I’m not going to make any comment about how much lower standards are for athletes vs non-athletes. That’s a loaded topic.
However, I have 1 recruited athlete in my family. If I had a choice, I would 100% want all of my kids to be recruited athletes. Unfortunately, they all aren’t so fortunate. The process is so much easier and less stressful than the regular application process. To know that your child is essentially guaranteed to attend a university nearly 2 years in advance is a godsend for both the parent and the child. There is a lot less stress studying for standardized tests. Heck, for my kid, there was no need to even take them. There is no need to publish research, start a non-profit organization, volunteer, assume leadership positions in various organizations - all in an effort to convince the admissions office that you are more deserving. The school gives you a general expectation of what grades they want you to meet for the next 1-2 years. So that alleviates a lot of stress, too. At that point, it’s all about meeting their minimum standard. My kid only completed 1 college application and didn’t have to worry about sending 10+ like everyone else. I know for a fact the submitted essays weren’t “perfect,” but they didn’t have to be. It is a very stress-free experience once you get committed. The caveat is that you have to get committed. On the flip side, if you don’t get committed to a school that you want to attend, you’ve essentially IMO put all of your eggs in 1 basket.
I agree. If we had to do it all over again, knowing what we now do, we would have chosen the recruited athlete route in targeted sports (granted, we are an athletic family with favorable genes). Not everyone has this choice, of course. We were lucky and have had positive EA results either way, but athletics definitely is a great path to college with a lot of community support.
The dark side is that there are a lot of kids who didn’t make it. I think they spent a lot of time on a sport, and many could have better utilized the time doing other things.
True. There are also lots of students who don’t make it with their EC’s also. I can think of a handful of 1570+ kids, 3.9 UW GPAs with the toughest loads with strong EC’s not getting in as well. It’s rough all around - guess it’s best to just have your kids pick what makes them happierst. Getting in a few years earlier than others is definitely an amazing perk though!
That may be due to the fact that they have an intense PT/“FT” job that occupies their time during the entire calendar, not just academic, year. Also, they have a skill/talent/ability that the college finds desirable.
And then there are some that played at a high level in HS, didn’t get recruited, for whatever reason, but yet still play at the club level in college. And continue to compete.
There are A LOT of reasons to continue playing HS sports, fun and health being two reasons, even though a college scholarship or even a non-scholarship team position wasn’t in their future.
I think you and your kid have to be honest about their abilities early on. D1 vs D3? Are they willing to put the time into it? It becomes an almost joyless job to all of them when they are in high school. The stress between the end of freshman year and beginning of junior year is intense. Boys have it a lot harder than girls. Because of Title IX, there are fewer athletic opportunities in niche sports for boys than girls. Does your kid really want to go the athletic route for certain schools when it’s quite possible he/she could get accepted as a regular applicant without sports?
The non-recruited athletes also may have an intense PT/FT job that occupies their time during the entire calendar year, not just academic. I can think of several kids who work the entire year on their activities or employment coupled with the most difficult academic load. The key is that the college values “athletes” over other groups. Colleges have every right to do so, hence, the benefit of pursuing this path if you are genetically blessed and have the resources to do so.
We’ve gone back and forth over the Harvard lawsuit data in the past I believe. I don’t find them as useful as you seem to in terms of generalizing across the conference.
However, even the data you cite show that the vast majority of recruited athletes are well within the range of typical admits. So no standards or thresholds are being relaxed. And I would just point out that athletes and coaches come at this from a threshold rather than competitive viewpoint: Ivy recruited athletes typically know what score they need, take the ACT once, usually far earlier and with less preparation than most Ivy applicants, the score is good enough, and they are done. Non recruits, in my experience, spend a lot more time and effort squeezing the orange because every last drop of juice matters (or at least they think it does). Comparing the two pools (recruit vs. non recruit) when the approach is so different is not very revealing (not to mention poor scholarship).
