<p>Rice’s total enrollment consists of approximately 7,000 (undergrad and grad) students. Even if every single one of them attended every single home game, I think it’s still safe to say that the vast majority of fans who attend Rice games are opposing fans.</p>
<p>Some college football teams tend to attract local fans, usually if they are not in a metropolitan area that has competing professional teams. However, Rice has the NFL’s Houston Texans in their own backyard. Not to mention, Rice is not even the most popular college football team in its own city, which is the University of Houston.</p>
<p>And only one should be sufficient to contradict my claim. But I doubt that hawkette (or anyone else) can come up with even one itty bitty example of an ivy athlete with SATs in the 800’s.</p>
<p>For the record, Rice’s enrollment is even smaller than what you post above. Undergrads number 3154; grad students number 2302 for a total of less than 5500. </p>
<p>Btw, there is a lot of local alumni. Rice’s student body is usually composed of 50+% Texans.</p>
<p>You’re missing the point. I am not trying to say that sports is the only reason why some schools have shot up in the USN&WR rankings (although a case can be made that football definitely helped USC in the last seven or eight years). I want to look at the bigger picture. </p>
<p>My argument is that certain schools would not have been ranked where they were by the USN&WR or any other rankings, for that matter, IN THE FIRST PLACE if it were not for their sports.</p>
<p>Not to pick on Notre Dame again, but let’s use it for illustrative purposes again. Before the Second World War, ND was a nice regional Catholic school that scheduled football games with tradtional national powers. It was not then known as an elite academic institution by any stretch of the imagination. Then the War happened. Priorities shifted. After WWII, the service academies against which ND competed began to de-emphasize football. Later on, other traditional football powers (the Ivies) not only de-emphasized football but also moved onto a lower level of competition. Hence, ND was able to rule the day in the Post-War era as one of the, if not THE predominant football program in the country. With this football supremacy, ND gained national acclaim and started to attract top Catholic students from around the country. What had once been a local Midwestern Catholic school with a foreign name became a national university.</p>
<p>Think about it, would ND be what it is today without football? Of course not. That is why the school will continue to admit football recruits with 800 SATs and 2.5 gpas. Because ND’s very identity as an institution depends on it. ND is synonymous with football and vice versa. Without its football history, ND would just be another regional religiously-affilated institution in a dying industrial “rust belt” town.</p>
<p>As a current Rice student, I can tell you our football performance is horrendous (been to 2-3 of the games). Now, on the other hand, baseball is a totally different story… we are currently ranked in the top 5 collegiate teams in the nation. We are not a football or basketball school though.</p>
<p>Wow. Nice revisionist history, meangirl. I suppose I cannot bring up the schools that were less well known than Notre Dame, have no football or other sports draw, yet have passed Notre Dame in the rankings, like WUSTL? Or those that actually dropped big-time football yet are much more elite than they were when they had it, like Chicago? Hmmmmm. How could that have happened without football or basketball? Could it be that they just decided to try and become more academically elite by, oh I don’t know, raising their standards? And the USC example is fairly laughable. USC has been good at football for a very long time. Just a quick glance at their history shows they were excellent all the way back to the 1920’s, and were very powerful in the 60’s, 70’s and beyond with multiple Heisman winners. Why didn’t football “help them” then?</p>
<p>Last time I looked USNWR didn’t have sports success as a ranking category, and under your theory that big time sports means attracting better students, the Ivies should have died a long time ago. Not to mention all the counter-examples I just gave.</p>
<p>So would ND be what it is today without football? Of course it would, if they made all the same decisions regarding academics otherwise. The only reason it wouldn’t be is that there might be less money, but that is even doubtful and an entirely different argument. I just did some brushing up on Notre Dame history and it is clear that the big rise in academic prowess came in the 1980’s and beyond, well after the prominence in football. It would be hard to explain a 50-60 year lag effect. You really do fail at logic, I am afraid, and you are sadly lacking on the facts.</p>
<p>All of your arguments are “straw men” arguments. I haven’t said the stuff that you’re attributing to me. I made claims about how certain institutions prioritize athletics over academics or used athletics to enhance their academic prestige or name recognition. There’s nothing controversial about that, I don’t think.</p>
<p>I said absolutely nothing about WUSTL, UChicago, the Ivies, etc. When did I ever say that promoting athletics is the ONLY way to promote academics. I simply said that this is one way and a fairly successful one at that. By suggesting that some schools like Notre Dame and USC built their academic reputations on sports, I am clearly implying that others don’t. In other words, these other schools built their academic reputations on, what do you know, ACADEMICS.</p>
<p>And while Notre Dame and USC are not as highly ranked as WUSTL, UChicago and non-HYP ivies such as Brown and Dartmouth, are you seriously suggesting that they don’t have more name recognition to the general public? This is a reason why WUSTL and UChicago relies on heavy marketing, whereas ND and USC don’t because people already know about them. Now, could ND and USC have garnered this amount of publicity through academics alone? I sincerely doubt it. But then again, we’ll never know because they never tried.</p>
<p>The following are my exact words. Please tell me how your post (#128) addresses this:</p>
<p>OMG, lol. We are not discussing name recognition by the general public, we are talking about the quality of their academics. YOU specifically said they shot up in the USNWR rankings because of their sports. Yet you failed to demonstrate how this is so. My examples are not straw man arguments at all, look up what that means. It goes right to the point. I didn’t say you brought up WUSTL and Chicago, I said they provide proof that schools can rise in the USNWR rankings withour sports, and therefore so can Notre Dame and USC. Further proof that the sports were not responsible for the rise of these two schools was demonstrated by my time lines. You directly argued that sports were responsible for these two schools rising in the rankings.
