Looking at the last sentence of the abstract below, it appears that sports success attracts students to colleges (and perhaps to private high schools, also). I don't really understand this, but tastes differ
. Do other countries have college sports that attract a lot of attention?
The Benefits of College Athletic Success: An Application of the
Propensity Score Design with Instrumental Variables
by Michael L. Anderson - #18196 (ED LS PE)
Abstract:
Spending on big-time college athletics is often justified on the
grounds that athletic success attracts students and raises donations.
Testing this claim has proven difficult because success is not
randomly assigned. We exploit data on bookmaker spreads to estimate
the probability of winning each game for college football teams. We
then con- dition on these probabilities using a propensity score
design to estimate the effects of winning on donations, applications,
and enrollment. The resulting estimates represent causal effects
under the assumption that, conditional on bookmaker spreads, winning
is uncorrelated with potential outcomes. Two complications arise in
our design. First, team wins evolve dynamically throughout the
season. Second, winning a game early in the season reveals that a
team is better than anticipated and thus increases expected season
wins by more than one-for-one. We address these complications by
combining an instrumental variables-type estimator with the
propensity score design. We find that winning reduces acceptance
rates and increases donations, applications, academic reputation,
in-state enrollment, and incoming SAT scores.
