By: Andrew Glenn and Ryan Glenn

We—the authors and two others—are Penn State alumni and current graduate students in aerospace engineering. We believe Penn State Athletics discriminated against graduate students in the 2024 student football ticket lottery.

In early April, Penn State Athletics announced a new process for students to receive football season tickets. According to the university’s press release, the lottery was implemented to “provide an equal opportunity for all eligible students.” We believe at least one group of students—graduate students—did not have an equal opportunity in this year’s lottery.

On June 25, 2024, Penn State released the lottery results. Within minutes of those results being made public, we suspected that graduate students had been denied tickets at a disproportionate rate. We thus decided to investigate the matter. On June 25 and June 26, we surveyed 149 students who had entered the lottery. All the students surveyed were polled in person or in a method that guaranteed a response. Almost all of the interviews took place on the University Park campus. Our survey did not use group messages or online polls; we had a guaranteed response for every person surveyed. Our survey was performed diligently and ethically.

All convenience surveys carry inherent risk of being nonrepresentative of the entire population. In this instance, however, we believe the risk is extremely small, since all students in the lottery were promised to have the same chance of success. Therefore, it should not matter for the survey to have representative distributions of freshmen, sophomores, juniors, or seniors. Similarly, it should not matter to survey different majors, different residential areas, or different campuses.

We surveyed 109 undergraduate students and 40 graduate students who entered the lottery. Of the 109 undergraduate students, 70 received football tickets. Of the 40 graduate students, five received tickets. We thus had two survey groups, one of which went 70-for-109 (64.22%), the other 5-for-40 (12.50%).

The problem is that the likelihood of any single student getting a ticket was supposed to be the same as every other student. We tested 1,000 probabilities evenly distributed from 0 to 100%. For each probability, we calculated the likelihood of getting as many or more than 70- out-of-109 and the likelihood of exactly or fewer than 5-out-of-40.

For example, if the assumed success rate were 0.400, a random survey would yield 70 or more out of 109 0.0000286% of the time. Using the same success rate, a random survey would yield five or fewer out of forty 0.014% of the time. And the likelihood of getting both the undergraduate survey and graduate survey can be calculated by multiplying the two likelihoods together, which would yield 0.00000000413%. (The assumed success rate could be raised to increase the likelihood of getting 70 or more out of 109, but this would lower the likelihood of getting five or fewer out of 40.)

The dilemma is that there is no percentage where both survey results are even remotely likely. The most viable lottery success rate is 0.510, meaning 51% of lottery entrants would have received tickets. If the lottery success rate were 0.510, however, there is approximately a 1- in-730 million chance of getting survey results this drastically in favor of undergraduate students. And these odds account for the sample sizes of the surveys. This 1-in-730 million chance was thus determined using the optimal probability based on the survey results.

There are two potential explanations for the survey results. The first is that our survey results were skewed by the convenience sample nature. This is almost certainly not the case because the survey was performed diligently, and everyone included was polled in-person or with a guaranteed response. The second, and more likely, explanation is that graduate students had a lower chance of getting student tickets. If the lottery were fair, as Penn State Athletics asserts, there is a 1-in-730 million chance of getting survey results this drastically in favor of undergraduate students.

Two factors—trust in the survey method and drastic survey results—convinced us that graduate students were—intentionally or unintentionally—given worse odds in the student lottery.

We (along with other graduate students) wrote a technical, mathematics-based report (linked at the end of this column) showing the extreme unlikelihood that the student ticket sale was equitable.

On July 2, we hand-delivered a letter (addressed to Dr. Patrick Kraft) and the report to two employees at the front desk at the Athletic Administration Building. (We also e-mailed Dr. Kraft.) Our letter asked for answers to four questions:

1. How many undergraduate students requested 2024 football student season tickets?
2. How many undergraduate students received 2024 football student season tickets?
3. How many graduate students requested 2024 football student season tickets?
4. How many graduate students received 2024 football student season tickets?

The answers to these four questions, we believed, would reveal an error in this year’s lottery. Neither Dr. Kraft nor the Department of Athletics responded. On July 15, we again hand-delivered a letter (addressed to Dr. Patrick Kraft) to an employee at the front desk at the Athletic Administration Building. (We also e-mailed the letter to Dr. Kraft.) Neither Dr. Kraft nor the Department of Athletics responded.

On July 29, we hand-delivered a letter (addressed to Dr. Patrick Kraft) to Dr. Kraft’s office. (We also e-mailed the letter to Dr. Kraft.) Neither Dr. Kraft nor the Department of Athletics responded.

On August 12, we sent an e-mail (with the report attached) to Ms. Kristina Petersen, Senior Associate Athletic Director for Strategic Communications. As of today, we have not received any response from Dr. Kraft, Ms. Petersen, or any member of the Department of Athletics. Our repeated inquiries have been met with repeated silence.

Once again, we call upon the Department of Athletics to release information about the student football ticket lottery. The information should include, at a minimum, answers to the four questions we have asked over the past two months. We believe that the Penn State graduate student body deserves those answers. And we believe the Department of Athletics has an obligation to live up to its public promise that the lottery system would “provide an equal opportunity for all eligible students.”

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This post, written by graduate students Ryan and Andrew Glenn, was submitted independently as part of our community content program. You could have your content published on Onward State by submitting it here.