Seems pretty clear to me. So not only do you fail at logic and deny clear proof, but you try and backtrack on what you said. We can all read, you know.</p>
<p>By the way, I never remotely suggested that Notre Dame and USC don’t have more name recognition to the general public. What a crock. You cannot show one place where I said anything that could be possibly taken that way.</p>
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Perhaps not, but as usual you miss the argument. These schools were very famous for decades before their academic rise. If your theory were true, why didn’t it translate into academic prestige at the levels it is now long before their far more recent rise?</p>
<p>Here I am distinctly not discussing “quality of academics.” I am talking about academic REPUTATION or RECOGNITION.</p>
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<p>And when did I say they canNOT?</p>
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<p>Hypothetically yes. But in reality, they didn’t and (it seems to me) probably couldn’t. The rankings are a zero-sum game. Not every school can go up. And when they do, some other school goes down. If only it were that easy to move up in the rankings. WUSTL and UChicago (and a few others) are the exceptions that prove the rule.</p>
<p>It took Oxbridge and the Ivies centuries to gain their academic prestige. A few decades is a blink of the eye in the history of higher education.</p>
<p>Untrue. College of William and Mary came before Yale. It certainly didn’t garner immediate prestige. Neither did the Ivies.</p>
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<p>Domestically, no. Globally, yes. By general (including American) consensus, U.S. universities were second-rate compared to the European (esp. British, German and French) universities until at least the early 20th century.</p>
<p>Define prestige. Not until recently did the Ivies become these bastions of hyper-competition that we know now. They were for the wealthy and the privileged.</p>
You are a riot. If you consider 60 years of lag time a blink of an eye, then I feel safe in saying that Harvard and the others became prestigious almost immediately. Sorry I wasn’t clear I only meant domestically. I couldn’t care less about globally for this discussion, since globally they don’t care about American football either. This entire discussion was clearly focused on American students and how things are relative to American universities. To being in globla considerations now is a red herring. Oh, and Harvard came before W&M. Nice how you left that out.</p>
<p>BTW meangirl, everyone talks that way online, even all my old fogey friends. Makes us feel young I guess.</p>
<p>40 - Princeton
44 - Northwestern 59 - Cornell
64 - Rice
67 - Vanderbilt
**70 - Yale
**
Well, the record shows that Princeton ranked higher than Northwestern, Rice and Vanderbilt. Cornell ranked higher than Rice and Vanderbilt. Yale was three spots behind Vanderbilt.</p>
<p>That’s three Ivy schools at or better > Northwestern, Rice or Vanderbilt. So again, I don’t buy that those three schools are indisputably better athletically than the best of the Ivy League, and the record backs me on that view.</p>
<p>Next, Notre Dame is ranked what? 20? </p>
<p>Stanford and perhaps Duke. Those are the exceptions which prove the rule.</p>
<p>Knights - I feel very safe in saying that Harvard and Yale have always been considered among the most prestigious universities in America. At one point so was Transylvania University, now it isn’t. Yes they were for the privileged, but in those days only the privileged went to university, or even finished high school for that matter. Not sure how that is relavent at all. They were clearly the most prestigious schools, along with a couple others that now are not at that level like Transylvania and W&M. Also, I have no idea what their hyper competitive nature of today has to do with how they were considered many decades ago, which is the time frame I was referring to.</p>