You don’t mention, but it’s certainly relevant that recruited athletes score higher on both personal and overall rating than typical admits. So if standards are being relaxed I guess it cuts both ways.
Since we’re all sharing personal experiences I’ll share mine: I’ve been involved with a few dozen recruits over the years who looked at Ivies. Some ended up at Ivies, others didn’t. Most if not all would have raised the median ACT at any Ivy. The one I can recall who probably would have been a reach for HYP admit ended up at Stanford and did great. These are great students who also happen to be fun and interesting people. They aren’t better people than the non athlete admit, but a mix of both makes for a more interesting campus.
(As far as the wealth issue, you seem to have shifted to conflating recruited athletes with the pool of athletes at these schools; they are not the same thing).
Some non-recruited athletes work a PT/FT job, some don’t. I can think of some non-recruited HS athletes who only thought about their academic resume. Period. Or did nothing, but travel and look at their IG feed.
In the case of my D, she played her HS sport at a high level, had a PT paid job and and PT unpaid volunteer position all year round.
But it’s not like the recruited athlete is only doing their sport for 3 months and nothing else the rest of the year. Some often play multiple sports, train all year round, have PT jobs, and most importantly IMO, can and do get hurt, like concussions, broken limbs, strains, sprains, etc.
Injuries and rehab from injuries take time, patience, psychological wear and hard physical labor that it takes to come back from said injury, which the non-recruited athlete will NOT have to contend with at any time during the year. Very few realize or think about that sports do come with injuries and the road to recovery is difficult and of course there’s the academics too.
SO, let’s give the recruited athlete some just due and not demean them for being 1SD or whatever below the rest of the class. Or didn’t take a rigorous course load or whatever negativity folks want to thrust upon them here on this site.
Not demeaning anyone. No doubt athletes work hard and burnout/injury is real. At the same time, I’d like to give you some background regarding my family. My child was an Olympic-level athlete before deciding not to pursue the sport further. Our family is well aware of the injuries and level of commitment necessary.
I’ve been on this site for many years now. And the recruited athlete rarely get their just due, when it comes to their intelligence or their HS rigor/workload (“heavenly walk in the park”). It’s always about their less than stellar academic achievement and being 1SD, or whatever the “variance” may be, below the rest of their college cohort.
A, they’re not all dumber than their cohort, B, they provide a talent or skill that the university finds desirable and C, many get hurt and that could present issues within the context of their HS academic record.
I’m not sure how you are drawing that conclusion given that 18% were below 2 for non-ALDC vs 76% below 2 for athlete. Consistent with this, the standards for Ivy League conference rules are an average 1 standard deviation lower. Whether 1 SD lower is “within the range of typical admits” depends on what range you select as “typical”. Under a normal distribution, one would expect half of athletes to be > 1 SD below non-athletes. If you define “within range” as +/-1 SD, ~half of athletes are not within range on the low side. If you look at specific numbers such as stats, scores, or AI distribution; there are stark differences between the typical athlete and typical non-athlete… more so than nearly any other sizable hook group.
I’m not sure where you are getting this from, as I didn’t see it covered in the lawsuit. The original Plantiff analysis included athletes. The rebuttal analysis did not include athletes. So if I compare the 2 analyses, I can roughly estimate the ratings in which athletes were higher or lower than non-athletes. Using this method, I estimate that athletes averaged significantly worse ratings than non-athletes in all reader ratings categories except for athletic and alumni interview.
The lawsuit did find an extraordinarily large boost in chance of admission for being an athlete, when controlling for reader ratings, including controls for both personal and overall rating. Using odds ratio, chance of admission for a particular set of ratings, hooks, and other criteria was 2000x higher if a recruited athlete. If a particular applicant had subpar admission reader ratings suggesting a near auto reject with <0.05% chance of admission, he/she would be expected to be admitted as a recruited athlete. I realize that much of this boost relates to pre-screen, but it suggest that athletes can and do average far lower admission reader ratings and still be admitted. This is consistent with the academic rating distribution for athlete vs non-athlete that was published in the study and listed above, as well as the rough estimates for ratings in other criteria listed above.
