Does adding football help colleges with recruiting? It's complicated

toggle caption Miles MacClure/The Hechinger Report

SALEM, Va. — On a hot and humid August morning in this southwestern Virginia town, football training camp is in full swing at Roanoke College.

Players cheer as a receiver makes a leaping one-handed catch, and linemen sweat through blocking drills. Practice hums along like a well-oiled machine — yet this is the first day this team has practiced, ever.

In fact, it's the first day of practice for a Roanoke College varsity football team since 1942, when the college dropped football in the midst of World War II.

Roanoke is one of about a dozen schools that have added football programs in the last two years, with several more set to do so in 2026. Administrators hope that having a team will increase enrollment, especially of men, whose ranks in college have been falling.

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Yet research consistently finds that while enrollment may spike initially, adding football does not produce long-term enrollment gains.

Roanoke's president, Frank Shushok Jr., nonetheless believes that bringing back football — and the various spirit-raising activities that go with it — will attract more students, especially male students.

The small liberal arts college lost nearly 300 students between 2019 and 2022. And things were likely to get worse; the country's population of 18-year-olds is about to decline and colleges everywhere are competing for students from a smaller pool.

"Do I think adding sports strategically is helping