Student-athletes will travel hundreds of miles — in some cases, thousands — to attend a university for its sports teams. And money is rarely a factor.
Athletics draws the most geographic diversity to a campus, with the average athlete traveling about 600 miles to attend school, according to research from Clio Andris, assistant professor of geography at Penn State, recently published in the journal The Professional Geographer.
The reputation of Ivy League schools, including Harvard University helped them attract students from farther away, but centrally-located schools also saw high figures. Andris and her team sifted through 20 years of data for 160,000 student-athletes from 1,600 teams at 128 schools.
Some areas saw larger numbers of transplant students than others. The Universities of Arizona, New Mexico and Idaho ranked highest among distance traveled for public schools, with the average student traveling 1,000 miles.
The colleges and institutions lure people more than the cities where they’re located, Andris said.
See: How athletic scandals can tarnish a college -- and turn off potential students
Comparatively, universities in the Northeast were most likely to attract “homegrown” athletes — that is, those that choose to attend schools in their own states. A player traveled an average of 736 miles to attend schools in the Northeast, but students traveled twice that distance to attend private colleges.
Naturally, the quality of the sports program at individual colleges influenced how far a student would go.
Tennis players, for example, traveled the farthest — an average of 2,000 miles to attend university. (Players traveled more than 5,000 miles to participate in the University of Tulsa’s tennis program.) For other specialized sports, such as skiing, squash and swimming, athletes traveled more than 800 miles on average.
Also see: How to get into an Ivy League school -- by someone who got into 6 of them
Some sports have less competition than others. For men, gymnasts, fencers and ice hockey players had the best odds for receiving an athletic scholarship from National Collegiate Athletic Association and National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics schools, according to ScholarshipStats.com, a website that analyzes collegiate athletic programs and the number of scholarships they offer. For women, the best chances for a scholarship were in rowing, equestrianism and rugby.
Some public universities spend hundreds of millions of dollars to attract student-athletes and provide them with financial aid, according to USA Today.
The University of Texas was ranked first on that list, spending more than $171 million on its sports programs, followed by Ohio State and then the University of Michigan. How much a school spent on its programs did not correlate with how likely a student was to attend that school, according to Andris’ research.
