I honestly wouldn’t be surprised if there is a COVID issue that is ALSO impacting athletes. It’s pretty widely established that some schools/districts handled COVID better than others and some students lost a year if not two of instruction. Some issues with readiness are also pretty widely reported and universities going TO when students couldn’t achieve scores, probably didn’t help.
We’re in a high education/income area and quite a few athletes we know have gone on to NESAC and Ivy and none have had issues. By far the biggest issue we hear about is labs and sport commitments. I think people underestimate just how many more hours are required in some of the engineering and science classes. Spring freshman year with an engineering class with lab, chemistry with lab and physics with lab and a DiffEQ was easily 3x the hourly commitment of many students in my son’s school. He was “lucky” as his coach offered morning practices for those who have lab conflicts - but it’s a rough schedule, and I understand why some schools just don’t support recruited athletes who want engineering.
I also think this is possible. With that said, many schools have several years of TO data now and from what AOs have said they generally haven’t seen lower GPAs or other issues with TO students. Would be nice to have athlete data with that!
Lastly, I don’t have any data on this, but just based on my experiences, it does seem like there has been a greater proportion of student-athletes not passing pre-reads (talking highly rejective D3s) during and after covid. Too bad that’s not tracked either.
I don’t really think this is just a recruited athlete issue. Grade inflation is terrible. All sorts of schools spin all sorts of tales about their academics. For various reasons our kids have earned As at various places and the standards are laughably different. The work assigned in tenth grade wouldn’t merit A work from our 7th grade English teacher, in fact, it would make her flinch. The fact that these two kids are going to be competing for the same college slot, for the same team, is crazy. And yes, one will struggle.
Quite a few high profile private schools dumped AP content because they didn’t like being bound by the content and because they could. A lot of weak private schools did the same because their kids weren’t competitive anyway.
Our experience has been that the pre-reads at high academic D3s do look at class rigor. We had a situation with our recruited athlete where a coach did an unofficial pre-read before the official one was done by AO and advised my daughter to add a specific AP course to her senior year class schedule (she did previously take an honors level course and had 10 other AP courses on her transcript/senior year schedule). She was seeking admission into engineering and coach wanted to make sure the official pre-read goes through without any issues.
I’ve heard of revenue sport athletes who lack basic literacy – essentially they cannot read. However, this wasn’t at “highly selective colleges.” There is a lot of variation depending on which highly selective college and which sport, but in general, there are stringent enough admissions to prevent students from attending, who are not adequately prepared enough to successfully graduate.
I think more common might be athletes favoring less demanding majors that have a reputation among students as being easier., particularly in Div 1 revenue sports For example, skimming through Stanford’s football roster, over 40% of players who have declared a major chose the major Science, Technology, and Society. In contrast, across the full school, the majors with highest enrollment are completely different from the football roster, as summarized below. STS is only the 20th most popular major or so among the general student body. While the football players’ majors vary significantly from year to year, perhaps imitating one another, a similar pattern emerges in other years. For example, in one year I checked film studies was an especially popular major among Stanford football players, even though it was extremely unpopular among the general student body. This resulted in a large portion Stanford’s film studies majors being football players.
Most Popular Majors at Stanford
1 . Computer Science (nearly triple #2)
2. Human Biology
3. Economics
4. Engineering
5. Symbolic Systems
6. M&S Engineering
7. Computational Math
8. Biology
,
I have not seen this. Remember that pre-reads aren’t just about admitting the student because the coach wants the player, it’s also about giving the coach a thumbs up that the athlete will not fall below the academic threshold for continuing to play. Nobody wins if the athlete can’t hack it.
With that said, there are students at all these schools who find they don’t have what it takes to be pre-med or to be an engineer and who shift course as a result. That isn’t just athletes, though.
I work in a large urban district and some of our outstanding student atheltes are recruited to power 5 schools or mid majors and are significantly behind academically but have met ncaa requirements. The coaches and athletics departments do provide support like remediation courses and tutoring but often the student athletes just can’t keep up with the rigor and if they aren’t performing well athletically they end up dropping out. For others the additional supports are life changing and they get an education and degree that can be life changing for their family. Often depends on the kid and the value the athletic department sees in them
At the more selective D3s and D1s with pre reads and more selective admissions with my daughter’s teammates I have see. Some kids struggle a bit with higher expectations then at their high school and the feeling of being surrounded by similarly strong students. But that is not to say they are failing or have low grades. Most athletes have supports built in through relationships with older teammates, academic supports, mentoring and tutoring etc that can help identify those struggle and find avenues to success sooner then a non athlete. I see many more kids dropping out because they aren’t happy athletically and only picked the school for their sport, so if they aren’t playing or starting then they realize they don’t like the school and choose to transfer to a school that is a better fit (geographically, size wise, socially, etc)
I know this it not the population of recruited athletes we are discussing, but we have watched several seasons of Last Chance U on Netflix, where athletes who stared out D1 washed out of their programs for various reasons and are in athletically competitive Junior Colleges to try to get an athletic scholarship back to a 4 year institution to complete their degree. Many have a lot of obstacles: low income, family instability, literally homeless and couch surfing or commuting 2 hours one way by bus or sleeping in their car. But with the care that these JuCo programs are giving them with academics and tutoring, and other supports, you really find your way rooting for these kids who were young and screwed up and opportunity, but really want to make it right to support their families and get an education.
