CalTech do sports help with admission chances?

@DumbYellow
There are four D1 teams at MIT, women’s heavyweight and lightweight crew, and men’s heavyweight and lightwei@DumbYellow

http://www.mitathletics.com/information/Compliance/DI

Here is some info about Men’s Lightweight Crew at MIT, so they review your application, before you submit to MIT Admissions to get it into the best shape possible:
http://www.mitathletics.com/sports/m-crewlt/FAQ09-10

You can see they quote pretty low test scores for athletes, although I think most are higher than this website suggests.

. I would ask the MIT crew coaches that question to get a clear answer on are there “crew rejects”, who might qualify to row, but do not end up getting into MIT.
I know a woman being recruited for what I thought was D1 women’s crew,
who was not accepted to MIT, so I think you are correct,
the MIT Admissions office still has final say in any Division 1 recruit to MIT. MIT Pistol may also be Division 1, by
the way.

Here is the D3 MIT recruiting page, so all other sports:
http://mitathletics.com/information/Recruiting/index

As a current Techer I’d like to inform you all that the statements above regarding athletics are bullshit.

In the past two years we have been admitting approx. 30% athletes as our student body due to the new athletics director (she has crazy, unchecked power). The administration's argument is that athletics pull alums -> pull donations -> good good moneys. Complete bullshit.

However, any smart athlete should know to capitalise on this fact!

This school is no longer the purely academic wonderland many describe it to be - coaches have enough pull to take an athlete over another student with similar or slightly higher qualifications. Based on my observations at athletics events, the kids in the teams are generally of lower academic calibre than the rest of the student body, some significantly so. Thank god we have no football team. Happy recruiting! You won't get in with a 30 ACT, but if you hold something near the bottom 25th percentile scores, you probably only stand a chance with athletics or some magical award.

Bonus fact: this school Does do gender-based affirmative action - how else are you going to get near 50-50 gender ratio when your applicants are largely male? I hope you didn't Really believe that Caltech was gender-blind; otherwise, you probably don't have the analytical skills to be here. If you get in and still wish to believe your fantasies of equality, perhaps you should go somewhere else. We don't need sheep who blindly believe in statements by higher powers here in science.

Bonus, bonus fact: this school is called “Caltech”, not some variation of that. Spelling it wrong will significantly decrease your chances of admission.

As a current Techer I’d like to inform you all that the statements above regarding athletics are bullshit.

In the past two years we have been admitting approx. 30% athletes as our student body due to the new athletics director (she has crazy, unchecked power). The administration's argument is that athletics pull alums -> pull donations -> good good moneys. Complete bullshit.

However, any smart athlete should know to capitalise on this fact!

This school is no longer the purely academic wonderland many describe it to be - coaches have enough pull to take an athlete over another student with similar or slightly higher qualifications. Based on my observations at athletics events, the kids in the teams are generally of lower academic calibre than the rest of the student body, some significantly so. Thank god we have no football team. Happy recruiting! You won't get in with a 30 ACT, but if you hold something near the bottom 25th percentile scores, you probably only stand a chance with athletics or some magical award.

Bonus fact: this school Does do gender-based affirmative action - how else are you going to get near 50-50 gender ratio when your applicants are largely male? I hope you didn't Really believe that Caltech was gender-blind; otherwise, you probably don't have the analytical skills to be here. If you get in and still wish to believe your fantasies of equality, perhaps you should go somewhere else. We don't need sheep who blindly believe in statements by higher powers here in science.

Bonus, bonus fact: this school is called “Caltech”, not some variation of that. Spelling it wrong will significantly decrease your chances of admission.

Permaban is correct. Sports definitely help. A Caltech coach told my neighbor she’s in if she can show higher than 750 on SAT math.

wow, this thread keeps getting better and better for my chances lol… nice motivation to write some awesome essays!

@Permaban What do you teach?!! All schools,including Caltech try for gender balance. Thats does not mean that girls are scoring lower on exams at Caltech, but it does mean that its “easier” by the numbers for girls to get in. I would say the average girl who applies to Caltech has taken BC Calculus in 10th grade and has taken Calculus 3 at a college, and other math classes. Often she has HL math and knows her way around a mathematical proof. If she has not, she will not pass freshman year at Caltech. Ditto for boys. If you have never solved a mathematical proof, try one before you get to Caltech. The freshman math sequence at Caltech is analysis, although it quickly reviews, single variable and multivariable calculus. Since most Caltech students studied multivariable in high school, it just moves on to analysis.

