Asian with a 1700 got into Stanford

Colleges and Universities A-Z Stanford University
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@renaissancedad You’re right, that’s an AI of around 195 and certainly some Ivy athletes are in that range, although at HYP the average athletic recruit is more like 210 (to meet the Ivy requirement of being within one standard deviation of the overall student average for these three schools, which is around 225). And the individual Ivies are restricted by league rules on academics, whereas Stanford (and Duke and others) can recruit whoever they want - it’s up to the school’s discretion.

That said, I’m still a fan of Stanford sports. Just saying it’s a difficult balance.

22

@bluewater2015, I understand that the AI of 195 is on the lowish side (“not great”, as I said above), but it’s still well above the Ivy cutoff. This applicant was a 5 star recruit, with plenty of other stuff as well. As a marginal recruit it might well have been different. For all we know some Ivies chose not to recruit her, but at least one did.

Finding a balance is extremely difficult, even aside from athletics. I thought I was hot sh*t when I arrived at Stanford a long time ago as an arrogant 18 year old, and academically I could run rings around the “average” Stanford student. But many of those people went on to found start-ups, start service organizations, win awards, and do other extraordinary things with their lives. Talent comes in many different packages. I consider myself fortunate to have been humbled and to have had my horizons broadened - which is one of the reasons why I chose Stanford in the first place.

23

I think this is a good discussion. I don’t know what the right balance is for admissions—on any criteria. I do know, however, that there are a lot of misconceptions on what the facts are about colleges and intercollegiate sports, be it at Stanford or elsewhere. My goal is to try to help people understand the facts. Where they go with those facts is a matter of personal preference.

A couple of you mentioned that there are only so many really top students, and Stanford is probably taking most if not all of them. I agree. There are very few lights-out academic students, contrary what some kids might tell you on this board. Maybe at most the top 1/3 of a school like Stanford or Harvard. I’ve known three in this category (and I’m an educator). Two were admitted early to Harvard, the other to Stanford. Two went to Stanford for undergraduate, the other went to Stanford for graduate school. (He told me that in retrospect he wishes he had gone to Stanford for undergraduate as well.) My hypothetical candidate in an earlier post (2400, Concord Review, etc.) probably falls into this category, so it might not have been the most appropriate example of the opportunity cost of any admit, athletic or otherwise.

Let me give you an actual example of the potential opportunity cost. Sarah was selected early to the Cum Laude Society at Phillips Exeter, which is based solely on academic performance in the classroom. Exeter is one of the top secondary schools in America. Early Cum Laude at Exeter is limited to less than 5% of the class (of 300). Sarah was not one of the top two students of her class, but she was among the top five students in her class. She had extremely high board scores. She was a captain of two sports, but she was not a recruited athlete. She was also very active in her church during her four years at Exeter. She was well liked by her classmates and teachers. Sarah is not what I above call a “lights-out student” but a notch below that.

Sarah applied early to Stanford and was straight-out rejected. She was not even deferred. She ended up at Yale.

There are a lot of Sarah’s rejected at Stanford each year. That’s the cost of admitting anyone, athlete or not.

Let me end by relating some facts:

