NIU Offers Free Tuition Prize To Boost Football Attendance

By Kate Shepherd in News on Sep 4, 2015 3:20PM

NIU Football

Northern Illinois University will offer free tuition for the spring 2016 semester to one randomly chosen student who attends all six home football games, NIU recently announced. Many college students would do crazy things to earn free tuition, so attending a few football games sounds like a piece of cake.

This free tuition prize, and its various caveats—see below—sounds pretty weird to us (especially those of us who didn't attend big college football schools), but it's not unheard of. The University of Akron in Ohio pulled a similar stunt last year with success.

The public university is hoping thousands will participate, and betting the contest stipulation that more than 6,000 NIU students must attend all six games will be motivation enough. The winning student will have to be patient too. In order qualify for the free tuition, students have to stay until the end of each game.

Guaranteeing attendance at games won't be a problem for the NIU Huskies anymore. They're usually a winning team and the school has about 15,000 undergraduate students but they've has struggled to fill the student bleachers in the past, according to the Tribune.