junglehusky
Molotov Cocktail of Ugliness
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Get us out of the AAC, part 74,763
NCAA conference affiliation linked to academic prestige in Stanford/Iowa study
NCAA conference affiliation linked to academic prestige in Stanford/Iowa study
For the study, the three scholars created and analyzed a comprehensive dataset linking information about school characteristics, conference affiliation, football performance and academic reputation (as measured by US News and World Report). Looking to understand how a successful football program affects status, they explored data on 283 American universities from 1896 to 2013 — all of them present or former members of the conferences included in the NCAA’s two top subdivisions.
The researchers found that all of the widely publicized recent entries to the Big Ten, Pac-12 and Southeastern conferences, for example, are schools closely comparable in terms of US News reputation scores to the standing members. “And, of course, the most academically prestigious league in the country, the Ivy League, has offered membership to no additional school since its formation in 1956,” said Stevens. “That exclusivity is not based on sports alone.”
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.