A story in The Post on April 13 suggested there was a connection between recent athletic success at Ohio University and a rise in applications that occurred this year.
The article presented data on recent athletic success in football and basketball and a few other sports. It also presented data on applications to OU from 2009 to 2012. There were 14,204 applications in 2009, 13,366 in 2010, 13,271 in 2011 and 17,200 in 2012.
The article drew a deeply flawed inference that recent athletic success led to the rise in applications. Given this data, anyone, including the author, should have been suspicious of such an inference.
First, the rise in applications occurred suddenly, only in 2012. That points to a causal factor that occurred in the period just before the sudden rise but had to be absent from the prior years. Athletic success during four years does not meet this requirement. The bottom line is that the cause of the sharp rise is likely something that happened in the last 12 months, not spread out during the last four years.
Second, the great success of the basketball team is so recent that it is too late to explain this year’s rise in applications. The vast majority of applications were in before the basketball team went on its run. One of the important requirements of a causal link is that the cause must occur before the effect. Drawing a connection to this year’s basketball success fails this requirement.
Third, no competing alternatives to explain the sudden rise in applications are explored. The only possibility considered is athletic success. That is not good analysis and is an example of uncritical thinking that damages public discourse.
The evidence in the graph of the story provides sufficient reasons to keep the author, editors and readers from drawing any causal link between this year’s large rise in applications and athletic success. But the problems with this story go even deeper.
All I have is the printed story, but there is no evidence that anyone in admissions was consulted about the large rise in applications. This is the obvious direction to go if one is investigating a rise in applications. If any effort had been made to contact admissions, it might have been discovered that the university has hired an outside firm, starting just this year, to solicit applications.
That firm apparently has been so successful that the university was at one point afraid of having too many students next year. The new firm is a causal factor that only occurred in the last 12 months; it can explain a sudden rise, and, I believe, the admissions office has actual data on the number of applications solicited by the firm that could measure its impact. The hiring of the firm has the ability to explain the sudden rise in applications. Athletic success does not.
That so little skepticism was applied to this story by The Post is problematic because this is not a news story. It does not report on a recent, newsworthy claim by someone that there is a link between athletic success and a rise in applications at OU.
Instead, it is a news analysis in which the author voluntarily steps forward to explain some recent event, in this case the rise in applications. The argument is developed by the author, not some third party. This should place an extra burden on the author and the editor for greater scrutiny on the validity of the claim.
No such scrutiny seems to have been applied. The result was publishing a misleading story with the largest headline of the day, and one that stretches over two pages.
None of this takes away from the laudable success of the athletic teams. Fans should enjoy that success. It just means that athletic success at OU has not had any noteworthy impact on applications.
Jim Mosher is a professor in political science
