Researching College Culture in Unique Places

As college counselors, we’re always looking for ways to help our students explore their best fit colleges. We all have different strategies to help our students get an idea of a particular school’s culture, and college sports have provided you with one of the more unconventional culture gauges in the Men’s College World Series Jello Shot Competition.

For those of you that don’t know, the Men’s College World Series takes place in Omaha, Nebraska every year. The eight top baseball teams compete for the National Championship, and one of the local pizza joint has turned the event into a huge charity opportunity for food banks across the country.

In short, custom colored Jello shots are sold for $5 that match the colors of the competing teams. The money raised from those shots is donated to the team’s local food bank and the heartland food bank in Nebraska. The shot leaderboard is watched almost as closely as the score at TD Ameritrade park, and you can gather a LOT about a school’s fanbase based on the numbers on the scoreboard.

While don’t think anyone should plan to use this as their top research tool, this competition certainly showcases some cultural tendencies in fanbases and it can be a fun way to break up the studying process if you happen to have a student interested in one or more of the competing teams in Omaha.

Unconventional? Yes. Insightful? Absolutely!