• There has been a dramatic increase in the number of recruited athletes at Stanford. In the fall of 1972, in my freshman dorm of 74 students there were at most four recruited athletes (very broadly defined). Today that percentage is about 3 times higher. I don’t think this was a conscious decision of anyone at Stanford. It was a combination of Title 9, big donors who agreed to “support” a new team, etc. The rise in athletics is one of the most dramatic changes at Stanford over the past 40 years.
• Stanford is not alone. Harvard has 320 athletic admits in a class of about 1,650. At one time about 35% of the entering classes at Amherst and Williams were recruited athletes. That has declined somewhat recently, but it is still probably over 25%. My son was initially interested in Williams, but decided not to pursue it because it was too much of a jock school. The Williams faculty is upset with the focus on athletics, but the administration isn’t willing to do anything controversial.
• Stanford at one time (and probably now) had by at least one measure the biggest gap between athletes and regular students. The NCAA used to publish data on the average SAT scores by teams at colleges. (BTW, the lowest team SAT at Stanford was not football but women’s basketball.) At that time, Stanford was one of two schools with the biggest gap between athletes and other students. Georgetown was the other school. You can say that SAT is only one measure; it’s not perfect, etc. I don’t disagree, but it is the one consistent measure we have of all applicants, and it does do a good job predicting academic performance. That’s why all of the top schools use it.
• To me the most disturbing thing is what a freshman at Stanford called “the extensive segregation of athletes at Stanford.” Here is what he meant:
o They are admitted under very different standards. See above.
o Stanford gives scholarships for athletics but not for scholarship. Think about it. You are the kid of a single mother who is a pediatrician making $200,000 a year. Certainly not poor, but too much for financial aid at Stanford. If you are a good volleyball player, you can get a full ride. Heck, you can get a full ride even if your father is Bill Gates. But if you are the best chemistry student in America, there is no merit based aid at Stanford whatsoever for you. What message does this send to the high school students of America?
o The athletes “work” long hours, so they tend to hang out together. First, it is meals, and then after freshman year they live together. I understand this. A classmate of mine who is a coach at Stanford told me that the time commitments for athletes has increased “dramatically” since we were students. And this guy was an Olympian.
o Because the time commitments for their sports are so great and because many of them do not have the academic qualifications of the other students, many athletes gravitate to easier majors, such as STS. About 30% of the football team major in STS (of those who have declared majors), but only about 6% of the student body majors in STS, and this number includes a lot of athletes. Computer Science is now the largest major at Stanford. After the first couple of courses, it is a hard major. Currently, not a single member of the football team, men’s basketball, or women’s basketball is a CS major.
o From what I can tell, there is widespread agreement among students at Stanford, athletes and not, on most if not all of these points.

@renaissancedad Talks about how much athletes enriched his experience at Stanford. I had a similar experience. I don’t know if this is the case today. I don’t know whether it is because the segregation is greater today, or whether there are just more athletes.

Again, I don’t mean to attack anyone or any group of students. It does seem to me, however, that we have gotten into a position that is open to question in several respects.

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@fredthered, I’m certainly not defending athletes as a group, and I think that admissions right now is in a terribly difficult position given the sheer volume of applicants and the “bunching” that occurs (grade inflation, superscoring, test preparation, proliferation of special programs, etc.). If you have 1500 spots and 30,000 applicants, of whom 80% are clearly qualified, then you could essentially fill your freshman class 16 times over. So each of your qualified applicants would have about a 6.25% chance (1/16) in being admitted - about what the odds are for HYPMS. How do you differentiate? Do standardized test scores mean anything beyond a certain point, accounting for statistical chance and differences in preparation and superscoring? Does GPA given grade inflation and differences in schools? Which ECs do you value? Should there be a fixed cutoff similar to Oxbridge? In your example Sarah certainly had the qualifications for Stanford; though being forced to go to Yale probably isn’t the worst fate in the world.

I don’t know the answers to these questions. Athletics, for better or worse, is an area of potential differentiation. It’s obviously not “fair”, especially given that some sports are prioritized far above others for financial and publicity reasons. Scholarships can be quite limited in non "prime time"sports. It might be better to differentiate those sports from the ones that get most of the publicity and generate the most money.

Consider this fencing applicant, who ended up going to Stanford:

http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/athletic-recruits/1012720-fencing-future.html

A 238 AI out of 240 (2390 SAT, 4.0 UW GPA, class rank 1/345) and top 10 nationally ranked sabre fencer. I would bet that his academic qualifications fall at the top end or exceed the Stanford 25-75% range. Top fencers that I know train 6-7 days/week, pay for equipment and private coaches, and travel to competitions several times a year; it’s easily possible to spend $10K/year. And that may or may not have earned him a scholarship. Stanford offers 300 athletic scholarships, but has 900 students participating in intercollegiate sports. I believe that scholarships are sometimes split as well. The first full fencing scholarship at Duke was award to Becca Ward, who won an Olympic Bronze Medal while in high school and who went on to be a 3-time NCAA champion. She majored in public policy and also earned a minor and certificate, was a 4 time ACC academic All American, currently works for a Senator in Washington, and continues to be an ambassador for the school. I’d say that scholarship was a reasonable investment on Duke’s part.

