Know what to expect when implementing athletics-driven enrollment strategies

Abstract

The vast majority of the 812,652 students at Concordia University (Ann Arbor, Michigan) participated in at least one campus sport during the 2022–23 academic year. Hovering around 80%, the school's unusually high percentage of student-athletes didn’t happen by chance. In fact, the school purposefully implemented an “athletics-driven” enrollment strategy to curtail the school's ever- increasing financial deficit — approximately $35.7 million accumulated during the previous 10 years. The university chose this approach based on the reasoning that recruiting student-athletes would help increase the overall student enrollment and therefore, in theory, increase revenue.