Interestingly, some D-1 privates are very splintered as well, instead you get larger pods. You sometimes get the Greek/sports crowd, and you get “everyone else” and in cases where the student body is much less diverse than other elites to begin with, this sometimes starts to break down along ethnic demographic lines, with mainly Caucasians and non-URM American citizens on one side, having one set of experiences (and sometimes not even that plentiful) and everyone else not as much (and in fact often not even being as welcome to join the other experience). I have my friends describe their school as having this type of vibe if you are on it despite folks simply seeing “tons of school spirit” from the outside. I kind of liked Emory because it was fairly easy to float between whatever “pods”. There was hardly no paradigm that said that such “factions” were permanent. I had friends from many and would often join them in whatever their activities or hobby was.
It gave me many new experiences that I would not have gotten on a campus with a more homogeneous student body and social scene. Also, because of the differences, it always left an activity or some recurring event on campus to “discover” and as an open-minded person, I’m a discovery type of person. It breaks the monotony. For example, if sports, traditional greek party, and that type of fervor were everything, many other events would get completely drowned out, especially during home games. It has even been said to be responsible for patterns of behavior and traditions that reduce productivity. Like at some schools, including an elite private or two, teachers may just have to cancel class before a game simply because attendance is historically low. And it isn’t like Dooley Week, where classes are drawing to a close, it is anytime there is a home game. I do not know how I feel about that. But if it can frequently affect class attendance then I imagine it would effect non-sports related events (which at those schools are known to avoid scheduling near home games or campus). Again, it could provide certain feel good moments or something to cheer for, but dampen or add homogeneity to campus life in other areas where it shouldn’t. And it could leave out a huge chunk.
Also, there is the fact that, likely due to the reason I mention above, about the splintering of campus into literally 2 large or 3 large camps, the fervor from sports ends up very temporary at some places (especially if it does have a team or teams that win championships with any sort of frequency)
The D-1 sports thing is a more complicated animal than one should be led to believe. It is not an instant solution, especially at a place like Emory. The effect cannot be assumed to be uniformly good even if it does say, draw more apps (from whom is the question. Would Emory transform into a more laid back campus with high scorers? Would it become less productive? This is a legitimate possibility if you sell your sports to draw apps. Notice how Duke has gotten out of this habbit and instead mostly sells its special academic and co-curricular offerings to undergraduate prospectives. Otherwise, they would still have the strong student body having much less post-grad success than peer schools because the crowd they would attract would just be less intense and perhaps there more for the social life with the excellent academics an added bonus. If you mostly market sports, school pride, etc, even as an elite, it may work short term, but have long term effects that are unanticipated. Again, I believe Emory is outperforming many of its more selective peers in this arena for a reason. Ask our two recent Marshalls, Goldwaters, the Rhodes, and all the Fulbrights if they just had terrible and boring times when on campus. My guess is that they managed to find and intended to find joy in some other way).