Completely agree! I get tired of the comments questioning if athletes in general belong at high academic schools and can hack it. Here’s the thing - believe it or not, athletics adds something to a college community. Future employers LOVE to hire former collegiate athletes. Grad schools will take into consideration athletes who played at the undergrad level during their admissions process, as well. Med schools do the same. They understand the sacrifice, dedication, and hard work that these individuals put into their time being a student-athlete. They feel that this will also translate to the next level be it a job or grad school. Most athletes at high academic D3’s can hack their sport while also being a STEM major. It is what it is. Sorry that we (parents of collegiate athletes) don’t agree with what you (parentologist) have heard.
My daughter said that in her job interview, all they asked about was her sport, being a captain, how she handled playing with academics. They were engineers. They could read her resume and transcript and ‘get’ her academics, so no need to ask questions about them.
Time management is a big deal to employers.
Yep. One of my Ds was part of a victory at a competition that is very well known even amongst those who aren’t followers of the sport. And she occupied a key position on her team. It came up in every interview. People respect it, especially when it’s coupled with a notoriously rigorous major. I advised her to include on her resume the number of hours per week spent on the sport during season and off season. I’m sure that helped people put it in some kind of context.
This isn’t the norm for tech. Every tech company I am familiar with has technical interviews for engineering hires, involving solving problems and/or answering questions that correlate well with the skillset needed to be successful on the job. Being an athlete may (or many not) be an advantage, but its not norm for student athletes to get a pass on technical interviews. Larger companies often have a standardized process.
The influence of athletics on hiring can also vary among different employers and different fields, as well as vary on other characteristics of the individual.
For example, there is an interesting study at https://edre.uark.edu/_resources/pdf/collegeathleticslabormarket.pdf in which the researcher provided 2 resumes to employers. They were identical in all ways except one said the student was an athlete, and the other did not. Overall the non-athletes had both a slightly higher rate of callbacks and slightly higher rate of interviews than the athletes. However, when they added controls, it varied by race (race associated with name on resume). White athletes had better results than White non-athletes. For other races, non-athletes had better results than athletes. Specific numbers are below.
Received Callback
White, Is Athlete – 28%
White, Not Athlete – 26%
Other Race, Not Athlete – 24%
Other Race, Is Athlete – 21%
Interview Request
White, Is Athlete – 17%
White, Not Athlete – 15%
Other Race, Not Athlete – 15%
Other Race, Is Athlete – 12%
One possible reason for these results is some employers favoring hires who they expect to be a better cultural fit, rather than focusing on personality traits that they believe are associated with athletics.
My daughter is a non-white athlete, and a female in a male dominated company. I don’t think there was anything on her resume indicating she wasn’t white (she has an Irish name).
You pick why she got an interview. (Personally, I think it was because she is female).
But she wasn’t out of her league academically and had very good grades. Other team members? Several weren’t STEM majors at a STEM heavy school, but they weren’t out of their league academically, they just took non-stem classes (communications, business).
You are a very knowledgeable CC poster, so I don’t understand why you are re-posting your question by citing a flimsy data set of “a few cases of”.
We know more than a few, and in fact, many URM, ORM, high-academic, legacy, and other categories of kids who had trouble in demanding courses in college. Citing “a few” athletic recruits really means nothing. That is just life.
Simple Google searches reveal a bounty of studies showing how athletic recruits have fared in demanding college settings.
Our experience is that athletic recruits tend to stay in their lane. Those that were STEM kids in high school often remain so in college. I rarely see athletic recruits switching from their high school rigor track to an even more rigorous track at college.
I think D3, and in particular, NESCAC, schools do an amazing job at pre-read to make sure athletic recruits are good academic fits.
The focus of this thread has been on STEM, but I think some of the comments above apply in other fields as well. I was involved as a lawyer in hiring both lawyers and nonlegal personnel for many years. Based on my experience with how people worked out over time, I learned to keep any eye out for athletics on a resume. Recruits who were involved in sports in a serious way in college tended to have a level of discipline that proved very valuable in a demanding profession and were also able to absorb and use critical feedback without a lot of ego pushback. I should note that recruits with military backgrounds often had similar skills.
Same. Multiple organizations I’ve worked/interviewed for preferenced athletes in the hiring process. Not only for discipline but for their ability to work as part of a team, perseverance, and leadership skills.
Guess this isn’t what you wanted to hear, OP, is it?
Looking at successful graduates who are lauded for having been able to manage a D3 sport and academics after the fact is not what I’m talking about. That is a preselected sample of only those who succeeded, looking at solely them, after the fact. After all, STEM employers don’t see applications from recruited athletes who had to transfer out of the major, or the school, because they were in over their heads and struggled academically.
I’m talking about freshmen, recruited to play a D3 sport and admitted with “good enough” academic achievement, who might not (honestly, probably would not) have been admitted solely upon the basis of their academic achievement. The kid whose GPA met the minimum, but who didn’t have any tough APs, only honors and college prep classes, and since they go test optional, there’s no standardized test score to give context. It’s a few of those kids whom I’ve seen experiencing academic shock, and struggling when they start their STEM and other tough classes at the more selective colleges. The schools have these statistics, just as they have stats on all students, but they’re not sharing them. And even if they would, how would they keep track of a kid who started out with STEM, but dropped those classes and picked up sociology and other “soft” classes, because they realized that they just couldn’t keep up in the STEM classes, in which all the other kids had already had AP sciences and math in high school? Passing an academic pre-read does not mean that a person would have gotten in solely based upon their academic stats, especially in the test-optional era.