I agree that it’s not ideal if a particular major is dominated by athletes because of difficulty, or if others are almost not represented at all. One of my majors was applied math - which included CS at the time - and I remember staying up late at night doing statistics problem sets with one of the stars of the women’s basketball team, who was also an applied math major. I don’t recall thinking that she was out of place. But a situation in which there is a huge “gap” is certainly a problematic one.

I was a “lights out student” at Stanford, and I would agree that this represents a minority. I’d guess less than 25%, though I found it hard to tell at Stanford, because a number of people were extremely bright but very quiet about it. I know there were some incredibly bright people, some much smarter than me. I also know that I was immature, arrogant and probably obnoxious when I arrived, and that I would have stayed so much longer in a less diverse environment. I consider one of the smartest things that I ever did - for me, personally - was choosing to go to Stanford instead of staying at the Ivies.

I’m rambling, and I don’t know the answer about how to address the inequities. It’s a tough situation. I’m glad I’m not on an adcom.

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I posted this on another thread, but it certainly addresses some of the concerns mentioned here:
My son accepted recruitment at Stanford and was recruited by several Ivies. He in a national champion in a non-revenue sport. His AI is 235. However, the coach at Stanford stressed that she was unable to guarantee acceptance. Acceptance at Stanford is controlled by admissions, period. He met many other athletes at Admit Weekend. All were exceptional students. At no point during his recruitment did any coach at any of these institutions suggest that academics were insignificant.
Subsequently he was told stories (granted they were anecdotal) of national and world champions who were not accepted at Stanford, because of inadequate grades and test scores. This young woman must have had exceptional additional ECs or is simply an anomaly.

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Just finished my first year at Stanford (as a non-athlete) and this post made me reflect on my opinion of athletes at Stanford. It is undeniable that because athletes spend so much time together, they hang out alot together (especially the revenue sports like football and basketball). Many of the football players in my freshman dorm were hardly around the dorm because they practiced so much, and then studied together in the team locker room. All I can say is that when I did get a chance to interact with the athletes around my dorm, they were nothing but smart, humble and cool, chill guys and girls to hang out with. In fact I can say some of my great friends today are athletes of all different kinds of sports. While they do tend to live together after freshman year, I think it happens less than people think. Lots of my non-friends have athlete roommates/draw mates of various sports.

While one could say there is a non-athlete/athlete divide purely in the sense that athletes like to hang out together naturally because they spend so much time together, it’s really not a divisive issue at all. You rub shoulders with athletes everyday in class and the dorms, and they are some of the coolest and smartest people I’ve ever met.

I think some people assume athletes have a jock status on campus where they look down on everyone else but they really don’t whatsoever, and don’t even want it. They’re some of the most humble people I’ve ever met. I remember talking to one of my football player friends and saying I don’t know how you do it. going to practice early in the morning everyday and also taking the same classes as everyone else." His reponse was “Naw, I respect you. you play in the band, go to your clubs, and still take really hard classes? I wish I could do that.”

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If Stanford gave merit scholarships at standard levels, such a large portion of the class would qualify that it would drive up tuition. They could give merit scholarships for only the ones who are exceptional on a national/international levels, such as international academic team members and similar top few, but that would not help the ones who are concerned about this. Instead of merit scholarships, they make the college more accessible with very generous FA. If you use their FA calc with typical assets,you’ll find that your $200k pediatrician family qualifies for quite a significant FA “scholarship.”

If you make a video series titled “How I got into Stanford”, being among the top 20 nationally ranked recruits in the country in your sport is obviously an important factor to neglect. That said, while some recruited athletes have relaxed admission standards, Stanford still requires that the athletes be qualified to succeed academically at Stanford. This is reflected in Stanford athletes as a whole having the same grad rate as non-athletes, with highest FGR grad rate of all Div I colleges. The degree to which academic requirements are relaxed varies quite a bit between sports and particular athletes. For example, I briefly rowed at Stanford. I was not a recruited athlete and did not have any previous rowing experience. Most of the team were not recruits. Many of the persons I knew on the team were really amazing from an academic perspective, as well as an athletic one, including recruits. Looking at Stanford’s website, ~80% of the current varsity rowing team who have declared a major have chosen ones that have a reputation for being challenging, with nearly half in engineering or CS. The article at https://cheme.stanford.edu/news-events/news/engineering-rowing-team discusses reasons for this correlation between engineering and rowing. , Rowing is far from the only sport with this pattern, particularly sports where recruits cannot expect to make a living doing the sport professionally after graduating.

