| Abstract: |
An ongoing controversy in the literature on the economics of higher education
centers on whether the success of a school's athletic program affects alumni
donations. This paper uses a unique data set to investigate this issue. The
data contain detailed information about donations made by alumni of a
selective research university as well as a variety of their economic and
de-mographic characteristics. One important question is how to characterize
the success of an athletic program. We focus not only on the performance of
the most visible teams, football and basketball, but also on the success of
the team on which he or she played as an undergraduate. One of our key
findings is that the impact of athletic success on donations differs for men
and women. When a male graduate's former team wins its conference
championship, his donations for general purposes increase by about 7 percent
and his donations to the athletic program increase by about the same
percentage. Football and basketball records generally have small and
statistically insignificant effects; in some specifications, a winning
basketball season reduces donations. For women there is no statistically
discernible effect of a former team's success on current giving; as is the
case for men, the impacts of football and basketball, while statistically
significant in some specifications, are not important in magnitude. Another
novel result is that for males, varsity athletes whose teams were successful
when they were undergraduates subsequently make larger donations to the
athletic program. For example, if a male alumnus's team won its conference
championship during his senior year, his subsequent giving to the athletic
program is about 8 percent a year higher, ceteris paribus. |