College football starts towards the end of August. The big and successful college football programmes attract millions of dollars and hundreds, if not thousands, of additional student enrolments, as well as keeping alumni engaged. It's not just college students who care about the result of a Michigan vs. Michigan State matchup!
But does it pay off for colleges further down the NCAA ladder to have football programmes? In the NCAA divisional system, Division I contains the powerhouse athletic programmes, Division II consists mainly of smaller public and private schools, and Division III is reserved for schools that don't offer athletic scholarships. Is it worthwhile for those Division III schools to have a football programme?
That is the question addressed in this 2025 article by Bryan McCannon (Illinois Wesleyan University), published in the journal Economics of Education Review (ungated earlier version here). McCannon starts by noting the growth in the number of schools playing Division III football, as shown in Figure 1 from the paper:
I was surprised that so many of these schools have added football programmes over the last thirty years, but note that the increase has levelled off since the mid-2010s. McCannon looks at data from 1984 to 2021, for all schools that had a Division III programme in 2022. He is interested in whether there are changes in student enrolment, gender balance, and endowment. He employs a two-way fixed effects (TWFE) approach, which essentially compares changes at schools before and after they introduced Division III football with changes at schools that did not introduce it. Conventional TWFE estimates can be biased when schools adopt football at different times and its effects vary across schools or over time, so McCannon applies a correction for that problem and also uses a synthetic difference-in-differences approach.
It turns out that both approaches produce similar results, and those results are not favourable, and McCannon reports that:
I fail to provide evidence that the adoption of Division III football has any effect on undergraduate enrollment. The change is statistically indistinguishable from zero. In addition, I provide evidence that the proportion of the student body that is female reduces. Taken together, this suggests that any increases in the male student population attributed to the introduction of football is offset by either reduced demand from female students or changes in the institution’s admissions practices.
And in terms of endowments:
Schools which added college football were overdrawing their endowments prior to adoption... I fail to find evidence that the addition of college football reverses these downward slides. This suggests that it did not sufficiently energize alumni giving or reduce financial pressure on the institutions.
So, adding a Division III football programme appears to offer little measurable reward for a college or university, at least in terms of the outcomes McCannon looked at. Why then would these schools start football programmes? One possibility is that they are caught in a competitive arms race, which is a type of prisoners' dilemma (which I covered in my ECONS101 class this week). A Division III college may believe that introducing football will attract students away from rival institutions, or prevent it from losing students when other Division III colleges introduce football. But if every Division III college introduces a football programme, none of them gains relative to the others, but they all incur the cost of running a football programme. The result is that many Division III colleges introduce football programmes, only to leave them all worse off (or at least no better off, based on McCannon's results).
Alternatively, McCannon suggests in his conclusion that it may be attractive for these schools to add a football programme in times of financial distress, in order to attempt to reverse the decline. However, these results suggest that such efforts would be largely unsuccessful in reversing declining enrolments or financial pressure.
These Division III schools are typically small, and education-focused. Perhaps they should stick to their strengths, and leave the expensive football programmes to the larger schools?
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