"- 20% of U.S. parents with kids in sports programs expect them to win a college athletics scholarship, TD Ameritrade found in a recent study.
- Many parents also tap their retirement savings, work overtime or even raid college funds to pay for coaching fees, equipment and other expenses that can easily add up to $500 a month.
- Statistics shows that only 11% of young people got sports scholarships to attend college in 2019." …
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/betting-on-a-sports-scholarship-to-pay-for-kids-college-dont/
I’d be interested to know how many CCers that post on this particular forum have children who earned a scholarship.
So only a fairly small minority of sports parents think their kids can get a scholarship. Only 20%. I wonder how many parents of kids in robotics clubs think their kids will get a merit scholarship at the UCs or Harvard. I’m guessing it’s at least equal to 20%. Can we see some comparative data on how one group of parents is more deluded than the other before we keep beating this dead horse?
My kid got an athletic scholarship which she could (and did) combine with a merit scholarship. Her school had 3 levels of merit, and she got the middle level. Anyone who was in robotic or when to a STEM high school was guaranteed the lowest level of merit, but you couldn’t get that level for a robotics merit and another merit based on stats.
Now they do it a little differently ad there is a small scholarship of $2500 for the robotics, STEM, eagle scout, etc, and then the student also gets a merit award based just on stats. Can still stack an athletic scholarship with one of the smaller awards.
I had my eyes on golf caddy scholarships for my kids. They, sadly, didn’t cooperate by becoming caddies.
@ccprofandmomof2
Couldn’t agree more! My daughter got a 36 ACT, and my in-laws think the merit money is falling from the sky for her to go to Stanford. She’s working the sports angle at high end schools, but she won’t be getting any merit money, her reward is getting into a T20 school and we still get to be full pay.
CCer that have had children that were recruited and could have earned an athletic scholarship of some form but they picked the school based on academics and fit. In those cases the athletics helped them get into the school.
Athletics & recruiting can help you get into a school though athletes/students earning athletics scholarships are often overstated and exaggerated by parents especially by the word of mouth that gets spread about by other parents.
I have had numerous people tell me about someone going to an Ivy for a full ride based on athletics disguised as merit (not possible at an Ivy) or a D2 or even D3 giving a full ride for track because they really wanted their son/grandson/friends kids…who was a slightly above average HS Athlete.
Many parents do not understand how scholarships work, that some sports programs are not full funded and that recruited does not always mean athletic scholarship or depending on the sport it may be a smaller partial scholarship.
However, if you are a very good athlete and a top student academically, it can open some doors and provide a lot of good options to choose from.
This subject has been discussed previously. And, despite being openly discussed for years, the scholarship myth persists. https://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/10/sports/10scholarships.html. Overall, there are more dollars available for academic scholarships. https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052748703824304575435340724917622. On this data, it could be argued that tutors would be a better spend than private athletic trainers.
That said, these are overall numbers. An athlete getting an athletic scholarship has to be both good and lucky. A student getting an academic/merit scholarship has to be good, and often have the stats above the mean in able to qualify. For example, a student with a 36 ACT and equivalent GPA probably could get a very hefty academic scholarship to a college or university – but it would not be to an elite academic institution where students with that ACT score are being turned away.
Being a good student and good athlete, however, absolutely does open doors, as suggested by @recruit parent – both in college admissions and after college.
It is much more likely that athletics opens doors to better schools than it amounts to a ton of money unless it is football, basketball or baseball at a D1 powerhouse. Conversely women are more likely to get full rides in sports like rowing due to title IX (depending on the school of course). Ivies dont have scholarships or merit. It is all FA. So when you hear full ride at an Iv, that means full financial aid. Some schools --including Ivies–have money slotted for very specific students like Princeton had endowed scholarships at one point for certain boarding schools.
hahaha… i bet that number is way higher among NON-CC members. DS22 plays on a high level soccer team… most of the parents are delusional. DS has a 4.0 and has gotten some invites to camps (all D1 schools can do at this time). We have no illusions about his “odds” For boys there are only about 90 or so D1 soccer programs… for girls around 400. DS’s odds are not good and we don’t have any intention of pursuing it. We might consider a D3 program IF he decides he’d like to continue playing.
That said 90% of our team parents believe their sons will play in college (despite not having great grades). But you can’t tell those parents anything… little johnny’s future is bright.
“An athlete getting an athletic scholarship has to be both good and lucky.”
I don’t get this statement. There’s projection involved in recruiting, but not much luck.
That number seems incredibly low for my daughter’s sport, gymnastics, where every parent of a child who can do a handstand or a backflip seems to think they’re destined for D1- at least for awhile. There are too many coaches that perpetuate the craziness too. My favorite part of my not-NCAA-caliber gymnast heading to college is that club gymnastics is basically free. After years of such an expensive sport I’m just happy she can continue for the love of it without sinking all her money into it!
