Undoubtedly Americans, particularly college students, would have experienced “Spuds MacKenzie fatigue,” but they never became bored with the party atmosphere that he represented. One expert, analyzing the breweries’ marketing strategy, explained: “Advertising doesn’t create cultural trends, it capitalizes on them. The brewers didn’t dream up” collegiate drinking, “but because of the money invested” in advertising aimed at students, the brewers try to “shape what comes out. They can encourage and shape the trends in their interest. The underlying message [of their college campaigns] is that it’s naturally part of college life to drink” (emphasis added).
Just as demographics drove the advertising campaigns of the alcoholic beverage industry, it motivated colleges and universities to accept beer-and-circus. After the last of the baby boomers passed through higher education in the 1970s, the number of college students dropped precipitously—from over 3 million in 1978 to less than 2.5 million in 1993—causing panic in Admissions Offices and administration buildings and, according to the New York Times, creating “a favorite indoor sport among educational pundits … predicting how many private colleges will be folding because of the declining number of 18 year olds in the population.”
In a period when most institutions of higher education had many more places in their undergraduate classes than students to fill them, and schools desperately needed to increase the flow of tuition dollars, they marketed themselves in every way possible, many emphasizing their big-time college sports programs and party atmosphere, usually depicted as “collegiate good times.” This marketing game plan succeeded, and, as a result, it continues in a mutated form in the twenty-first century.
5
ADMISSIONS OFFICE SCAMS
In the 1980s, some higher education officials began to discuss “the student as customer,” referring to applicants as well as undergraduates. Pleasing this customer, soon termed a “consumer,” became paramount at many schools. Colleges and universities needed to fill their classrooms and dorms—overbuilt to accommodate the baby boomers of the 1960s and 1970s—and, as a result, except for the most prestigious schools in the country, the demographic crunch of the 1980s and early 1990s transformed admissions from a selection process to a sales campaign, often involving clever scams.
Colleges [and universities] … are business enterprises competing for a limited clientele: the students. They know that competition for students [especially those able to pay full tuition] is intense; that is why they pump so much money into the production of videos, brochures, viewbooks, catalogs, and all the other promotional material that becomes a blizzard of hard-to-distinguish hype … .
In fact, very few of this country’s colleges and universities are selective. More than 80 percent of our institutions of higher education admit virtually all their applicants (emphasis added).
—Peterson’s Guide to College Admissions, 1991 edition
Many college-bound students and their parents ignored the reality described by Peterson’s Guide and fixated on the competition to “get into” the small number of truly choosy schools. They failed to examine the actual acceptance rates of most universities, easily obtained in the national guidebooks; for example, the annual college editions of U.S. News printed tables revealing the rate for every school, including the hundreds who admitted between 90 and 100 percent of their applicants. Many applicants fell into the admissions trap set by a majority of institutions, including famous public universities: phony selectivity. Schools pretended to be choosy—in reality, they accepted almost everyone. One admissions official acknowledged that his university and most others never actually looked at applicants’ SAT/ACT results, but said, “If we didn’t ask for the scores, we would be regarded in the marketplace as having very low prestige.”
(From the mid-1990s on, when the children of the baby boomers began entering college, enrollment numbers improved, but de facto “open admissions” continued. Because higher education’s appetite for undergraduate tuition dollars is insatiable, most schools, including some with reputations for selectivity, still admit a large majority of their applicants: for example in 2000, Wisconsin at Madison—73 percent, Georgia Tech—75 percent, Texas A & M—86 percent, Purdue—87 percent; and hundreds of other colleges and universities accept over 90 percent, such as Auburn, Bowling Green, and on through the alphabet.)
Peterson’s Guide to College Admissions has long discussed the direct marketing tools that schools use, and it has advised readers on how to interpret Admissions Office literature, e.g., “One of the quickest ways to determine the flavor of student life at a particular college is by studying the student activities … . Do descriptions of athletic events outweigh those of other extracurricular activities?” Also, how do the brochures depict the “marching band, homecoming,” and other collegiate events? In other words, if you seek a beer-and-circus school—or wish to avoid one—this is how to do it. Moreover, high school seniors should ask themselves, “Do you want an academically demanding college program, or would you prefer a school where you can get respectable grades without knocking yourself out,” and have lots of time for collegiate life?
In addition to direct mailings to potential students, from the 1980s on, Admissions Offices sent out recruiters “to beat the bushes” for applicants, visiting countless high schools, and also manning booths at college fairs in all parts of the country. At these events, usually at least one hundred and sometimes many hundreds of colleges and universities set up booths, and recruiters handed out as much promotional material on their schools as potential applicants could carry home. In addition, the sales people, resembling college athletic coaches on the prowl, buttonholed prospects and gave them their best spiels. One university, in a New York Times Want Ad seeking Admissions Office recruiters, listed “ability to close” a deal with a prospect as an essential qualification. (In the late 1990s, schools supplemented these marketing strategies with elaborate sites on the World Wide Web, including virtual tours of their campuses.)
