Small colleges find that adding football pays off in a lot of green, and more
By Daniel de Vise
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, October 26, 2010; 9:19 PM
IN STEVENSON, MD. Stevenson University was another small liberal arts school with a surplus of female students. Women outnumbered men 2 to 1, an extreme example of the imbalance that pervades higher education.
Then came football.
Stevenson spent $500,000 this year to create an intercollegiate team from scratch, largely as a means to fill the campus with tuition-paying men. The program has drawn 130 players, raising the male share of the freshman class from 34 to 39 percent in a single year at the 3,075-student university.
The suburban Baltimore school is one of at least a dozen small, private colleges in the United States that have added or rebuilt football programs in the past three years, usually with the dual purpose of feeding the bottom line and narrowing the gender gap.
For many small, regional colleges facing a bleak admissions landscape, the gridiron is a beacon of hope. The college-age population is leveling off. The economy is sluggish. Private colleges must offer ever-larger tuition discounts to fill the freshman class.
Male students are particularly scarce because of several factors, including higher dropout and incarceration rates. The national college population is 58 percent female. At private institutions, the gender gap is slightly larger.
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