No, not the basketball team, but the undergraduate student body.

I have it from an unimpeachable source that Loyola has admitted more undergrads this year than they can reasonably accommodate and that they are scrambling to find enough classrooms for the youngsters. Apparently, the formula used by the Admissions Office to determine "Yield" (Percentage of accepted students who actually enroll) underestimated the number of students who would show up on the Lake Shore Campus eager to matriculate and binge drink.

The problem is particularly acute with those annoying Pre-Med/Bio Majors. Not enough lab space, so classes are being scheduled for Sundays and late at night.

Do I smell an opportunity for a class action lawsuit on behalf of these undergrads for breach of contract?

*cough* Ambulance chaser. *cough*

Sounds like a good problem to have. Now Loyola can build more dorms...and perhaps in the next 2 years they will have expanded all the way to Wrigleyville. Then we can bulldoze that old looking baseball stadium there and construct a nice football stadium.

http://blogs.luc.edu/ilweekly/2013/08/2 ... nvocation/

According to this article, the incoming freshmen class is more than 2,500 students! I think that is about 500 more students than we had planned. I recall Fr. Garanzini saying that Loyola was going to limit it's undergraduate enrollment at around 2,000. However, that was probably before the financial geniuses at the university realized that when you reduce the number of credit hours required to graduate from 128 to 120...students will actually graduate on time...and the school will lose a lot of much needed revenue!

Gotta pay for this top-25 basketball program!

_________________
MBB Scholarship Chart

This could have some negative implications for the U.S News rankings. Our student-teacher ratio is going to increase significantly....

Could some of the unexpected increase in accepted students enrolling be due to the move to the MVC? The models that universities use to anticipate actual enrollment from accepted students are pretty sophisticated. It would be one thing if the unanticipated surge in enrollment was 5 or even 10 percent. But a 25% surge in enrolled from accepted students? That's extremely significant.

There is no way to know for sure if the recent perceived upgrade in intercollegiate sports made a significant difference, and in higher ed the jury is still out on some of these questions. All there is is anecdotal information from schools that make a splash in athletics... Butler, VCU, and George Mason all reported a doubling or near tripling of their applications after their appearances in the Final Four. Belmont, Marquette, and other schools that have moved up the conference and notoriety food chain over the past decade have had significant enrollment increases even as the trend in college enrollment has declined or leveled off since the economy imploded in 2008. Florida Gulf Coast has increased admissions since going DI in the early 2000s, and has a surge of enrollment applications.

http://espn.go.com/blog/playbook/dollar ... admissions

Enrollment for schools with static or declining prominence in athletics have leveled off or declined for the most part. Schools without ANY competitive sports have really suffered-- Columbia College in Chicago, for instance, has experienced a 25% enrollment decline. Nearby Roosevelt University has kept their enrollment basically even after establishing a fledgling D-III sports program in 2010. Community colleges, despite their much lower tuition and job training focus, have not experienced an increase in enrollment over the past several years, even though they are a solid and viable alternative for reducing debt for graduates.

So let's say that a conservative estimate of 150 of these 500 unexpected enrollments are due primarily to the move to the MVC, and let's say that each student represents an average revenue to the University of $25k (that's a round figure minus scholarships, added costs, and incentives). That's $3.75 million in added revenue for year one. Factor it out to a 70% graduation rate over four years, and that's $10.5 million in added revenue for just this year's incoming freshman class-- not counting their expected Alumni giving in out years.

There are two ways to go from here: 1.) Bumping up the minimum requirements for incoming students, thus improving the US News ranking, thus putting Loyola in a more elite class, and thus increasing the per-student expected revenue per year... or 2.) Serving more of the same level student academic level, touting our size as a private Jesuit school, and maintaining the same academic reputation.

Given that we're in the same market with DePaul, I'd vote for option 1. There are three tiers of schools in Chicago: U. of C. and Northwestern in tier one; Loyola, DePaul, and UIC in tier two; and everybody else in tier three. Nudging into tier one could potentially be worth BILLIONS-- that's not a typo, I mean BILLIONS, with a big capital B. Everybody's degree would be worth more in earning power and reputation, and the University could establish itself as a national fixture, somewhat immune to the kind of financial crisis we had in the late 1990s. And Loyola could still serve its mission by promoting community service in a way that U. of C. and Northwestern are totally unable.

My advocacy of Loyola moving to the MVC wasn't even predominantly because of sports. It was predominantly because I thought this kind of thing might happen-- although I had no idea it would happen so quick and so impressively.

If you delete "conservative", and change "150" to "10", then I agree completely with your statement!

I think one statistic you're overlooking is that the ratio of females to males in the incoming class is 2/1, and I doubt whether Loyola's entry into the MVC even entered the minds of many of the coed contingent.