The demographic and economic crisis in higher education not only affected average institutions, but also famous universities like the University of Southern California. In September 1990, the Los Angeles Times headlined, “USC FRESHMEN ENROLLMENT STARTS SEMESTER DOWN 18%,” continuing the downward trend of previous years. Southern Cal’s response was to hire more “admissions executives” and increase “recruiting in the Midwest, Pacific Northwest, Texas, and Florida.” Recruiters coordinated their campaigns to coincide with USC’s football appearances in various regions, and, in their mailings, the Admissions Office emphasized the national fame of the Trojans and the school’s “festive” (party) atmosphere.
Some colleges and universities, even prestigious ones, tried to solve their admissions problems by going much deeper into their applicant pools than ever before, pulling out students with far lower SAT/ACT scores than their previous norms. Other institutions, particularly those with shallow applicant pools and de facto open admissions, had to use more imaginative—and frequently unscrupulous—devices to generate applications and enrollment. Some schools played “let’s make a deal” with applicants, offering such financial “come-ons” as reduced tuition bills if the student enrolled at their institution. But, as the New York Times pointed out, these schools often used “bait and switch” tricks, extending generous packages for the freshmen year but then greatly reducing the aid for subsequent years, particularly for “those students who have made the most successful transition to college—and are thus less inclined to transfer.” (For a detailed discussion of the financial pressures on colleges, and the rise in tuition costs, see chapter 9.)
In the hunt for applicants, universities with prominent college sports programs felt that they had an advantage over schools with mediocre or no NCAA Division I teams. The Admissions Offices of Big-time U’s could arrange “fun weekends” for potential students, including free football or basketball tickets to home games as part of the package. These institutions believed that they could clin
ch the application-and-enrollment deal if they could “get the buyer inside the store,” i.e., onto campus. They had discovered, according to a Carnegie Foundation report, that “the appearance of the campus is, by far, the most influential characteristic during campus visits,” and, if a school appeared highly collegiate, featuring a big-time college sports program and party scene, this “look” persuaded many touring high school seniors to apply. Big-time U’s sponsored collegiate activities for visitors, and, at a time of financial crisis in higher education, many schools spent millions on their grounds and the exteriors of buildings, and almost nothing on the insides of those structures—neglecting classrooms in deplorable physical condition and also ignoring deteriorating undergraduate education programs.
In a sense, many schools created Potemkin Villages and, like the historical precedent, never showed visitors the hollow interiors. The Carnegie investigators described a typical campus tour and its emphasis on collegiate life:
During this tour, prospective students and their parents learned about festive occasions, but not who teaches undergraduate classes. They visited the student union and the dorms, not the library. The winning football record was discussed, but no mention was made of academic honors. Visitors heard about “keg parties,” not about concerts and lectures. One had the distinct impression that the campus was a place with abundant social life. Education was ignored.
On the questionnaire for this book, many students responded positively to the queries, “How important a factor in your decision to attend your university was the fame of the school’s intercollegiate athletic teams?” and “ … the fame of the school’s party scene connected to its college sports events?” In the results, because only a few percentage points separated the responses to both questions, the totals were combined, revealing that at NCAA Division I schools, 56 percent of males considered these factors “very important” or “moderately important”; 31 percent, “neither important or unimportant”; and 13 percent “moderately unimportant” or “very unimportant.” Females at these schools responded much less enthusiastically: 26 percent positively, 38 percent neutrally, and 36 percent negatively. Some respondents added in the P.S. section of the questionnaire such comments as, “I always dreamed of wearing purple and gold in college [Louisiana State’s colors], and majoring in tailgating. I’m glad I fulfilled my dream.”
Undergraduates at Division III institutions—schools that do not give athletic scholarships—recorded numbers that almost reversed the Division I males. Few students at these institutions considered the fame of their schools’ college sports teams and the accompanying party scene important in their college choice; some even wrote sarcastic comments about the questions in the P.S. box. A woman at Emory University in Atlanta remarked, “What kind of dumb-ass chooses their college on the basis of its sports teams and boozing? Does anyone actually say yes to these questions?”
In the last decade, in their college choice, many students at the University of Oregon have responded affirmatively to these questions, selecting this university, in part, on the basis of the Ducks’ high rankings in the Pacific-10 football and basketball standings, and the school’s high rating on various “Party School” lists, including the Princeton Review’s. How Oregon achieved these distinctions, and also solved its admissions problem, is a story worth exploring in detail.
[Intercollegiate] athletics are extremely popular at the University of Oregon … games [also] draw large numbers of cheering spectators for the great tailgate parties. The marching band divides up into sections and plays school fight songs for the often inebriated revelers.
—The Insider’s Guide to the Colleges, compiled by
Yale [University] Daily News staffers, 1997 edition
During the 1980s and early 1990s demographic crisis in higher education, some universities so successfully marketed their college sports/beer-and-circus scenes that they bucked the trend and held or increased their enrollments. The University of Oregon, the film location of Animal House, performed the latter feat, ironically altering its campus reality to fit the Hollywood view of it.
The longtime PR director of the university conceded that when the movie was made in Eugene in the 1970s, the school “wasn’t like that, really.” At that time, the University of Oregon was regarded as a haven for health and environmentally conscious students, also known as “joggers and tree-huggers” (the school and the town provided one of the first jogging paths in America, and the Oregon track program produced many famous runners as well as Phil Knight, founder of Nike Shoes, which has its headquarters in Eugene). Additionally, the Oregon Ducks’ football and basketball teams rested comfortably near or at the bottom of the Pac-10 Conference, ignored by most undergraduates. A small Greek contingent existed, but it barely resembled the Deltas of Animal House.
Then, in the 1980s, the university administration tried to upgrade the intercollegiate athletics program, and, by the end of the decade, the Ducks made it to their first bowl game in a quarter of a century (the Independence Bowl). A few years later, they won the Pac-10 and played in the Rose Bowl. Accompanying the rise of the Ducks was the revitalization of fraternities and sororities, as well as collegiate dorms, and a drinking scene that imitated Animal House. In her early 1990s guidebooks, Lisa Birnbach described “two distinct groups” of undergraduates at Oregon, almost equal in size: “liberal vegetarians and beer-drinking Greek types,” with the latter ending their “annual rush events” by consuming large amounts of booze during the “ritual of watching Animal House.”
In its admissions literature, the school now proudly referred to its Animal House connections and to its big-time college sports programs; throughout the 1980s, its enrollment held steady, then it began to rise in the early 1990s. Oregon’s success was particularly noteworthy because of the university’s dire financial situation in this period. Beyond the student demographics and federal cutbacks to higher education, the state of Oregon drastically reduced its funding from over 50 percent of the school’s budget at the beginning of the 1980s to less than 15 percent a decade later. However, the Oregon president, Myles Brand, had a plan: he surveyed the even worse condition of higher education in neighboring California—caused by draconian cuts in state spending there—and he ordered an aggressive recruitment campaign of California high school seniors, with an emphasis on Oregon’s new collegiate image (showing supreme confidence in his plan, Brand also convinced his board of trustees to double out-of-state tuition to increase the anticipated flow of dollars).
As part of his strategy, Brand continued to upgrade the athletic department; again, he faced greater difficulties than the presidents of most other universities. Intercollegiate athletics at Oregon ran ever larger deficits in the 1980s, and the state legislature refused to help the school cover the losses—in fact, some politicians wanted the university to drop out of the Pac-10 and play college sports at a less expensive level. But Brand saw Pac-10 membership as essential to “recruiting … students,” and he tenaciously fought the proposal to deemphasize. He also raised money for the Ducks from various sources, an Oregon faculty member noting that the president “can work the alums at a football game as well as anybody.”
Thus Brand’s “repositioned” University of Oregon was more “student friendly” and offered a more collegiate atmosphere than the deteriorating California public colleges and universities. Soon, Brand’s plan paid dividends: increasing numbers of entering freshmen came from out of state, the majority from California suburbia, and they willingly paid the high out-of-state tuition fees. Then, during the year after Oregon appeared in the Rose Bowl, applications jumped another 20 percent, out-of-state applicants comprising the largest percentage of the new cohort.
The Oregon admissions saga was somewhat unusual—part of its success connected to a financial crisis in a nearby state with a huge population—but this university was also typical of schools that found Enrollment Valhalla in the 1980s and 1990s by emphasizing beer-and-circus. In fact, Oregon’s 20 perc
ent increase in applicants after its major bowl appearance was part of a national phenomenon, known to admissions directors as the “Flutie Factor,” strengthening the link between the athletic department and the Admissions Office. (The next chapter discusses this in detail.)
In the mid-1990s, when the “baby boomlet” (the children of the baby boomers) entered higher education, enrollment numbers improved, but at many Big-time U’s, the lessons learned during the down period of the previous fifteen years—market the hell out of college sports and the festivities surrounding it—were ingrained and continued into the twenty-first century.
6
THE FLUTIE FACTOR
From the mid-1980s on, many admissions officers have prayed for the “Flutie Factor” to hit their schools, and many university administrators have invoked it to justify their excessive spending on college sports. The phenomenon has become so central to the link between intercollegiate athletics and student life, and created so much mythology, that it merits full examination.
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