Gebbia vs Nolan

as usual, Angry was far ahead of the curve. This is what having a critical minded outlook towards sports (or any subject) will do for you. (and contrary to popular impression, here and more largely put, being critical and being negative are not the same thing).

Anyway, there’s another aspect to student demographics, other than, say, debt load, that’s impinging on football attendance, etc. With cutbacks in state support nationwide, post-recession, state flagship universities (e.g., OSU, UO), that is, the schools that populate the power 5 conferences, have made up the difference and balanced their books by tilting their admissions in favor of out of state and foreign students, both of which subsets pay a higher tuition rate than a resident population, usually 3x. That is, one non-resident student is as remunerative as three resident students. You can see the incentive that creates. Correspondingly, directly or indirectly, the flagships shunt an increasing portion of their in-state student population to regional schools (Eastern Oregon, for example) or their branch campuses. The University of Washington, which had to be dragged, kicking and screaming, into the realm of branch campuses in the 1980’s, finally accommodated themselves to their value: they charge top dollar for kids from Oregon, California, or, say, China, while “local” prospects are guided into their branch campuses in Tacoma and Bothell.

So, you may ask, how does this translate to student attendance at football games? If, for example, a student was raised in southern California, is it not conceivable that, once admitted in Corvallis, Eugene, or Seattle, they come with an underlying allegiance to SC or UCLA, dis-incentivizing that student into staying in the dorm to watch SC play ND rather than head to Reser to watch the Beavs play Utah? That effect plays out much more formidably by the increasingly sizable population of students who grew up in Asia, or Africa, for whom American football is a completely foreign game and for whom the traditions and pageantry of tailgating etc. are a yet to be acquired taste.