I know little about squash and picked it at random, but the same point holds true for the Harvard athletes who play the sports that are offered at your high school.
One thing I do know about squash is that it actually does take one hell of a lot of work and work ethic to become good enough to be recruited by Harvard.
Squash isn’t even a NCAA sponsored sport. But among the list of NCAA sponsored sports, the majority are done by wealthy kids. That includes: beach volleyball, fencing, field hockey, golf, gymnastics, ice hockey, lacrosse, rowing, skiing, tennis, volleyball, and water polo.
We live in a time where 9 year old football and baseball players have year-round private positional coaches and there are travel basketball teams with schedules comparable to the NBA, there isn’t a collegiate sport left that isn’t influenced by a significant degree of elitism.
Wealthy athletes in any sport always have a built-in advantage.
My son was contractually precluded from playing his sport in high school.
We aren’t “wealthy” either.
In my state from the sports on your list, middle class kids do participate in hockey, gymnastics, volleyball, and tennis/skiing… also increasingly lacrosse… Not that it’s not a struggle sometimes though since club level is required for most of those sports which is pricey. Not pricey to the degree of having to also pay private high school tuition on top of club sports. Many public high school kids do these club sports. Top gymnasts don’t do high school gymnastics at all, only club. Most top female hockey players here usually still do the HS season as well as club the rest of the year. Some top Hs boys do the same, although some play juniors hockey which means leaving home and not playing on HS team. Crew, squash, polo - mostly just private school kids here.
Back to my original topic.
All of the universities I am referring to are multi-billion dollar entities. For the majority of schools on the list, the athletics programs bring 0 actual revenue. They represent a costly annual financial drain. Like other industries, they probably have all done cost-benefit analysis to
determine exactly how much running their sports programs helps/hurts them.
How much does the additional exposure and publicity: influence overall public perception of the school, increase the popularity of the school among potential applicants (especially coveted ones), increase satisfaction among current students/faculty/alumni, and increase donations to the school by alumni and other parties?
My guess is that those long-term benefits are well worth the cost. It’s too late for schools like U Chicago and Tulane to go back.
But UChicago will show you the Heisman Trophy that they have on display during the tour.
Yup, the the trophy belongs to the first-ever Heisman Trophy winner who was also the first player selected in the inaugural NFL draft. What U Chicago could have become…
SEC Football Payout Per School
The distributed revenues totaled slightly more than $54.6 million per school, an increase over the $657.7 million distributed in 2019-20 that amounted to $45.5 million per school, not including bowl money retained by participants that fiscal year
That’s a lot of money. But to a school like Stanford or Duke, it’s a pittance to what they may be actually gaining from the athletics program. Could it be that the free publicity and halo effect not only enhances its overall reputation, but it also leads to a greater sum in terms of actual contributions to the school?
And yet Duke is probably the biggest contributor to the ‘one and done’ basketball player trend. They aren’t taking lax players who have a 19 ACT o 1000 SAT, but they take a lot of 6’8" basketball players who have no interest in a college education.
Basketball is important to Duke so they do what they need to do to win.
As a matter of fact, the latest Duke CDS shows that in the class that entered in the fall of 2020, there were 16 students who scored 800–999 on the SAT, and another 32 who scored between 18–23 on the ACT.
I guess it’s possible that this group contains some mega-hooked non-athletes, although probably not? Maybe a mid eight-figure donors’ list kid or two. But it’s mostly athletes.
If you’ll recall, Coach K was a pious and smug critic of one-and-dones; he used to pontificate about doing things the right way and described programs like Kentucky’s as if they were the mafia or something. He swiftly and silently changed his tune when he realized that this stance meant you would never get a top-25 recruit to sign, and I have no doubt he was given the clearance from the trustees to lower the standards to just a whisper above whatever they were at the lowly state schools.
ETA: it was actually 10 kids <1000 on the SAT and 20 kids in the 18-23 band. The denominator is the number of kids submitting each test, not the total number of admitted students. Mea culpa.
Chicago is more selective and popular than ever and is doing just fine. It’s outpaced virtually every other top university in aggressive marketing, deluging prospective applicants with mailings and free swag. Additionally, Chicago was quick to loudly proclaim its dedication to free speech in the midst of the campus culture wars – appealing to many conservative students in particular – and it benefits a great deal from its location, since so many kids these days are keen to attend college in a major city.
I’d actually say that Duke has not done a particularly good job of keeping up with its peers, slipping a bit from its glory days in the early 2000s. There’s several reasons for this, including a lackluster admissions team and the declining popularity of biology and econ/banking relative to CS and tech.
And also tell you about their undefeated record against Notre Dame.
Tulane is NCAA Division I and at least tries to compete in athletics at a high level.
Is it fair to say that many top academic US universities, that also have big time sports programs, enjoyed big time sports before they became “top” academic schools?
You’re right. I got it wrong- they are D1, but they did drop out of the SEC.
Not sure. Maybe Stanford, Duke, Johns Hopkins, Northwestern, Vanderbilt, Notre Dame?
The Ivy League schools with the exception of Cornell were already well-established before organized collegiate sports came into existence in the late 19th century.
Speaking of Stanford’s success at the highest levels of sport, if I got it right, then six (6) of the eleven (11) starters at tonight’s “SheBelievesCup” match between the USWNT and Czech Republic played at Stanford.