I’m sure there are some student-athletes who go to highly rejective LACs who, had they chosen a less selective school, MAY have made it through intro stem classes.
It doesn’t seem you are recognizing the 40 hour per week commitment, all year long, that some of these student-athletes are making at the D3s we are talking about. If they are struggling academically, perhaps that’s the reason why and not necessarily their academic ability.
Lots of pre-health dreams, whether athlete or not, die in intro stem classes at all levels of schools.
All students have to make adjustments to college. It may be going from Mom and Dad making all the meals and doing the laundry, making doctor’s appointments and taking care of you when you are sick. More often, it is having unlimited amounts of beer available and learning to say no to a party invitation.
For my daughter, the athletic part of her day was the easiest to deal with. She was used to practices and games 5-6 days a week. She was even used to getting up before 6 to go lift at the gym as she’d been doing it during senior year.
She was really scared about the academics so instead of drink beer every night she went to the (required) study tables for athletes 4 nights a weeks. She also went to office hours and the tutoring office (same for all students, not just athletes).
Luckily, my little Cinderella had been doing her own laundry and cooking a lot of meals since she was 10 so that wasn’t a big adjustment. In fact, having meals cooked for her freed up some of her time.
I really think it is that the students aren’t used to working that hard at academics. High school is easier than college. My nephew was an athlete in hs but not college. He did not do well his first semester. Too much beer, too little supervision of his social life, too little of putting his butt in a chair and studying. Getting a D in Calc cured that. In hs a teacher would have called his parents if a grade slipped below a B, but that doesn’t happen in college (oh yes, except for athletes as my daughter’s coach had her grades and class attendance before she did).
There are also excellent unhooked student who get into very selective schools who do not have the aptitude for college level STEM classes and choose not to take them. These might be kids who are going to knock it out of the park in Classics, for example.
There are a lot of reasons to dislike the fact that recruited athletes get to “jump the line” when it comes to admissions. It’s very frustrating when hooked applicants get priority over the rest of us, and I suspect that these kinds of stories – the “they shouldn’t be there” stories are fueled by that.
So, I will use anecdotal examples here as it seems like the same thing you are doing. I think what is not being mentioned here is the crazy amount of time one needs to devote to their sport in HS to be able to get recruited to one of the schools you are describing. The majority (if not all) of these kids ARE taking the courses you are describing, the APs and the honors.
My kids used to leave the house by 6:45 every school day, drive almost an hour to school, and then be there until about 6:00 in the evening, as their school had a sport requirement every season (there was no gym class). They would get home around 7:00 pm, scarf down dinner, and do their homework. Both kids took AP and honors classes, both which carried the same academic weight at their school, so their HR load was not light. Weekends they worked out with their travel teams or did their private lessons. There was no down time. They still maintained extremely good GPAs, but were not your “A+ students.”
So yeah, as an admissions officer at the schools you’re describing, I am going to be well aware of the amount of time a recruited student-athlete devotes to their sport and might give slight leniency if they are an A- student and a very good athlete vs the A+ student with no hook. I will also understand that they have exceptional time-management skills and were disciplined enough to do very well both academically and athletically in HS.
My dd is a junior Bio major and has made Dean’s list every semester so far (except maybe her 1st) and was an A- kid in HS. DS is in his 1st college semester and is a Physics major. He was an A student in HS. I’m glad the admissions officers took a chance on them.
Again, those are the athletes that are not getting into the schools they keep describing. At least to me, it’s very confusing because they won’t mention specific school names or conferences.
I think @Mwfan1921 has been largely right on what she has been consistently saying here. Very few of these kids are out of their depth for the school generally. HOWEVER, they may be out of their depth for specific majors, and they definitely may be out of their depth for essentially working a full time job (their sport), that they are pressured to prioritze over their classes, while trying to get through a rigorous school.
I have mentioned my son before. He was a highly recruited D1 athlete, and he is one who absolutely would not have been admitted to his Ivy without a coach’s thumb on the scale. He has “struggled.” However, I really need to define struggled. His GPA is around 3.0. Not pre-med, but a relatively rigorous science major, probably around average difficulty to slightly above for the school as a whole. I’ve got to think he has one of the lowest GPA’s in his class in his major. I’m guessing he would be closer to 3.5 as a sociology major at a high academic school like the one he is attending, and maybe a 3.5 in his chosen major at a less rigorous school.
