More jock stuff

1/4/2011: Bill Graves of the Oregonian has a piece on the football team’s success and what it will mean for academics. President Lariviere goes gaga:

The UO not only stands to gain market share in the sports business, but also mind share in public attention, he says. On a recent trip to New York City, Lariviere says, people would notice the gold UO pin on his lapel and approach him on the street to say, “‘Man, I love your university.’ Very rarely did they say, ‘I love your football team,'” he says. “They would say, ‘I love your university.’

The quotes from UO Foundation head Paul Weinhold and our new head of Admissions, Roger Thompson, are considerably more sober – and empirically supported. Here’s one study – sponsored by the NCAA, of all people:

Hypothesis #8: Increased operating expenditures on sports are associated with changes in
measurable academic quality.

• In our previous reports we found no evidence to establish a pattern, positive or negative between athletic expenditures and academic quality.
• Looking at SAT and ACT scores, our updated results continue to show no consistent support for such a relationship between athletic expenditures and academic quality.

Hypothesis #9: Increased operating expenditures on sports affect alumni giving.

• In our previous reports, we found no consistent evidence for a relationship between operating expenditures on sports and alumni giving.
• Using the data from 2004-2007, while we do find a statistically significant relationship between changes in athletic expenditures by Division I-A schools and alumni giving in the same year, we find no evidence to establish a relationship between lagged expenditures and current alumni giving.
• Since we would expect any causal relationship between expenditures and alumni giving to show up (at least partially) with a lag, we do not consider the observed statistical relationship between athletic expenditures and alumni giving to be robust enough to suggest a causal relationship.

And a new, as yet unpublished study connects the dots and shows that for most schools winning means more alumni donations for athletics, but *less* for academics.

Is this true for UO? We don’t know – the UO Foundation leaves that section of the reporting form blank:

Here’s the history from the OSU Foundation, which is a little more transparent about these things.