Generally, coaches can give more help to athletes during EA/ED as opposed to RD. I don’t know if that’s the case at Caltech.

Permaban said he’s a “Techer,” not teacher. Also disagree with the assertion that Caltech is dipping down to recruit athletes. The sense I get is that if you have the same stats as everyone else, it could give you an edge.

We had personal recruiting experience with Caltech last year, and in fact met with the AD and the coach. S’s stats were at Caltech’s median. Based on the stat’s they said he might have a 50/50 chance with their support, but his app would be crucial. Had virtually the same conversation with MIT, so I came away with the impression that the coach’s support for Caltech was on par with a strong EC. S ended up getting in early elsewhere, so don’t know how this all would have played out.

From a 2006 post about CalTech sports. I don’t think it has changed a lot…

"Rick Reilly writes commentary for S.I. In 1/9/06 issue, last page talks about Caltech team.
Tried to copy article:

At Caltech, the most eggheaded college in America, they love numbers the way moles love dirt, so here goes:
Number of Nobel Prize winners on the faculty: 5.
Number of players on the basketball team who had a perfect SAT score: 2.
Years since the hoops team won an NCAA game: 12.
Forget that. It’s been 21 years since Caltech, a Division III school in Pasadena, won a Southern California Intercollegiate Athletic Conference game. Wouldn’t you think just once a ball would bounce off a pocket protector and in for a win?
“We think too much,” says Roy Dow, the Beavers’ coach.
That’s true. Every player on the team can tell you the optimum launch angle, parabola and velocity of a three-pointer. They just can’t make one.
Not that Caltech doesn’t have a rich athletic tradition. During halftime of the 1961 Rose Bowl thousands of kids in the Washington student section were duped into holding up flip cards that they thought would spell out HUSKIES but instead spelled caltech. At the 1984 Rose Bowl, Caltech students hacked into the scoreboard by remote and changed it to read Caltech 38, MIT 9. There is a T-shirt you can buy in the university bookstore that reads CALTECH FOOTBALL: UNDEFEATED SINCE 1993. Possibly because Caltech hasn’t had a football team since 1993.
But winning games instead of mocking them? They’ll find the 10th planet before that happens. (Oops! A Caltech professor just did that.)
Do you have anyidea how difficult it is to get decent basketball players into a school this hard?
“I search all around the country, trying to find a few good players who could get in here,” says Dow, who has eight high school valedictorians on his squad, “but as soon as I hear they’ve gotten a B, it’s, ‘See ya!’”
Only six guys on his roster even played varsity ball in high school. Nobody on the team got an offer to play from any other college. None has dunked in his Caltech career.
The team’s best player, senior Jordan Carlson, who’s a theoretical physics major, figures he does schoolwork 14 hours a day. What’s so important at school? “Well,” he says, “an interesting question we’re studying now is how mass is generated in terms of quantum field theory.”
Oh, sure, the Kentucky players were discussing that the other day.
In his four seasons Dow has seen it all. One kid closed his eyes when he shot. One didn’t know if he was left- or righthanded. One current player puts topspin on his jumpers. “Must be some sort of physics I’m not aware of,” Dow says.
So I went to Pasadena last week to see the Beavers put their epic losing streak on the line against Rivier College of Nashua, N.H. Three things you notice right away:

  1. Caltech has the world’s most optimistic statistician. The stat sheet has a column titled WINNING STREAK. That’s like Paris Hilton keeping track of how many Oscars she’s won.
  2. Caltech players are so skinny they look like they could be knocked over by a butterfly’s burp.
  3. Caltech has no cheerleaders. But wouldn’t it be great?
    Molecules, slide rules
    Watt, ampere!
    Fill that cylinder
    With that sphere!
    But the Beavers do hustle, make smart passes and run their motion offense as smoothly as a gyroscope. That’s how, with 90 seconds left, they actually led Rivier by four. And the only thing the crowd could think was, O.K., which of these brainiacs is messing with the scoreboard again?
    Alas, Rivier started pouring in threes, and Caltech started spitting out turnovers, and when Carlson’s last-second 30-footer just missed, Caltech had lost its 181st straight NCAA game 55-54. (The Beavers have since lost two more.)
    Hey, at least it was close. Two years ago they lost by an average of 59 points a game. “Winning any single game at Caltech,” Dow says proudly, “has gone from impossible to improbable.”
    Not that it made the pizza afterward any easier to swallow. “I thought we were going to give you something to write about,” Carlson said glumly.
    You get the feeling, with kids as smart as this, they will. As an opposing player – whose team had just slaughtered the Beavers – said as he shook each Caltech player’s hand, “Now go cure cancer for us.”
    Issue date: January 9, 2006"