This wasn’t my experience at all. The athletes I knew generally had many non-athlete friends who they hung out with and regularly did things together. Sure there were some athletes who had mostly athlete friends, just as there were some Asian students who had mostly Asian friends, or students who primarily hung out with kids in their frat, or students whose friends had similar majors and classes, etc. I expect you’ll find such cliques in nearly any college. Rowing practice was ~25 hours per week or so. So roughly the same number of hours as part time job or various other time consuming ECs that many students participate in. I had time to take a heavy enough schedule to complete a BS+MS in electrical engineering in slightly under 4 years, while also doing the pre-med track (had a lot of entering credits from college classes during HS).

I get the impression that Stanford looks past test scores more than most other highly selective colleges. While you aren’t going to find many unhooked students with a 1700, some do have lower scores than most on here would expect. For example, there was a poster on here last year who mentioned her unhooked daughter was accepted with an 1890. I was accepted unhooked with one of the ~6 lowest CR scores in my entering class at 500, although I had a perfect math score. Along the same lines, Stanford has a history of rejecting perfect stat applicants. A recent article in the alumni magazine mentions rejecting the vast majority of 2400 scoring applicants. Back in 2007, the dean of admission at Stanford said that they rejected 65% of the applicants who had a 4.0 and a perfect SAT. Admissions decisions involve far more than stats for non-athletes, as well as athletes.

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@fredthered BUT shes not alone… https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k8fHUSgpMBg fast forward to 2:35-2:45

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Fredthered - I’d like to amplify and reinforce one thing that you brought up in your thoughtful post.

First of all, I think Stanford does high level academics and athletics better than anyone.

But what bothers me most is that even at a school like Stanford it is the athletes themselves who are harmed the most. Even at Stanford, which competes at the very highest levels in every sport, very few athletes will end up doing the sport for a living. Yet as you point out, Fredthered, the athletes do not have enough hours in the day to handle the demands of their sport along with a time intensive major like CS or engineeing. There are exceptions of course, but if you analyze the majors of the athletes you would see the trend is slightly less rigorous majors. And the problem of handling the time demands of the sport and the classroom is just getting worse.

Now a Stanford grad in any major is pretty competitive in the marketplace regardless of the major, so that’s why this “Faustian” bargain is maybe okay there, but imagine the average football player or (worse I think) basketball player at the typical flagship State university. What does he or she do with no pro career and a recreational studies major?

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That’s very sad, but it wasn’t the case in the past. Kodak used to offer a handful of full scholarships to the best students in America based on their Freshman performance in Chemistry at the tippy top schools.

Blame the loss of this on digital photography.

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Kaukauna, those are some interesting points. I do think some college athletes are being exploited, especially at schools where graduation rates for revenue sport athletes are low and where only a small percentage will ever get a big professional sports paycheck.

I think it’s generally a reasonably good deal for athletes at Stanford and other academically competitive schools, even though it’s definitely a challenge in terms of time and workload. This is especially true for those athletes who might not be at Stanford in the first place if it weren’t for their athletic accomplishments - not saying that’s all they have to offer, but it makes a big difference in admissions for recruits - and for those on full or partial athletic scholarships.

William Bowen did some interesting research on career outcomes for athletes at academically selective schools, and found that on average they actually have higher earnings than non-athletes, notwithstanding academic credentials that are on average lower than others at their schools. As noted above, SAT scores etc. are just one way of measuring talent.

Here’s the alumni magazine article I mentioned on Stanford sports.

https://alumni.stanford.edu/get/page/magazine/article/?article_id=72888

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Actually more Stanford student athletes pursue general engineering majors than non-athletes. In 2012, slightly under 11% of student athletes pursued general engineering compared to 7.6% of the overall student body. Engineering was the 3rd most popular major in both groups. Athletes were more likely to choose flexible interdisciplinary majors like human biology and STS than non-athletes. However, both human biology and STS are among the 4 most popular majors for the overall student body, so a good portion of non-athletes choose these majors as well. The most notable differences I see are management sciences & engineering was nearly 3x more popular among athletes, while CS was much more popular among non-athletes.

