As Professor Mosher noted in last Thursday’s Post, Ohio University’s hiring of an outside firm to generate freshmen applications for the 2012-2013 academic year, combined with the timing of the upsurge in applications, indicates that the firm’s actions, not ICA triumphs, produced this welcome increase.
Increased freshmen applications, even increased freshmen admissions, are not, however, the crucial element in a recruitment-based testing of whether national publicity received by football and basketball prowess benefits OU as a whole.
The coin of the realm, to use the university’s own terminology, is the total of “confirmed” freshmen, those admits for fall semester 2012 who, opting to enroll, have returned signed housing contracts as compared with the like total on the same date of the previous year.
OU’s participation in the Sweet Sixteen games was an ideal laboratory for testing the impact of high-profile athletic success. By that time, as the university’s official comparisons show, OU had received 4,000 more applications and had admitted 2,000 more freshmen than at the identical dates in March of 2011.
But did OU’s basketball triumphs initiate a flood of freshmen admits eagerly advancing to confirmed status?
No flood — not even a diminutive freshet. As the subsequent official day-by-day comparison reveals, the moving daily total of confirmed freshmen for fall 2012 has merely equaled, edged slightly above or, on many days, fallen somewhat below the comparable figure for fall 2011.
On the Monday after The Post’s Friday publication of the article to which Professor Mosher responded, the confirmed freshmen count for 2012 was 2,306 as against 2,406 for 2011.
The annual movement from admit to confirmed status continues. There is every reason to believe that the freshman class entering in 2012 will be equal in size to that of 2011. But a steady-state situation falls far below what proponents of the argument put forward by ICA claim.
The benefits of athletic prowess, insofar as they can be measured, would seem to accrue, not to OU as a whole, but to ICA itself.
Bruce E. Steiner is a professor emeritus of history.