The Harvard freshman survey only included recruited athletes, in their family income survey. It did not include students who hoped to walk on a team.
Sports & Top20 = admitting the type of student you want without being questioned.
Many kids spend too much time playing sports when the time would be better spent on academics. Many parents spend gobs of money in pursuit of getting that D1 offer.
That being said I am in favor of kids playing sports up through HS if they want to. I think it is goof for them to have an activity as long as it doesn’t interfere with their schoolwork.
There is a dark side to playing sports in college. It turns into a job for the student. It can easily interfere with their degree/major. Like most things this is not everyone but some. Kids burnout. Kids realize that eventually sports stop for 99% of them after college. Coaches in college can be jerks and you can be stuck especially if you aren’t a superstar.
I have seen plenty a college athlete give up their sport before graduating or wish they could.
Getting recruited as a college athlete for a team sport is a pretty involved process for most athletes. I didn’t want touch upon it, but the time and $ demand during the recruiting process (not just from playing HS sports) can be extraordinary.
I’m not sure if we’re disagreeing on semantics or substance. The way I see it, Harvard is willing to accept students within a range of academic measures. They accept non athletes with academic measures ranging from 1-3. So I don’t understand how one can say that they are “lowering standards” for athletes, the vast majority of whom are also within that range. The distribution isn’t really relevant, especially given the apples and oranges nature of the data pools. (That is, if a school is willing to accept a non athlete with a 32 ACT superscore, it isn’t lowering standards when an athlete with the same score, achieved earlier and likely in one sitting, is admitted).
As far as income, the claim I was refuting above was that athletic recruiting is used to admit the Uber-wealthy. I don’t think your income data supports that claim, nor does it call into question my claim that a significant number of athletes in sports like football, basketball, track and field are attracted to the financial aid available at Ivies.
Last but important point: I would not generalize from Harvard practices to the conference in general.
I’ll try to dig up a cite on the other issue. I am going by memory of some of the papers at the time but frankly discounted the whole enterprise awhile back…
It’s a matter of averages and statistical distribution. 3 is the lowest score for which the number of non-ALDC admits is significantly different from 0. This group includes URMs and others with non-ALDC hooks. If you restrict it further to non-URMs, then there were still some 3s but the portion is lower. Specific numbers are below. Yes, the groups were not completely separate, such that many athletes scored similarly to the lowest among non-athletes. However, there was still a very stark difference between the average for athletes and the average for the rest of the student body, consistent with the Ivy League conference rules permitting athletes to average 1 SD lower.
Unhooked – 9% have 3 or worse, 0% have 4 or worse
Non-ALDC – 18% have 3 or worse, ~0% have 4 or worse
LDC Hooked – 22% have 3 or worse, <1% have 4 or worse
… Large Gap…
Athletes – 76% have 3 or worse, 15% have 4 or worse
Each of my posts has emphasized conference rules about AI distribution that are applied to the full Ivy League athletic conference, not just Harvard.
I agree that athletes are generally not “uber wealthy.” However, there are still noteworthy differences in income distribution… generally more so on the low end than the high end. Competing at a high enough level to be recruited is often expensive. One does not need to be “uber wealthy”, but it can be challenging for lower income groups. There are also issues with differences in exposure and opportunities in many sports, for students of different income/SES groups. I also agree that football, basketball, and track and field aren’t associated with as high an income distribution as typical non-revenue sports.
I think this is where we disagree then. A kid who is academically qualified to succeed at Harvard doesn’t become less so just because Harvard admits more kids who published academic papers in a given year. Any more so than the minimum height requirement for a ride at Disneyland changes just because Kareem, Wilt, and Shaq happen to be in line that day.