management Nathan Fuerst said. “That does bring us some recognition and some brand awareness that we wouldn’t otherwise be able to [have] in households all across America. Then when students go to a college fair and they see UConn’s table, or they’re talking to their school counselor and UConn comes up, they say, ‘Oh, I’ve heard that before,’ and then they connect the dots.”

Still, UConn director of admissions Vern Granger cautioned that athletic success is only one of many factors that can affect the number of applications UConn receives in a given year, along with university initiatives, population pyramids, economic trends and more. Much of UConn’s steady increase in applications over the past 25 years likely owes to a rise in college-aged students across the country, as well as the school’s efforts to improve and market itself, Granger and Fuerst said.

“There’s no doubt that athletic success has some impact [on applications],” Granger said. “The degree to what it has year-to-year — there are so many other factors that need to be weighed into that.”

Whether or not athletic success is a primary determinant of applications to the university, it appears to have played at least some role in recent decades. Since 1991 (and excluding outlier years in 2011, when the school began using the common app and 2013, when it stopped accepting early-action applications), applications have increased by about 9.3 percent following years when both basketball teams reached the Elite 8, compared to an overall annual average of 4.6 percent. Following years when neither the men’s nor women’s programs enjoyed strong results by their respective standards (i.e. the women didn’t make the NCAA title game and the men failed to reach the Sweet 16), applications have increased by only 1.3 percent.

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UConn football’s performance has not seemed to correlate with increases in applications, though applications have tended to spike following notable gridiron breakthroughs. For example, UConn’s sharpest increase in applications over the last 30 years came from the high school Class of 2003, which applied to college just as the Huskies were tripling their football win total from two games to six while preparing to join the Big East Conference and open Rentschler Field.

That 2003 class had also recently seen the UConn women’s basketball program win the 2002 national championship and the men’s basketball program go 27-7 on the way to the Elite 8. That performance likely helped attract applications, along with admissions-department initiatives including new scholarships.

The Courant could not find meaningful association between application trends and UConn’s performance in sports other than basketball and football.

Research suggests UConn is not unique in terms of the apparent relationship between its sports performance and its popularity with college applicants. According to a 2013 study by Harvard Business School’s Doug J. Chung, applications to a given school increase by 18.7 percent after football programs improve from mediocre to great. Chung found that athletic success affected both high- and low-performing students, thereby allowing schools to become more academically selective.

Chung’s research provided scientific backing for what has long been referred to as the “Flutie Effect,” referring to former Boston College quarterback Doug Flutie, whose famous Hail Mary against Miami in 1984 has been credited with boosting applications to the school. Over the years, universities including George Mason, Florida Gulf Coast, Boise State and UCF have seen applications rise after high-profile runs by their basketball or football programs.

As UConn’s Fuerst and Granger point out, the relationship between sports and admissions could be even stronger if the college application schedule were aligned more closely with college sports’ biggest events. The Final Four is typically played in April, months after applications for the incoming class have closed and months before high-school juniors begin narrowing their college searches. And although football season leads into application season, many students submit their essays and resumes well before the last bowl game has been played.

But Fuerst and Granger say success on the field or court can bolster a school’s name recognition in ways that resonate far beyond the the next year’s class. A basketball fan who, say, rooted for Kemba Walker’s title-winning UConn team as a preteen in 2011 might have maintained warm feelings toward UConn in 2019 when it came time for college applications. And a student who specifically desires a major-college sports experience might be drawn to a school that fills up Gampel Pavilion for both men’s and women’s games.

The link between sports performance and application totals has several implications for the broader college sports landscape. Schools sometimes cite benefits to admissions to justify spending more on athletics, even when it means failing to turn a profit. College sports often serves as a loss-leader, costing schools money while helping them to various extents in other ways. As UConn president Susan Herbst said in August, the athletic department can serve as the “a porch of a big, comprehensive research university.”

University spokesperson Stephanie Reitz made this point recently when asked about the UConn athletic department’s $40 million annual deficit.

“It is not a coincidence that the university saw skyrocketing applications and a greater appetite for investment in UConn on the part of the state at the same time as successful athletic programs were raising the university’s profile statewide and nationally,” Reitz said in an email.

Meanwhile, proponents of paying college athletes have pointed to the “Flutie Effect” as evidence of the value players bring to their schools. If players directly contribute to increased numbers of applicants (thus allowing the school to become more selective), advocates argue, they are providing value even beyond ticket sales and TV revenue, while receiving scant compensation.

So what does the link between sports and applications mean for UConn as it assembles the Class 2023? Well, the last year has not been great for the Huskies’ signature programs, as the men’s basketball team finished under .500 and fired its coach, the women’s team fell short of a national title and the football team won only a single game. If trends prevail, that spells bad news for the school’s admissions department.

Of course, with so many variables involved, no one factor determines how many students apply in a given year. Fuerst and Granger say they worry much more about a coming decrease in the population of college-aged people than they do about the performance of UConn’s sports teams.

Even so, Granger said, “Nobody’s going to complain about the football team doing better.”