In the early 1990s, as a moon-eyed undergraduate at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, I often killed time between classes by straying into the Hopwood Room in Angell Hall. Named for Avery Hopwood (1882-1928), an alum and playwright whose Broadway credits include Getting Gertie’s Garter, the carpeted oasis lured few visitors—beyond faculty and students from the MFA program in creative writing. Upon entry, you met a round oak table, or what you assumed was a round oak table. Its surface was fully plastered with literary journals from every corner of the U.S. 

If you were lucky, tea and cookies were on offer. Here, a visiting author might regale you and the room’s equable hostess, Andrea Beauchamp, about the travails of a literary life. It’s unlikely that the room had been advertised in the college brochures. Far better known were a series of cash prizes that old Avery had bequeathed for student writers: the Hopwood Awards. Arthur Miller, who bagged one of these in 1936, later said the contests were a chief reason for his deciding to attend Michigan.

To what extent are amenities such as the Hopwood Room likely to improve enrollment rates at a college or university? Does the prospect of new cultural amenities play a factor in tuition over time, and what types of students might be expected to sign up with a college if such amenities were available? The example of a literary tea-room may seem forced—but this scene of “cultural consumption” sprang to mind when I saw the subtitle of a new research paper by Siân Mughan (Arizona State University), Jessica Sherrod Hale, and Joanna Woronkowicz (both of Indiana University).

The article, Build It and Will They Come?: The Effect of Investing in Cultural Consumption Amenities in Higher Education on Student-Level Outcomes, asks if spending on cultural amenities can give universities an edge in a crowded and competitive market for students. As suggested by the first part of the title, with its Field of Dreams allusion, the paper is mainly concerned with bricks and mortar when it comes to cultural amenities. (So perhaps a better example than the Hopwood Room would have been the University of Michigan School of Music building, where a friend and I would jam on weekends.)

But why, one might ask, should there be any relationship between campus cultural facilities and student enrollment and tuition patterns? Anticipating the question, the authors reason that a decline in state appropriations has caused public universities to chase new strategies to increase revenue—and that such strategies entail making the university experience more attractive to out-of-state residents who can afford paying higher tuition fees than paid by state residents.  Cultural amenities “may be an especially effective recruitment tool if institutions are seeking students with a higher ability to pay, and perhaps, more taste for [such] amenities,” Mughan et al. state.

The authors also conjecture that public colleges and universities spend on cultural amenities as a way to recruit larger numbers of students with attractive academic profiles, capable of boosting the prestige of those institutions (and possibly making them more appealing to donors). As Mughan et al. observe, enrollment strategy in higher education “is often two-pronged, with one goal to support tuition strategy and the other to support prestige.”

Armed with these hypotheses, Mughan and colleagues take a longitudinal dataset tracking construction of cultural facilities at public four-year colleges and universities, and merge it with state- and student-level data from other sources, including the U.S. Department of Education. The result? Their analysis shows that large investments in cultural amenities at public colleges and universities are associated with increases in out-of-state tuition and decreases in the proportion of in-state students. 

“This is an important finding from a policy standpoint,” the authors declare, “as the pursuit of lucrative students poses access and affordability questions with racial and socio-economic implications.” They add: “To the extent that in-state students are more likely to belong to groups underrepresented in higher education (economic, racial, ethnic, or otherwise), non-resident enrollment may crowd out underrepresented groups in public universities.” Given the mandate of state universities to serve—well, their states—this dynamic is worth even closer attention.

Contrary to the researchers’ hypothesis, institutional investments in cultural amenities were not associated with greater “selectivity of the undergraduate student body” (though large investments were linked with higher SAT scores among students who enrolled). A more impressive finding is that investments in cultural amenities had a positive effect on the “yield” rate of universities—i.e., the share of admitted students who went on to enroll. Mughan et al. conclude that cultural amenities may not sway students in deciding whether to apply to such universities—but they can improve the chances of students who applied, were accepted, and are considering whether to join. 

In my own case, would foreknowledge of the Hopwood Room have made a difference in my college enrollment choice? Probably not, but if I were to add the music and theater facilities, the libraries, the art museum, and film screenings that were highlights of my time on campus—not to mention the off-campus arts venues that I ultimately enjoyed—then you have one compelling recruitment package. 

Mughan’s article makes us understand how new cultural amenities can enhance the value of a university education—not only for the student but, in terms of potentially higher tuitions, for the university itself. The question is whether such investments are part of a larger strategy to generate revenue, and, if so, then depending on which students are left at a disadvantage, whether the strategy can be reconciled with a public university’s mission.

Note: Mughan’s article appears in a recent issue of the journal Research in Higher Education. It also is featured in the current issue of Arts Research Quarterly, a research round-up at the NEA’s National Archive of Data on Arts & Culture. The study was supported by a NEA research grant to Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis. A previous article, also supported by this grant, was published last year in The Journal of Technology Transfer.  Authored by Doug Noonan, Woronkowicz, and Hale, the article is titled More than STEM: spillovers from higher education institution infrastructure in the arts. Noonan and Woronkowicz lead a NEA Research Lab investigating links between the arts and entrepreneurship and innovation.

Sunil Iyengar is the National Endowment for the Arts Director of the Office of Research and Analysis.