Tomorrow, Duke's men's basketball team will play on national television for the 26th time this season, presumably increasing the University's national prominence. But whether this exposure translates into a greater undergraduate applicant pool remains unclear, despite the widely held belief that athletics add to a school's prestige.
The debate about the correlation between athletic feats and the flux of high school applicants has been ongoing since 1984, when a single football pass supposedly boosted Boston College's pool of applicants by 25 percent. That football season, Heisman Trophy winner Doug Flutie launched the Eagles back into the limelight with a "Hail Mary" touchdown pass that shocked defending national champion University of Miami on national television.
For more than 16 years, dramatic rises in a university's applicant pool following well-publicized success of an athletic program have been attributed to the so-called "Flutie Factor." Last week, however, that concept was directly challenged by a research group in Baltimore, Md.
In an article published in The Chronicle of Higher Education, a telephone survey of 500 college-bound seniors conducted by the Art & Science Group claimed to have refuted the Flutie Factor. The survey asserted that more than 70 percent of college students are not at all influenced by the accomplishments of their school's athletic programs.
At Duke, skeptics of the Flutie Factor have pointed out the University's admissions numbers from 1993 and after, when the applicant pool dropped following the basketball team's only two national championships. In fact, no noticeable increase in undergraduate applications to Duke has occurred since the basketball team won its first national championship.
"I think the factors that affect a student's decision to apply to a school are incredibly varied," Director of Undergraduate Admissions Christoph Guttentag said. "It's very hard to quantify, except in very unusual cases, just how great [the Flutie Factor] is. But I think it's much more an exception than it is a rule."
Although the University received as many applications in 1988 as it does today-around 14,000 each year-a Flutie-like effect took place in 1987. The previous year, the men's basketball team advanced to the Final Four for the first of its seven trips in nine seasons. In 1987, applications to Duke rose dramatically to 15,120-its highest ever-in a spike that marked a 19 percent increase from the year before.
ESPN analyst Jay Bilas, who started at center for the Blue Devils on the 1986 squad, said he had never considered that his team's success had an influence on eventual applicants. However, he added that coverage of the NCAA tournament certainly brought more attention to the University.
"Of course. How much advertising would Duke University have to do to get the amount of positive publicity that it gets from basketball?" Bilas said. "It would be an enormous amount of money."
Guttentag admitted that the 1987 leap provided an interesting angle to the Flutie hypothesis, but he refrained from commenting specifically on that pool of applicants because he was not at Duke then. He said he has not since looked at the 1986-1987 applications to determine why the increase took place.
The University saw a similar trend to what occurred after the 1986 season when former coach Bill Foster led the men's basketball team to the Final Four in the late 1970s.
"I remember very clearly in '77-'78 when our basketball team came out of nowhere to go to the Final Four. We hadn't been very good in a long time and there was a spike in applications," said Chris Kennedy, an associate athletic director who works with Guttentag. "You can't tell me that was entirely a coincidence."
Skeptics still remain, though, even at universities whose pools have been seemingly boosted by their athletic programs. At Clemson University, the number of applicants has increased to 11,140 this year, up 17 percent from 1999, the year Tommy Bowden arrived on campus and reinvigorated the Tigers' football program. Robert Barkley, director of undergraduate admissions at Clemson, nonetheless attributed the increase to the university's in-state scholarship program and its recent award from Time magazine for public college of the year.
A few years ago, Gonzaga University Dean of Admissions Philip Ballinger would also have discounted the Flutie Factor. Ballinger said that after conferring with Boston College admissions directors who tried to sell him on the phenomenon, he still found it difficult to believe that something like athletics could convince a high school student to apply to, much less enroll at, a particular university.
But then a three-year run by the Zags' basketball team in the NCAA tournament turned a little-known Jesuit school in the state of Washington into everyone's favorite "sleeper team." Meanwhile, Gonzaga's applicant pool surged by 72 percent in three short years.
"I still couldn't accept that something like that would matter when it comes to such an important decision, but I've become a believer," Ballinger said.
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