Most of these high academic D3’s still want the recruited athletes to have taken AP classes. I know my dd had to submit her current (junior year) and senior year course list to the coaches that were recruiting her before preread submission because they wanted to be sure she was taking a challenging course load and not just taking regular-level classes to get a good GPA. This was at the NESCAC school she attends currently, as well as 2 other high academic schools. Also, because these schools were TO, the AP/Honors courses she took were definitely what helped make her academically qualified for those schools.
One factor to consider is whether “low grades” is defined in absolute terms or defined as a being behind other students within the college. At the type of highly selective private colleges that are regularly discussed on this forum, students may have high grades in an absolute sense while still having grades well below typical peers.
For example, in Harvard’s most recent senior survey, the median GPA of graduating seniors was slightly above 3.9 out of 4.0. Even if athletes averaged a large 1 SD difference in GPA from the overall student body, they’d still be graduating with an A average. The survey does not provide specific GPA numbers from athletes aside from saying athletes were half as likely to get a 4.0 as the overall student body – 22% of all students received 4.0 compared to 11% of athletes. Extremely few students averaged below 3.5, regardless of student type.
I think the difference is that there weren’t as many wholes in the teaching. The transcript doesn’t tell the story. At my local HS everyone got As for everything that first spring. At another school a lot of the teaching moved online that following year - there were minimal assessments and good grades given out for logging in.
Still curious to know which schools where you are seeing this occurring?
Just find this a little odd as I have 2 kids who went through the process at high academic schools, and was a recruiting coordinator for a team sport where my role focused on getting kids recruited. I was pretty familiar with what a lot of what these programs were looking for and required academically and athletically.
Sure. I’m talking 1st (but not tippy top) and 2nd tier LACs with acceptance rates <20%. Recruited athletes who are B+ students without particular rigor, vs unhooked who are A students with high rigor, but no spectacular particular achievement that was enough to get into T20 schools or the tippy top LACs, ahead of all the other unhooked A students with highest rigor. If that recruited athlete has any interest in non-soft classes, meaning STEM classes, they’re sitting in classes with others who were A students in AP Chem,Bio,PhysicsC,and Calc BC, with intro level classes that are essentially geared towards those very high achieving students who’ve had APs, classes that move FAST.
The recruited athlete met the criteria for admission - they had a high enough GPA, with some honors and an easier AP or two. But they might very well not have been accepted if they had not been a recruited athlete. And if they had wanted to major in sociology, and could write a coherent, grammatically correct paper, they’d probably have been okay. But if they want to major in science, they would have a terrible time in the intro level class for which they were not ready, whereas if they had wound up at a less competitive school, a school that was more of an academic match for them, they’d probably have been ok in the intro level STEM classes.
You see these kids get into Ivies, if they are good enough athletes . Less so a the high academic D3 where pre-reads are a pretty rigorous, formal part of the process.
As some like to say -
Great Athlete/Good Student goes Ivy.
Good Athlete/Great Student goes NESCAC.
I have a hard time with media outlets and CC when recruited athletes are all lumped together - there is a big difference based on revenue vs non revenue sports and then are differences between team sizes and school priorities for teams (ie: we want Olympic caliber athletes and will make exceptions) or our XX non revenue team has a lot of alumni $ support and we bend the standards for that team - it is not one size fit all for recruited athletes - so are some athletes out of their depth academically - sure - just as some non-athlete students are out of their depth.
Watching our child go though the recruiting process for a non revenue sport - National ranked D1 and Ivy - they saw those differences 1st hand and this was only for their sport - so sample size of 1: Go with the D1 and some classes would be online during main season and majors would be limited, pick up a class in the summer to graduate in 4 years, athlete dining room, tutors and laundry service, team stacked with international students and athlete scholarship $ was generous, go to an Ivy and you get none of the above (except one known to bend the test score cut off for international team members) and only thing about courses is a warning that lab classes are tough to fit into a schedule (but doable). Academics first - sports second - social life a distance third = great fit for a lot of kids.
Not every kid takes all the toughest APs in high school! And some of them still want to study science, or math, or engineering, or whatever, and it’s fine. My point is that some of the recruited athletes, who get admitted preferentially to highly selective, competitive schools, find themselves out of their depth academically once there.
I do think that the pre-read at the schools you are describing is significantly less cushy than that.
Regardless, the athlete bears some responsibility in their school choice. If they choose a school where they would never get in on their own academic merit, they have to be willing to be flexible. The beauty of LACs though is that there is no penalty for changing gears.