As anticipation grows to a fever pitch before Selection Sunday for this year’s NCAA Men’s Division I Basketball Championship tournament, the memory of Florida Gulf Coast University’s stunning back-to-back upsets last year remain fresh in the minds of fans.
In only its second year of NCAA eligibility, the No. 15 seed Eagles unexpectedly advanced to the Sweet Sixteen in a now classic underdog story. What’s more, as discussed in a Jan. 8 ESPN article, the university experienced an “unprecedented surge in freshman applications” of 35.4 percent after their team’s widely publicized performance.
Meanwhile in Chicago, as success continues to elude most of DePaul’s prominent athletic programs, freshman applications to the university have simultaneously hit a slump of their own.
Although nearly all of Chicago’s major universities have experienced an increase in applications for the upcoming year, DePaul was one of only two schools to see less interest from prospective students. Despite the record number of 19,957 applications the university received for 2013-14, a 2.5 percent drop for 2014- 15 was highlighted in a Feb. 25 Crain’s Chicago Business article, along with an even more precipitous decline at the University of Chicago.
According to Northwestern University’s official website, the school received a record 33,200 applications for the upcoming year, and applications have risen by “more than 10,000 since 2007.” Although both the Northwestern men’s football and basketball teams posted losing records that year, they have each had four winning seasons in the following six.
Overall, only 507 less students applied to DePaul for this academic year than last, but the decrease nevertheless begs the question as to why the university’s draw for students has dropped while the Chicago area’s has increased.
In the past, the cause and effect relationship between athletic prominence and boosts to the university has been undeniable. During Ray Meyer’s legendary tenure as head coach of DePaul men’s basketball, the university expanded exponentially in acquisitions, enrollment and visibility. In the years 1978-1984, when the Blue Demons had seven straight winning seasons and a trip to the Final Four in the 1978-1979 season, DePaul developed new properties and institutes, and would eventually grow to include nearly 15,000 students by the end of the 1980’s from 11,000 at the end of the previous decade.
Now, in the midst of yet another losing season for what is arguably DePaul’s most recognizable team, some students recall how they were drawn to the university for reasons other than athletics. Faizan Khan, a 22-year old student from Skokie, IL said that he was initially propelled to apply to DePaul not for its sports but its urban location, diverse student body and stellar political science program. “I’m a sports fan in general, (but) I just never felt motivated to go to any of the games,” he said.
Despite these factors, the historical connection between the growth of other universities and their athletic performance is readily apparent. The University of Southern California’s football program, which has produced more NFL draft picks than any other university, helped build a college of more than 38,000 students out of one that first opened its doors in 1880s Los Angeles-“little more than a frontier town,” at the time, as stated on their official website. Notre Dame’s celebrated football program also took shape under Ara Parseghian in 1964, and their success initiated a period of enormous growth where enrollment at the university nearly doubled by 1987.
Even the formerly lauded Joe Paterno’s powerhouse Penn State Nittany Lions achieved non-losing records in all seasons but one during his 46-year tenure, and the university’s enrollment steadily increased throughout. Currently, Penn State’s student body is at a total of 98,097, which almost triples that of the 34,958 tally taken in 1966-Paterno’s first year leading the team. Despite the fact that the university’s enrollment dwarfs that of DePaul, the heightened interest allows for a more selective acceptance rate- 54.8 percent in 2012, compared to DePaul’s 62 percent.
Additionally, at the latter institution, some students and alumni express disinterest in athletics overall. “I follow the school’s men’s and women’s basketball teams, and the softball team…(but) as a whole, athletics isn’t that important to the university,” Dustin Ruttenberg, a 23-year old alumnus from Redwood City, CA said. “It’s not like a good portion of the student body attends the games. A lot of this has to do with the success gap of the men’s team, and the lack of media exposure.”
Butler University, whose recent successes in men’s basketball have made it no stranger to media attention, specifically invested in and cultivated their athletics programs as a marketing tool after they experienced a decline in enrollment in the late 1980s. By launching a plan to give the Bulldogs a national presence, former Butler president Geoffrey Bannister and his successors managed to create “a brand approaching that of the goliaths of college athletics and academics” for the small university, as stated in a 2013 Indianapolis Business Journal article.
“While men’s basketball has certainly gained the most attention, and the most publicity and marketing and so forth… we’ve always had some solids pockets of greatness here in the athletics,” Butler Director of Admission Aimee Scheuermann said. “Basketball gave us the exposure that we needed to get the national exposure that we couldn’t afford otherwise…and it did impact the interest in this school, absolutely.”
Scheuermann, who has worked at the university for over nine years, stated that when she first came to Butler “we were already sort of on an upward trajectory, just based on some great things that had happened to the institution…and then suddenly, we added this basketball piece in and it just exploded. So we did see about a 40 percent increase in applications.”
Even though the Bulldogs are currently posting a losing record after the departure of visionary coach Brad Stevens, Scheuermann claimed that this rate has remained stable. “I think that those are good signs that would suggest that Butler is a great product,” she said. “I don’t know that I’d say it’s a model…there are other smaller institutions…that have had success in the past.”
While DePaul’s Division of Enrollment Management & Marketing (EM&M), Athletic Marketing and Licensing staff and News and Information Bureau declined or did not respond to requests for comment, students speculated on how a more visible and successful athletic department could bolster the university in a similar manner.
“For this to happen (at DePaul), the school’s administration has to be very open and clear about their goals, especially in regarding men’s basketball,” Ruttenberg said. “I think a few new hires by the president will go a long way in recruiting successful high school players. If this happens, I would definitely attend more games.”
“If they were more successful,” Khan said, “if they had a better program and some way got more students excited to go-those students have friends.”