Unfortunately, at least in our experience, the delusion is often the worst in the families that can least afford to be delusional in terms of finances and educational attainment. My kids played pretty high level travel ball in baseball and softball and we knew how costly that was in team fees, private lessons, and travel expenses, both for the teams and for recruiting camps and showcases. Our family was fortunate that we could afford this without sacrificing anything other than time, and we supported our kids in these sports because we are a big believer that sports develop many great life traits, and we were aware that sports could open doors to elite college admissions. Many of the families we played with had to scrape for every dollar – on occasion I got a separate room for my kid so that he/she could share with a teammate whose parents were unable to make the trip. The bigger tragedy though was that many of these kids were just not academically prepared. They and their parents were chasing fractional scholarships and education was not a priority. For many of them, if they had spent a fraction of the time and money they spent on playing ball on schoolwork and tutors, they would have gotten a much better return in merit scholarship money given their racial and economic status. When I tried to point this out to several of these parents, my advice fell on mostly deaf ears as fantasy and ego got in the way. And so the multi-billion dollar youth sports machine rolled on and over those least able to afford it.
While betting on a sports scholarship may be unwise in most situations, sports accomplishments do help with getting admitted to many colleges & universities which do not offer sports scholarships.
Not an athlete, but my daughter received merit scholarships for dance. She received the 2nd largest merit scholarship for her dance BFA and was admitted to Rutgers Honors College. This is all based on her dance audition. Her grades are fine but not merit scholarship level for the programs that she was admitted to.
Interesting that dance is considered a talent & not a sport–same for those with musical ability. Probably because there is no scorekeeping & no clearly defined winner or loser.
There are plenty of music and dance competitions where there are winners/losers.
Our experience was that good students saw much more scholarship money than athletes, other than the very tippy top. The athletes who did get big $ tended to go to lesser known regional schools. I agree that having both the grades and the athletic ability is a boost to overall admission.
My son was not a scholarship athlete, choosing to attend an Ivy instead of some opportunities in lower level D1 schools. There are a few regulars here who are parents of scholarship athletes. There are more of us whose progeny leveraged their athletic gifts into admission at top end academic schools, foregoing scholarship opportunities elsewhere. I think it is just the nature of this board.
Personally, I have been banging this drum for a long time. When my kids first started playing sports I was flabbergasted by the number of parents who were convinced that little Jimmy or Suzie was going to college on a “free” ride. Often this belief was completely independent of any objective physical skill. The level of self delusion that some parents engage in is really something. I will say that I have seen a number of parents engage in the same level of wishful thinking when it comes to recruiting in the high academic world. We all think our kids are both awesome and unique. But the cold truth is that there are a whole lot more kids playing competitively in high school than there are in college. The funnel really narrows, and it is best that you keep that in mind when thinking about recruiting.
When I coached youth sports I would hand out an NCAA publication every year that shows the number of kids competing in high school and the number who go on to compete in college. I have posted it here before, and I still think it is the single most important thing to understand when you or your child starts thinking about playing in college.
http://www.ncaa.org/about/resources/research/estimated-probability-competing-college-athletics
Even within these numbers, it is important to understand that most kids participating at the D1 or D2, unless they are in a headcount sport, are not getting anywhere near a “full ride”.
And as an aside to @PurpleTitan. I think there is a fair amount of luck in athletic recruiting. A kid needs to remain relatively injury free for one thing. I played with a kid in high school who was maybe the best pure athlete I knew. He broke his ankle mid way through senior year and ended up at a small D2 school that wasn’t even on his radar until after his injury (where he went on to a really nice career). On the other hand, I was able to remain injury free through high school and ended up in D1 (where I had a decidedly mediocre career). Luck played a role in that, on both ends.
“There are more of us whose progeny leveraged their athletic gifts into admission at top end academic schools.”
Or into academic merit scholarships. Her dance background definitely helped my D to gain her scholarship because the selection committee were looking for a variety of backgrounds and majors (for their cohort of 30 students) and a ballet BFA student hadn’t won the scholarship in the past. And she wouldn’t have even considered applying there if it hadn’t been for their top notch dance program.
Unless you are a truly remarkable athlete, luck is pretty important especially for team sports. There are many, many athletes that are recruitable at the various levels and have the athletic stat’s and recognition. Coaches in the recruiting process have limited opportunity to watch recruits in person and for the “average” recruitable athlete, exposure will be at some camp, showcase, or tournament where coaches are watching sometimes hundreds of prospects, if not dozens. Athletes have good days and bad days. The coaches may be watching you when you make that exceptional play (or when you boot something routine) or they may be off somewhere else watching another group.
20% expected scholarship versus 11% getting some level of scholarship is probably the least delusional thing I’ve seen in college applications or on CC. the 40,000 unhooked kids applying for 400 unhooked slots at Harvard and other T20s seems far more delusional than athletic scholarship chasing based on that stat.
Also, for affluent sports (lacrosse, soccer, field hockey, cross country, etc…) very very few kids (or more likely their parents) are going to let their kids apply to bottom academic D1s just to chase a fractional scholarship. For the team sport I’m most aware of (WSoc) almost no one gets a full scholarship (even at T10 sports schools), and many lower D1 schools have no scholarships or well below NCAA limits (e.g. 3 of 14 for Wsoc; e.g. Davidson) so athletic scholarships are not expected even for the best players that go to those poorly supported D1 schools. Finally, some of the bottom D1 sports are actually worse than top D3 in terms of quality.