Graduation Year

2025

Date of Submission

12-2025

Document Type

Campus Only Senior Thesis

Degree Name

Bachelor of Arts

Department

Economics

Reader 1

Richard Burdekin

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Abstract

At the turn of the century, only 3,589 international student athletes participated in NCAA Division 1 sports, accounting for only 2.4% of the population (Zgonc, 2010). By September of 2023, that percentage had grown to 12.8% of Division 1 athletes, and there were over 3,100 first-years alone. Men’s soccer has one of the highest international participation rates: 34% in 2023. This thesis examines the impact that this upwards trend of international students has on team performance and institution financial performance on Division 1 men’s soccer. I use NCAA team web pages to aggregate player biographic and statistical data on 6,450 men’s soccer players from the 2024 season. I use measures of team performance and institutional factors to determine the impact of these international players on their institutions.

I use an ordinary least squares model to estimate the impact of a team’s international recruitment strategy on their total wins, goal differential, and Massey Rating. I utilize a logit model to measure the impact of the international share of players on the probability of qualifying for the NCAA tournament. Finally, to determine the relationship between institutional fiscal resources and quality of international players, I use an OLS model that regresses an index of institutional fiscal factors on measures of international player quality like media player rankings and all-region award selections.

I find no support for the hypothesis that having a higher share of international players yields stronger on-field results. Instead, I find that persistence, as represented through lagged measures of the dependent variables for team success, is a far better indicator of current year success than international share. I also surprisingly find an inverse relationship between fiscal resources and international player quality. The scope of this effect is narrow and like my first hypothesis, the persistence measures are more reliable predictors of international player quality.

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This thesis is restricted to the Claremont Colleges current faculty, students, and staff.

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