<p>"I mean, these athletes are not even close to being state champs, let alone best in the city or district!"</p>
<p>Take a look at Stanford's, Harvard's, Princeton's, UCLA's, Brown's, and other ivy league teams' rosters and think again.</p>
<p>if you have a problem with atheletes getting into ivy league schools...do you also have a problem with proatheletes getting paid upwards of 10 mil/year?</p>
<p>nick3333, it was not sarcastic. I understood your meaning and I agree with you. I thought it was a very mature point of view.</p>
<p>Bottom line is that with Harvard graduating 98% of its students, and with 25% or so being varsity athletes, it seems that almost all varsity athletes who go to schools like Harvard are qualified to do the work. I'm sure Harvard's graduation rate among athletes is MUCH higher than most Division 1A schools (especially big football schools). </p>
<p>The overall fact is that even if you have a higher GPA and SAT than another applicant, that doesn't mean
A. You are more qualified for admissions than the other applicant
B. You "deserve" admissions more than the other applicant</p>
<p>Colleges say again and again that SAT and grades are just components of admissions and that other factors, including extracurriculars, athletic ability, diversity factors of all sorts, legacy, etc. play parts. Why is anyone surprised that athletes get such a big boost? Admissions to undergraduate is not based on academics alone, nor should it be.</p>
<p>"Take a look at Stanford's, Harvard's, Princeton's, UCLA's, Brown's, and other ivy league teams' rosters and think again."</p>
<p>Depends on the sport. The best football recruits in my area go to Penn State, Miami, Pitt, Ohio State, Michigan and other D1 schools.</p>
<p>i didnt read the whole thread, but do you guys know how the recruited athletes are doing in ivy league schools now academically? are they struggling?</p>
<p>To chrichessill,</p>
<p>I don't know if there are pure numbers, but anecdotally, athletes do well enough. Some do better than others, but given high graduation rates at all Ivy league schools, it looks like they are very capable of doing the work. Athletes also do very well in job recruiting. </p>
<p>The few questionable episodes have been at Princeton where a few players had been determined academically ineligable on the basketball and football teams.</p>
<p>EDIT- I was just doing Google searches, and most Ivy League schools say their student-athlete graduation rate is at or higher than the graduation rate of the overall student body. Compare this to many schools where the numbers are dismal (less than half of football teams of many Division 1 schools graduate).</p>
<p>He is right about that. Athletes do inherently posess many of the qualities that make a person successful.</p>
<p>There are plenty of pure numbers. Again I'd reference "Reclaiming the Game" which is book 2 on the subject by former Princeton president William Bowen. Graduation rates are good for ivy athletes (recruited athletes are more the subject of his books than walk-ons) but classroom performance is not. Most info is for class of 1999, ok it's a few years old but I can't imagine the trends have changed that much.</p>
<p>Some numbers from the many charts and graphs in the book: the average ivy football player is at the 21%ile of his ivy class, wrestler at 24%, basketball (male) 26%. At the NESCAC colleges (Amherst Williams etc small schools where athletes represent a higher share of the student body) those numbers are 20, 26, and 30. The authors found there is even academic underperformance for these athletes...they do worse than even their entering academic stats predict (see the books chapter 6 "Academic Underperformance"). Chapter 4 talks about the worst of it: a "campus culture" of anti-intellectualism, that athletes in the major sports isolate themselves in the classroom and socially from the rest of the student body. And that they are clustered in business majors and social sciences, not sciences or engineering.</p>
<p>This is the former pres of Princeton, who researched and wrote the books because of the problems hence the name of the book. Please, I know there are plenty of ivy and top schools grads who do very well at school and afterward.</p>
<p>2331clk</p>
<p>Maybe lower stats "predict" lower percentiles as far as GPAs go, but:</p>
<ol>
<li>Percentiles are sort of unfair given that someone is always gonna be in the lower percentiles</li>
<li>The only fair, benchmark platform as far as admissions go is "Can they do the work." This means that the people admitted meet the basic criteria for admissions to a given school. </li>
</ol>
<p>I think the administrators are huffing and puffing about "anti-intellectualism." It has been argued that Ivy student bodies as a whole are "anti-intellectual" many times, focused only on grades/extracurriculars/internships/jobs, not on pure academics. I don't think athletes should be entirely to blame.</p>
<p>My academic experience has been greatly enhanced by athletes, pure academics, and everyone in between. The campus atmosphere would deteriorate significantly without recruited athletes IMO.</p>
<p>"I mean, these athletes are not even close to being state champs, let alone best in the city or district!"</p>
<p>Take a look at Stanford's, Harvard's, Princeton's, UCLA's, Brown's, and other ivy league teams' rosters and think again."</p>
<p>I mean the athletes at my high school, not the ones at the schools listed above.</p>
<p>The big football schools graduate less than 50% of their scholarship players... if you want to complain about people getting in unfairly, look there. Many of these schools fugde the players grades anyway. Don't complain about the schools where the players graduate at a comparable percentage with the rest of the class. I think you'd have much better luck complaining about Ohio State's or USC's or Michigan's or UVA's policy on admitting poor academic students who can't carry the load rather than the Ivies.</p>
<p>Sports add a lot to the college environment... seriously.</p>