The effect of participating in high-profile athletic contests on private donations range from no impact to a modest increase, or negative impacts when a team performs poorly. Increases in donations to programs that compete in football bowls tend to be irregular and directed to athletic departments and may not provide as much benefit to the university overall.
Any such donations are included in the reported athletic department’s revenues. Competition in high-profile sports can boost a university’s image but it can also expose it to negative publicity from coverage of cheating scandals and other negative news. And while there is uneven evidence that football and basketball wins increase the quantity of applications to Division I schools, the effect is relatively modest and short-lived.39
If institutions believe sports should be offered to students, club sports would seem a more democratic means for accomplishing goals.
End Legacy Admissions
On 29 June 2023, the Supreme Court ruled in Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. President and Fellows of Harvard College, colleges and universities could no longer consider race as one of many factors in deciding which of the qualified applicants is to be admitted.40 The consequence of that ruling suggested that legacy admissions – the admitting of students whose family members previously attended the college – would also no longer be tolerated.
This was, in fact, how several colleges read the ruling: for example, Wesleyan University, the University of Maryland, Carnegie Mellon University, the University of Pittsburgh, Virginia Tech, and Occidental College all announced they would cease the practice of offering legacy admissions. Questions remain whether Harvard and other elite institutions will give up the practice, even with an ongoing civil rights investigation into whether Harvard University discriminates in its admissions process by giving preferential treatment to children of wealthy donors and alumni,41 or simply modify their admission process to “meet” what they understand the ruling to mean.
Elite institutions who continue to support legacy admits claim three things: 1) legacy admissions serve to ensure the culture of the school and engagement of its alumni continued; 2) legacy admissions contribute greatly to philanthropic giving; and 3) legacy admissions amount to only a small percentage of total admits.
Considering the first claim, it should be noted that legacy admissions started in the 1920s. As pointed out by Ayelet Sheffrey, colleges and universities at the time argued it was a practice designed to identify candidates who demonstrated ‘good character’ and ‘solidarity.’ However, not all agree with that assessment, or at least call into question what type of character and solidarity was being desired. Richard Kahlenberg, a nonresident scholar at Georgetown University who was an expert witness in the Supreme Court affirmative-action cases, is one of those people. Kahlenberg has been cited by Sheffrey as saying that legacy preferences were actually designed to restrict the number of Jewish students who were admitted.41 Seemingly, both claims could be true: however, both equally argue by default that the use of legacy preferences can be used to discriminate against certain individuals while promoting the interests of others.
Considering the second claim, not a lot of evidence exists to support arguments that legacy preferences/admissions significantly influence giving or significantly contribute to the financial stability of the institution. Harvard University has, for example, a $50 billion endowment. But contributions toward that endowment came from its private equity investments (which returned 77 percent in 2021), while only 45 percent of its revenue in FY 2022 came from philanthropy. The same was true of Princeton. Its unrestricted annual giving
and restricted gifts accounted for only 0.4 percent of its total endowment of $35 billion. And in what may be an even better indicator of
134