Assessing the institutional choice process of student-athletes

The primary purpose of this investigation was to determine the relative importance of the attributes that student-athletes use when determining their choice of a university. A second purpose was to compare previous athletic institutional choice studies with the results of this study to determine if the most important attributes were similar and to compare and contrast methodologies. Six hundred five Division I student-athletes (344 baseball players and 261 softball players) from all eight national geographic regions of the NCAA participated in this study. The experimental procedure was based on Information Integration Theory and a 2(10) fractional factorial design that resulted in 32 "choice sets." These choice sets were composed of universities described by 10 attributes. This framework required that the student-athletes choose from among three university profiles, thereby realistically simulating the decision process. The results for the aggregate sample show that the "Amount of Scholarship" attribute was the most important factor in the institutional choice process. Many demographic variables were analyzed (sex, race, amount of scholarship received as a freshman, amount of perceived financial need, self-reported grade-point average, questionnaire completion procedures, in-state/out-of-state status, NCAA region, and rank in high school) in conjunction with the choice set data in a post-hoc framework. The results for a subset of these variables are reported in this paper; differences (in the order of importance of the attributes) were found among groups. A primary finding of this study is that a student-athlete's perceived financial need has a critical impact on the institutional choice process.(ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS)