Students who visit a college on a cloudy day are 9 percent more likely to enroll at that school, according to a study from the University of California, San Diego.

Uri Simonsohn, an assistant professor of management and strategy, analyzed the enrollment decisions of 1,284 prospective students who visited an unspecified private northeastern university known for its academic strength.

He reasoned that since most people would rather study on cloudy days, students visiting on such days would subconsciously be more inclined to enroll at the university. The clouds induce a more somber mood, causing students to feel more like studying. The cloudy days make campuses more inviting to academically inclined students, according to the study.

Syracuse University sees only 62 sunny days per year, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, but the study still doesn’t convince SU psychology professor Leonard Newman.

“Hopefully, people will read it carefully and think about it carefully and realize that these findings might just apply to certain students in certain circumstances, and maybe not even there,” Newman said. “We really need to see the study replicated to see if anyone else can get similar findings.”

Newman said his primary criticism was the study was simply too specific. It is only taking into account students who perceive a university to be primarily a place where they are looking to study, he said.

At a school like SU, which Newman did not place on the same academically rigorous level as schools like the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Cal Tech, it’s all a matter of how the student perceives the school before they even arrive on campus, he said.

“So I guess the question you have to ask yourself is, when other people visit Syracuse University, how do they conceive of the place? Do they think of it as a place like MIT, or do they think of it as a party school?” Newman said.

Previous psychology studies showed that for weather to influence a decision, it must be subconscious. If the weather is brought to peoples’ attention, they tend to put it aside, Newman said.

For that reason, among other reasons, Newman said the study isn’t something SU should take a lot of stock in.

“Of all the pieces of advice that schools could pick up on in terms of how to treat visitors or how to conduct tours, of course there’s very little that’s less controllable than the weather,” Newman said. “Syracuse is known for harsh winter weather, so people coming to visit here might be so aware of that that incidental weather is not going to affect them in any way because that’s not something in the background. That’s something they’re already thinking about.”

Emily Coleman, the vice president of enrollment management, said though the university receives a lot of questions about the weather from prospective students, the university doesn’t try to sidestep the questions or avoid the issue.

The weather is not something the university can control, she said, adding that the programs for visiting prospective students are set up to show the campus at times students are inclined to be around. The inability to control the weather makes it unlikely the admissions office would do anything to act on the study’s findings, Coleman said.

“I don’t think there’s a lot we would do,” Coleman said. “I don’t think it’s something we would talk about in the literature, like, ‘Hey, it’s cloudy here,’ because I don’t think that there’s any evidence that people, even if this does influence them, know that it does. So I don’t think we would do anything differently in marketing.”

In addition, the weather isn’t usually a student’s top priority when looking at a school like SU, Coleman said.

The weather wasn’t a factor for Taylor Visoski, a freshman public relations major from West Palm Beach, Fla. She visited SU in the summer, but she said that when searching for boarding schools on the East Coast for high school, weather was not among the most important reasons for choosing the institution.

“When I did the boarding school visits, the weather was actually kind of disgusting because I didn’t go in the summer when it was nice,” Visoski said. “The school was just so exciting, I couldn’t help but just forget about the weather and take in how cool this place was or just how I could see myself here.”

Cloudy weather also didn’t make her feel like studying any more than sunny weather, she said.

Paul Helling, a high school junior from Midland, Mich., said he agreed about weather not having an effect on him.

“I can see why people would think that because people would be less inclined to be outside if it’s not sunny, but it doesn’t matter to me,” he said upon finishing a tour of the campus on Tuesday, an overcast day. “I don’t care what the weather is when I study.”

 

Published on March 31, 2010 at 12:00 pm

Contact Lorne: lefulton@syr.edu