The only response that has confirmed what I’ve seen some cases of, is from an instructor who reported that although certainly not all recruited athletes struggled in her classes, of those who did, a large proportion were indeed the recruited athletes.
That instructor was not teaching at a selective d3 school though. I totally concede that a linebacker at the University of Missouri might barely squeak by. But the scenario you posit is not reality. It does not exist at selective d3s.
@parentologist, as many have already told you, athletes must pass a preread. Rigor is assessed. Prereads are not passed based solely on a gpa. The schools themselves do not want athletes to struggle!
I don’t have the patience to go through various teams to get accurate statistics; but most teams track and publicize team GPAs and academic accolades. And there are a lot! Not only are those kids not struggling, they are thriving, and kicking butt academically.
You seem unable to accept that there are a lot of really smart kids, who are also good athletes. Those are the kids ending up at selective d3s.
Look at the title. Some does not mean all. Guess i must by some coincidence be seeing the only few who exist.
No one doubts your experience and that you have seen several athletes in D3 rejective schools struggle in college in STEM classes. Others shared their experiences too, also all valid, and I expect accurate.
How do you explain all of the unhooked students at these rejective schools who don’t succeed in the early STEM classes? After all, these students don’t have the time commitment of a sport impacting their academics. I expect the proportion of unhooked students who drop off the STEM track is higher than the group of athletes who struggle…and I do agree the schools have this data.
It did not seem that was at a D3 rejective school of the type you are talking about (schools with less than 20% acceptance rate is what I think you referenced).
Why would you think every single athlete must not struggle? That bar is higher than the general student population. Some students will have a hard time in some classes. Some will be athletes. Most will not be.
I know students with excellent stats who struggled in comparison to other kids. I think rigor can be difficult to assess just based on GPA. For example, my son had a 100 average in Algebra 1 and Geometry. When he got to HS we had to make him go back a year. He had never seen a test that wasn’t multiple choice from the book.
I also think this is why many top D3s and ivys are asking for test scores as part of the pre-read. This is a trend that picked up speed as this year went on so maybe it was a lesson learned. I know that our BS struggled to place kids correctly in STEM classes without test scores as an additional data point.
Many recruited athletes at top D3 or D1 that we know in recent years are pushed into “easier” majors, by the coaches, so the majority never start in the harder tracks. Some of these examples were just below top rigor in Hs, some were WAY below top rigor. One was not allowed to apply to engineering as a condition of recruiting but is allowed to try to transfer if they can handle the prereqs. However—I went to med school with two D1 football players who were top students and had no trouble being science majors (both at highly academic undergrads) and getting into a very top med school. So, it depends , as does everything, on the circumstances.
I guess this all goes to show that, as usual, it depends on the kid - and the school. I am sure there are recruited athletes who have had difficulty pursuing rigorous STEM tracks at highly selective schools. Kids and their parents may underestimate the time and effort required by either or both the athletic and academic obligations. But, given the prescreening, etc., that the highly selective schools undertake, it seems less likely that a kid who is simply unable to cope with the academic work will slip through. If the combined load is too much, a D3 athlete will always have the option of dropping the sport to focus on academics. Or, if they do not want to give up their sport, they have the option of changing majors. Overall, it seems OK to me.
Maybe it’s the fact that you had “heard from friends” that this was happening with their kids at top secret schools which you refuse to share that has some of us coming off as defensive. You believe them but seem to find it difficult to believe those of us who have shared our answer to your question. It comes across as disingenuous.
I think it may be that you don’t have a full understanding of the pre-read process in SLAC admissions. While it is beyond dispute (among those who know) that athletics is as big a hook for admissions as there is, nobody gets in who can’t handle the work. The “would not have been admitted but for” crowd aren’t a bunch of slackers who don’t belong there. Admissions is so keenly competitive that you can say that about volumes of applicants who have the chops to be there, but won’t stand out enough academically to make the cut for an offer of admission. What athletics recruitment does for a small number of people in the “slot” (or pick your term) category is make up for whatever was lacking to “stand out”. But it’s never a move to bring in unprepared kids.
Another thing to consider is that not everyone who is admitted to, say, Amherst, should embark on a physics major. Take the anecdote shared by @NiceUnparticularMan about the Amherst kid who took a math class at UMass because it was pass/fail. That student is perhaps (we don’t know this person) someone who has no business majoring in physics there. It would be no different for an athlete. But there are plenty of athletes who are admitted, even with slots, who have the preparation to major in those areas, and they do so successfully. I don’t know if my daughter was a slot or a tip - she was actively recruited, but also had a strong IB record and test scores. Whatever it was, she successfully completed an astro / physics double major, which she was prepared for based on her IB focus.
In NESCAC and at other highly selective LACs, they’re not admitting people who can’t do the work. That’s a myth I’d disabuse yourself of for this topic. Those athletes of which you speak were likely unprepared for that course of study in the way an non-athlete might be. Add the rigors of the sport, and it’s no surprise it didn’t work out.
Now, D1 recruiting is an area where you can really have this discussion. But not D3 SLAC. I’d say it’s exceedingly rare.
Hugely important point. Athletes who struggle don’t graduate on time, and guess what that does to the school’s ranking factor? My kid’s advisors were all over them all of the time about the logistics of graduating on time. It really matters, so admitting kids who are going to hurt that particular stat is not a favorite pastime in the admissions department.