Published by The Chronicle of Higher Education
In the hours before the Saint Peter’s University basketball team departed for the third round of the NCAA men’s tournament on Wednesday, the tiny Jesuit campus thrummed with energy.
Outside the student center, students clad in the college’s colors streamed over a bed of cherry-blossom petals freshly shed from the trees. A video screen overlooking a busy street in the middle of campus broadcast inspirational messages: “sweet history,” “Jersey City tough,” and “shining bright, Peacocks win!” Peacocks — the university’s unusual mascot — dangled as jewelry from the business-school dean’s ears.
In the cafeteria, members of the basketball team ate lunch as on any other day — even as they became household names online for their shocking wins last week over the University of Kentucky, one of the nation’s most storied college-basketball programs, and Murray State University.
…
It’s a story that’s been told before: the “Cinderella” college making a deep run into March Madness and seizing a moment of fame. But the moment feels especially striking at Saint Peter’s, which ranks 279th in athletics spending among the 353 teams in the NCAA’s Division I. Some colleges bet big on sports to try to set themselves apart; Saint Peter’s wasn’t exactly trying to get here.
Implications for such a moment stretch well beyond athletics — especially as small, tuition-dependent private colleges like Saint Peter’s try to recover from pandemic-era hits to enrollment and finances.
Amid the excitement, Saint Peter’s leaders are grappling with how to leverage the attention in a way that’ll benefit the university for years to come. While the short-term buzz is captivating, enrollment experts said, sustaining that momentum is easier said than done.
…
Whether or not Cinderella runs actually yield lasting change at colleges and universities has been a point of research and debate for some time.
David Strauss, a principal at the Art & Science Group, a consulting firm, said there’s no doubt that athletics and a culture of school spirit can be a major draw for prospective students. But a single glory year won’t do the trick. “One-time success can lead to some spike in attention, but it’s likely to be fleeting,” Strauss said.
A study published in the Journal of Sports Economics in 2020 found that surprise success in the NCAA men’s basketball tournament had little to no impact on the number of applications received in the following years. But first-year enrollment at private colleges increased for two years — about 4.4 percent total — after a Cinderella run.
…