Universities, for obvious reasons, try to avoid scandals. No one wants to have to call in Olivia Pope to handle a bad situation, particularly when it comes to a prestigious institution that depends on public image. But if a scandal is not covered by The New York Times at least five times or mentioned in a lengthy article by a popular magazine, the college might be in the clear.
A recent study published by Harvard Business School showed that a college’s popularity is more affected by bad press than it is by a scandal itself. Researchers found that misconduct only affected a university’s popularity, measured by the number of yearly applicants, if an incident was reported on fives times or more by The New York Times, or covered at length by another publication. If this negative media coverage took place, more students decided to steer clear of that school.
There were over 120 instances of misconduct by universities between 2001 and 2013 analyzed in the study. Using Google, the researchers tracked news and social media coverage of the schools involved. While The NY Times covered 41 major scandals, only 13 were mentioned five times or more. Meanwhile, nine were reported on in long-form articles that were published by other media outlets.
The study found that these various in-depth articles, which caused a 10 percent drop in applications, were more harmful to a college’s reputation than extensive NY Times coverage, which caused a 9 percent drop. Dartmouth College in New Hampshire was a prime example of a prestigious college that saw a massive fall in popularity due to harsh media criticism. After Dartmouth’s hazing scandal was reported on in a lengthy article by Rolling Stone, the school saw application submissions plummet by 14 percent the following year. Dartmouth implemented change almost immediately after that drop.
However, most schools that experience an abuse or hazing scandal are not doomed to lose applicants. If misconduct does not garner attention from either The NY Times or another major publication, researchers discovered that colleges typically did not see drops in popularity. For example, the University of Southern California and the University of California, Berkeley had allegations of rampant sexual assault in 2013. Because this abuse went almost unnoticed by mainstream media, both schools’ applicant pools actually grew in size the next year.
There does seem to be a silver lining in all of this, though. If newspapers, especially The NY Times, publish in-depth reports of a scandal, the school involved usually cracks down on abuse in order to avoid additional bad press. The findings showed that these schools were hyper vigilant in the following years, making those campuses safer in the long-run.