<p>Just saw a report on my local news.</p>
<p>AJC</a> investigation: Many athletes lag far behind on SAT scores | ajc.com</p>
<p>My question is as overall selectivity has increased amongst the top schools, has athlete selectivity increased as well? Or is the gap the highest its ever been?</p>
<p>Shocking!!! Just kidding. Isn't this a well known fact?</p>
<p>This is why everyone else needs higher than median stats, someone has to bring the whole pool up! Kids look at stats and think they'll get in with 50th percentile stats without understanding that everything is skewed because of athletes and others that meet institutional needs.</p>
<p>interesting issue. </p>
<p>At the BSC conference schools ... the conferences on which this study focused ... tend to have few varsity teams and be very large public schools ... it's true athletes get a big break at these schools and it's also true they are a very small presence among the student population and an argument could be made that the break given for the star QB had no effect on any other applicant (Ohio State accepting 10,025 freshman including the scholarship football players ... instead ot 10,000 without the football players is just noise).</p>
<p>On the other end schools like the IVYies and many top LACs tend to have much tougher standards for athletes (they get a break but a small one) ... however these schools tend to be much smaller and have many more varsity teams so that varsity athletes make up a significant proportion of the students (like 1/4-1/3) ... a case could be made these smaller breaks have a bigger effect on these schools.</p>
<p>I think its important to keep this info in perspective. For example, UCLA has about 334 scholarship athletes, about 1/3 of whom are football/basketball players. UCLA's student body is about 37,000 students (26,000 undergrads).</p>
<p>Bay, that's a good point. At a place as large as UCLA, the SAT scores (or GPA, or whatever) of the athletes don't matter much in the whole scheme of things.</p>
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<p>I'm not sure it's true that big schools have fewer varsity sports. Michigan, for example, has 27 university-funded varsity sports and five self-funded "varsity club" sports, operating at as tier between regular club sports and full varsity status. Michigan's amply financed athletic department---funded primarily by the University's enormous football revenue---gives as many athletic scholarships as allowed by NCAA rules.</p>
<p>But it certainly is true that varsity athletes represent a much smaller fraction of the student body at a school like Michigan than at many small private schools. I'd like to know whether recruited athletes at the elite privates enjoy a similar break in admissions standards. If so, athletes could indeed skew the smaller schools' SAT medians downward, especially at the 25th percentile level, and therefore mislead non-athlete applicants as to their real chances of admission.</p>
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I'm not sure it's true that big schools have fewer varsity sports.
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It general it is very true. One of my kids is/was a soccer/basketball/lacrosse kid ... when I did some initial leg work on schools for him I was stunned by the number of DI schools that do not have varsity soccer programs. Across the BCS conference schools I'd guess the average number of varisty sports is in the high teens (the Big10 schools tend to be on the higher end ... the SEC schools on the lower end) ... while the IVY and NESCAC (Williams, Amherst, etc) have in the low 30s. It's not even close. The big schools used Title IX as an excuse to cut programs right and left ... the DIII schools essentially doubled the number of sports adding women's sports along side the men's. While there may be specific schools that buck the trend ... the trend is very clear.</p>