J. Douglas Toma

Measures the cost of keeping up with the Joneses

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By JEFFREY SELINGO

Douglas Toma's career track in academe has allowed him to witness firsthand the subject of his sometimes-controversial research: the obsession with status among American colleges and universities. He has been a faculty member at a prestigious public flagship (the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor), an Ivy League institution (the University of Pennsylvania), and now an ambitious state university (the University of Georgia).

Georgia's academic reputation has improved sharply in the past decade thanks largely to the full-tuition HOPE Scholarship, which has kept top students in state to attend college. But like many public universities, Georgia is still an institution known to many Americans, including prospective students, for its football program. In his book, Football U., Mr. Toma makes the argument that colleges use football to try to establish themselves as national brands and to add distinctiveness to otherwise ordinary campuses.

"The things that are defining about an institution are very much related to athletics and football in particular," Mr. Toma says. "Institutions need these things to differentiate themselves from each other."

They also need football, he says, to supply the academic side of the institution with the resources needed to hire star faculty members, recruit top students, and build their endowments. A successful football program builds "local pride," he says, which in turn, may lead to increased donations, and in the case of public universities, higher state subsidies.

"Over the last 150 years, we have been able to exploit local pride to build these spectacular universities," Mr. Toma says, noting that more than half of the 62 institutions that belong to the prestigious Association of American Universities play Division I football.

His next book, which he is working on now, expands his thesis beyond sports to show how colleges build lavish campus amenities, like swanky dormitories and recreational facilities, to give students the feel of a great university. The majority of colleges "might not be able to proclaim their excellence by the U.S. News rankings," Mr. Toma says, "but they can do it in other ways by the way they look and the things they have on their campus."

Along with winning sports programs, such amenities are more visible -- and in some cases more important -- than first-rate academic programs are to external constituents, particularly donors, he says. At some institutions, he says, "if you build a great English department, you almost have to hide it."

It's not only administrators that drive this obsession with status. Faculty members, too, want the bells and whistles, since many of them end up teaching at colleges that are less prestigious than those where they received their degrees. "We want to make the place like where we trained," he says.

Mr. Toma's area of study -- status competition among colleges -- is not shared by very many higher-education researchers. But he believes that looking at the nonacademic side of institutions is important because it shows what colleges "are doing with the resources they have some discretion over." As Americans continue to fret over rising college costs, he says, at some point many colleges simply will not have the capacity to keep up with the Joneses.

"Most institutions are really challenged to deliver these services well," Mr. Toma says. "But as long as you can find someone to pay [for tuition], American higher education has never been as concerned about quality."