He has never been on academic probation or anything along those lines. No grades below “C”, and not many of those. Also not a ton of A’s, much to my chagrin. He could have easily raised his GPA by changing his major or curtailing his social activities. He could have raised it dramatically by dropping his sport and spending just 50% of the time it took on academics instead.
Back in HS, one of the many career paths he considered was dentist. We both knew when he committed to this school that he was closing that path off. I think he could have done it at a non-rigorous school, many of which were recruiting him. He also could maybe have pulled it off at his chosen school if he had dropped his sport immediately and focused on academics. But doing his sport and keeping up his GPA in the most rigorous science classes? He was out of his depth on that for sure.
Agreed, I haven’t seen highly selective/highly rejective D3 schools getting recruits through pre-reads and into the program when the recruits have had “regular” courses. Plenty of recruits may come from independent schools which don’t do APs, but those recruits are not taking “regular” classes in the sense “regular” is used at large public high school, with AP/IB, Honors, and then regular courses. And as others have noted, with the rise of test optional applications, course rigor has become even more important as a marker of readiness.
I will admit I do feel this way, but I also think there is sometimes more to it. I can only go by my personal experience which is admittedly limited to one university and several classes but…When I taught, I can say that I had many excellent students who were athletes. Some of these student athletes were every bit as strong academically - and sometimes even stronger - than the non-athletes in the class. But…
Of the weakest students I had over several years of teaching, a good 90% of them were recruited athletes.
And these were not tough STEM courses. These were gen ed requirements. They passed my classes by the skin of their teeth and by my generosity. I am not at all sure how they passed their other classes.
So in my personal experience, not all student athletes were weak students, but the majority of weak students were student athletes.
All is not lost, if he still wants to be a dentist. He should major in whatever he wants, and then do a post-bac year at your local state college, to finish his prereqs (or redo them, if necessary). He could probably get a 4.0 in his post-bac science GPA, if he’s motivated and obviously wouldn’t be playing a sport then.
Where are you getting the data that D3 athletes are spending 40 hours per week year-round on their sports?
Here’s what the NCAA’s data says (based on a 2019 survey). Yes, we should be skeptical, but it’s showing a median of 28 hours/week for all sports-related activities for D3 athletes , with less than half saying they have an equivalent time commitment in the off-season. Do you have other data sources that show something different?
Just personal experience, which includes feedback from my two kids, the other students I’ve worked with, and regular coach conversations. Some sports definitely worse than others, like baseball, but I absolutely know students and teams who regularly spend 40 hours per week all year long. Is it sometimes maybe 35 hours per week, probably.
When student athletes complete that survey, I often think they forget to include travel time, early morning weight room sessions, meetings, mandatory community service initiatives, etc.
This is one of the summary presentation slides from the 2019 survey. With more games/travel than other sports, D1 baseball has the most onerous load (with D1 football in 2nd). It seems like mostly a D1 baseball and football problem, rather than a generalized one across all NCAA sports and divisions.
Is this “off-topic” too? From the same slide presentation on the athlete’s perception of their own ability to keep up with academics (which, of course, is directly related to their athletic time commitments). D1 baseball is at the low end, with D3 “other” at the high end.
I don’t think so. My daughter would have included all those, if asked, and even included team meals because, to her, that was team time and not her time. She would have done some of the activities on her own anyway - study tables, eating, studying on the bus when traveling, weight lifting early mornings. Her team also did a lot of community and team building activities like swimming, beach clean up, working with youth programs and she’d count that too and I don’t think would come up with 30 hours per week off season.
Sports gave her week a lot of structure, so while it took time, it gave structure to the things she had to do that all college kids have to so - study, eat, study, get some exercise, study, eat, do some laundry.
There were some kids on her team who were average students in high school and they remained average students in college (but graduated). Most of her team were very good students in high school (it was a tech college) and were still top students in college, graduating with honors, becoming accountants and dentists and engineers. IMO, I don’t think athletes are out of their depths academically. Some use athletics to get into ‘this’ school over ‘that’ school, but they are not academically unqualified for the school, just used the hook. They still need to do the academic work.
This discussion is fairly similar to a thread that was started in August. The point of view is a little different, but the overall discussion seems to rhyme. Interested readers might want to look over the discussion here:
