NCAA conference affiliation linked to academic prestige in Stanford/Iowa study

NCAA conference affiliation linked to academic prestige in Stanford/Iowa study


"A college’s academic status may be determined as much by the teams it regularly meets on the football field as on the lectures and lessons taking place in its classrooms, according to a recently published study from researchers at Stanford University and University of Iowa.

“Our work shows that football is not an adjunct to the academic business of a university — it’s a part of that business,” said Mitchell Stevens, a study co-author who is associate professor of education at Stanford. “Football doesn’t corrode a school’s academic reputation. It enhances it. Contrary to what many academic professionals believe, academic and athletic reputations are not antagonistic. They’re complementary.”

In the study in the July issue of the journal Sociology of Education, Stevens and two colleagues find that intercollegiate football leagues are composed of schools that tend to be similar in measures of academic reputation. What’s more, over time, scores assessing the academic reputation of schools admitted to any given league come closer and closer to the scores of those already in that league. “This reputation convergence seems to be independent of change in underlying academic quality,” said Stevens.

The findings add another element in considering the potential effects of two developments last week: the Aug. 7 NCAA board of directors’ vote to give greater recruitment latitude to five of its most prominent conferences and the Aug. 8 federal court ruling to loosen restrictions on compensating athletes. (Both the NCAA decision and court ruling are under review.)

“While there is little question that the revenue-generating capacity of big-time college football is the main driver of the NCAA board’s decision, schools in those five conferences [the Big Ten, Big 12, Pac-12, Atlantic Coast and Southeastern Conferences] may also be gaming their academic reputations,” said Stevens. “Now that a new category of football conferences could be created, we may well see it further improve perceptions of the academic caliber of the member schools.” 

"Moreover, Stevens and his colleagues discovered that the academic reputation scores of schools entering a given league move closer to their league average at a rate of 3 percent per year. “This may seem like a modest increment, but in the cutthroat competition for higher places in the academic pecking order, there are no small gains or losses,” said Stevens, a member of the faculty of Stanford Graduate School of Education."