I think it was 2006 when I was there, watching Caltech BB win. So was Prez Baltimore and other parents. They almost won the previous game, and then finally won. Amazing. The female team was also good, and the women stayed to cheer on the men.

My understanding is that @Permaban is correct and admissions standards have fallen pretty significantly for athletes. The set of administrators in charge definitely have a different view on the issue of diversity broadly than previous regimes and one component of that is creating competitive sports teams. The two arguments I’ve heard for why this is important is 1) if MIT can do it, we should be able to as well 2) imagine a genius STEM student who wants to play competitive soccer in her free time, we should provide a competitive team in order to be able to recruit her.

Still, I am under the impression that the drop in standards isn’t reflected for the most part in test scores but rather in considering athletic commitments and successes as roughly at the same tier as scientific extracurriculars (being an All American may be similarly weighted as being a USAMO qualifier). In reality, this probably (impossible to actually measure/know but seems reasonably likely to be true) reflects a drop in standards and “Techer” qualifications from previous generations for athletes but you will still need elite scores/grades.

Why is excelling at sports and excelling at academics mutually exclusive? And what do you base the fall of admissions standards on? My sense if that everything being equal, athletes might (and I say might since coaches don’t guarantee admissions slots) gain a slight advantage.

@vhsdad sure. So, I think the underlying idea is that given a student is an extremely gifted athlete (we can debate if that’s a reasonable bar but just stick with me), the probability that they are an extremely gifted (or at the very minimum, the evidence that they are an extremely gifted) scientist will almost certainly be lower. This isn’t because of any bias or difference in ability but just their ability to allocate time to science studies and extracurriculars. Said another way, it’s highly unlikely you reach the highest levels of athletic performance in high school without spending significant time preparing for that (hitting the weight room, going to practice, eating and sleeping well, taking care of your body). These commitments prevent them from spending more time developing their mathematical and scientific acumen, demonstrating their interest in these fields, and working in a research lab.

From this perspective, the conditional probability that they have the same qualifications is just lower. And just for clarity, I don’t have any numbers to back up this assertion just 1) qualitative opinions from the (declining) contacts I have at Tech and 2) this framework above that makes those assertions seem reasonable to me.

Scholar athletes are really common in today’s world of elite high school students getting into MIT, Stanford and Ivy.
. Kids really do more than they used to and those very top students, with research work, and summer research AND varsity sports talent, are the ones who get into Stanford, MIT, and some of the Ivy League schools with athletics as one of their main activities in college. Stanford is very competitive for athletics though compared to MIT or Caltech and thus the academics of the Stanford D1 athletes may be somewhat weaker, or is said to be.

I have been surprised but D3 athletes that I have interviewed for MIT do extremely well at MIT. Something about the regimen of working out regularly may help the brain and give the student balance at a place like Caltech, so
I have come to understand why athletes are so sought after at MIT (and maybe Caltech? ) They SUCCEED!
They are driven and they can do the work required and have balance.

. I have no info on Caltech’s standards though, besides looking at test scores, and they have apparently dropped some. That could be the relentless drive to get to 50% gender balancing
since girls may test more poorly still due to various factors, or other social engineering Caltech is doing and not so much the tiny number of recruited athletes at this tiny school.

@Shrenil19 If the OP was being recruited in the fall of 2017, he/she would be targeting the 2018-2019 swim season at the earliest, and that class is still being filled, especially given the fact that Caltech doesn’t have ED. The second part of your statement is absolutely true as Caltech AD is on the record stating that the school does not “dip” for athletes.

Coach Hughes has already chosen his mens and womens swim team for this year. Sorry to say that theres no more spots. Basically if youre not good enough to get in academically, swim won’t help. At academic schools like caltech and mit academics come first