I don’t have a good explanation for why athletes as a whole seem to favor majoring in engineering, but not majoring in CS. Maybe athletes are less likely to be focused on the choosing the major with the highest starting salary, so they haven’t seen the rate of CS majors skyrocket in recent years like they have for non-athletes? Or maybe it more relates the article I linked earlier about the majority of Stanford rowers majoring in an engineering field where they seemed to like being able to apply their aspects of their major to their sport? This would also fit with human biology being the most popular major among athletes.

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@Data10 - not to derail, but what would you say would be typical assets?

I did a quick plug and chug with $200,000 of income, a $400,000 home value with a $100,000 mortgage, and $100,000 in cash. No FA at all. All that seems fairly modest to me. Maybe I should try again with a different state???

ETA: Nope. State change did not make a difference. I also put in $56,000 of federal income tax.

It would be nice to know where the breaking point is in terms of income/assets where you pretty much know you’re not going to get anything.

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@Data10 CS takes a lot of time because of all the assigned programming projects, so I’m not surprised that most athletes end up avoiding CS as a major.

@Hoggirl I think the cash amount you’re using is way too high. Try it with 10-20K. Even well-off middle-class families are usually asset-rich and cash-poor. And a $100,000 mortgage? Way too low. Try $200-300K ti be more realistic.

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My post mentioned student athletes are more likely to major in engineering than non athletes, yet less likely to major in CS. Personally I found that Stanford engineering classes were more time consuming than CS classes, so if athletes were simply trying to avoid time consuming majors that offer little flexibility, then I’d expect to see fewer engineering majors among athletes, not just fewer CS majors. Instead there is something that is different about engineering and CS that makes athletes as a whole favor one and not the other.

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@foilist - okay. I used:

200,000 AGI
56,000 federal income tax (28% - just a guess)
10,000 cash
400,000 home value
300,000 mortgage

only one kid - the one going to college. Grant aid = $3,400

Obviously, this is bare bones on the NPC. Student also has an expected contribution of around $2,200 and qualifies for a $5,500 Stafford loan, but I hardly think that a $3,400 grant is significant.

Sorry - I feel like I have ventured O/T, but I think Data10 is overestimating what a $200,000 household is going to get in aid.

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Here are the results I get for a 3-person family single parent family in my CA zip code, with 1 in college, a $200k AGI income, and $25k taxes for various assets:

$200k/yr AGI income + $100k savings - $7k scholarship/grant
$200k/yr AGI income + $200k savings - $3k scholarship/grant
$200k/yr AGI income + $300k savings - no scholarship/grant

Maybe, “quite a significant” was a poor choice of words, but $200k income families with one in college can often get some degree of aid. Larger families with more than one in college or other AGI dedudctions can receive greater aid.

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@Hoggirl If it’s really AGI that they ask, if your household income is say, $200K gross, then after exemptions and deductions then I’d say a typical value for AGI would probably be $100-150K. And even less if you are self-employed and have a lot of deductions.

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@Data110 My experience is different. I think for a lot of engineering classes, you can get by on aptitude. In contrast, if done “right” major programming projects take more time because you actually have to sit down and experiment and write/re-write the code. (Of course, all these modern programming environments and editors help speed it up nowadays, but still.)

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Several surveys have looked at how many hours per week students from different majors spend on their classes. In all such surveys I am aware of, engineering students averaged more time per week than all other majors. One example, is the NSSE study http://nsse.indiana.edu/NSSE_2013_Results/pdf/NSSE_2013_Annual_Results.pdf . As a whole, I do not think engineering has low time requirements compared to CS. However, I agree that different students have different strengths, and some find one field easier than the other. I probably have more natural ability in more purely deterministic CS/math type fields than more applied engineering type fields (particularly engineering labs), and as such did well in CS classes while spending less time than classes in most other fields, such as engineering. However, I expect the opposite is true for a good portion of Stanford CS majors since persons who are not naturally drawn to CS are more likely to pursue it than other fields for financial reasons, such as 6-figure starting salaries.