<p>Marysidney- William Bowen’s book is about this exact topic. He completely disagrees with all the focus on sports at the elite schools. Why do they do it? Mainly because they all do it and everyone wants winning teams. Besides athletic ability is probably a fairer test of merit than most of the mindless ECs that the typical student collects to help with admission. I’m not arguing it one way or the other but only to point out how admission to the elite colleges really works.</p>
<p>A couple of weeks ago there was a post about the Princeton class of 2014. (I did not verify) It went like this:</p>
<p>37% minority
17% athletes
13% legacy</p>
<h2>11% international</h2>
<p>78% </p>
<p>This leaves 22% for the balance of the applicants.</p>
<p>I don’t accept the idea that a kid who plays varsity sports is “hooked” unless he is recruited. Are musicians “hooked” if their music supplement helps them get in? By this definition, everybody who gets in is hooked.
And thus, I don’t believe that a majority of students at Yale and Harvard (or anywhere else) are hooked, because I don’t believe that URMs, legacies, recruited athletes, and development or celeb admits add up to 50%. You’d have to show me some numbers to demonstrate this–and remember that some students fit more than one of those categories.</p>
<p>Kajon, I suspect that that number of minorities for Princeton includes Asians, who aren’t hooked. Internationals aren’t hooked, either. The real number is 14% URMs, according to the College Board profile. That still gets you to 44% hooked, which is pretty high–but remember that some students would be double or triple counted there.</p>
<p>Actually I do think every student that gets in his “hooked”. Like Hunt poses, the assumption is that every accepted student is capable of doing the work…and a goodly chunk that are not perhaps accepted. Once you cull the kids that are not academically qualified by whatever standard you have the unique characteristics of each student and what they add to the composition of the class…call it the hook, the think that makes an adcom stop and consider a potential admit. Perhaps they are a strong writer, or a leader, or play an instrument, or participate in a choir, or play football or or or…This is why it does not surprise me that the “weight given” to stats is perhaps lessening. Stats is what gets you into the consider pile and not the reject …stats are not national, every school calculates GPAs differently, kids take the ACT or SAT once…or they take it numerous times after being prepped…those stats are simply a quick parser…after that it’s the whole package.</p>
<p>kajon, many of those groups are crossover’s. So the 22% would be incorrect.</p>
<p>SAY, just because 32% of Amherst students PLAY varsity sports does not mean that they take up 32% of slots. It is 15%, no matter what your books say.</p>
<p>Just saw Hunt’s post and agree with it +1, especially with kids fitting into more than one category. There is a very good possibility that a recruited squash player is a legacy, or that Denzel Washington’s kid gets admitted, and is a celebrity/URM combo. </p>
<p>We have to remember that these are PRIVATE schools we are talking about. They can take whoever they want. Don’t like it, you have other options.</p>
<p>If you take a look at Princeton’s varsity sports rosters, you will also see quite a few URMs, especially in football, basketball, and track and field. They are double-counted in those figures.</p>
<p>Hunt- almost all the varsity athletes have had contact with the coach and many have received varying degrees of admission assitance. As I stated before there are now very few walks on unlike 30 years ago.</p>
<p>Everyone is arguing many of these points without bothering to read the known established books on this topic. The books contain well documented statistics and yes for the last time over 50% of the students at the very top schools do have hooks. These hooks include:sports,URM, legacy,donors, special non-academic achievements(acting,models,celeb,music,etc). The Price of Admission Book has the approx. stats for hooked students in the book.</p>
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<p>That is pretty harsh SAY. So if somebody isn’t an athlete, and the most of the other students collect mindless EC’s for admissions sake, what is left? Oh…got it. GPA and test scores. As I said, there are other options.</p>
<p>BTW, your alma mater lists EC’s as “very important.” I’m assuming yours weren’t “mindless.”</p>
<p>edit: Jeez SAY, are we back to the books? There is more accurate information to be gained by some of the knowledgeable posters here on CC than either of your books.</p>
<p>So, what is exactly wrong with “hooks?” Isn’t that about fit and all kinds of things that are discussed separate from have the grades to make the initial cut? We all had hooks of one sort of another thirty years ago that got us admitted to whatever college we attended. I know I had a few things on my app that differentiated me from the next “girl” with perhaps the same GPA and SAT scores. All hooks are is something that substantially differentiates one student from another…so what’s the problem and what’s the problem if they are considered heavily by some colleges once the GPA/SAT scores boxes are check marked?</p>
<p>Public universities are probably the closest analogy where GPA/SAT/ACT scores play a larger role. Even with the elite publics it’s known that GPA/SAT can trump other factors and is the threshold for admittance consideration.</p>
<p>No, hooks are a special category of particular value. Tips are what “differentiates one student from [an otherwise similar] student” especially from the same or similar environment.</p>
<p>Sure some students count for more than one category. Overall the point remains the same that a large amount of the slots are not really available to the regular non-hooked student. </p>
<p>No GA212mom you are not correct. What Amherst is telling you is that they only save that many spots for athletic admission directly. But as everyone who has been through the proccess knows the coach can still help applicants with admission if they have scores at the average of the accepted students. (The 15% number is for students that fall below their normal academic standards. )These students apply ED with no guarantees but many more get admitted than would if they were not known to the school. Keep in mind that the coach will have already taken the potential student/athletes application to the admission committee for a pre-screening before the student decided to apply ED. This happens at every NESCAC School for most sports though I only know the boys side from direct experience.</p>
<p>I can’t find the numbers, but isn’t it the case that the number of tips available to a NESCAC college is pretty small? Sixty-something? That’s how many student athletes get a finger on the scale in the admission process each year at schools like Haverford, Amherst, and Williams, yes? The rest of the students who end up playing sports went through the same admissions process as everyone else - their sport might make them a more interesting person, just like playing a musical instrument or building robots or folding origami, but that’s about it.</p>
<p>Edited to add - my D was in the non-recruited pile at a NESCAC school. She visited the team on one of the recruiting weekends, but did not get a tip. Possibly this was because her GPA and test scores were high, so why would the coach want to waste a tip on her, but more likely it was because the coach didn’t think she would be very good. Or so he told her later on, after she proved that his initial impressions were off base :-).</p>
<p>SAY - ED seems to offer an admission advantage for everyone in the pool. Do you have actual data to show that within the ED pool, athletes who were not recruited are admitted at a higher rate than students with non-athletic talents?</p>
<p>These are not just some books but very well researched and really helped open up the closed world of elite college admissions. I’m not saying sports should be so important but it is. As for the EC’s many show real accomplishment but so, so many really are the parents helping the child start a non-profit for disadvantaged children for the sole purpose of aiding college admission.</p>
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<li> I actually looked at the Haverford site, which helpfully posts the rosters of each of its teams. The only way you get over 40% is if you ignore women altogether, or count all of the people who are on both the cross-country and track rosters twice. (Yes, I checked. 100% of the non-freshman cross-country roster was also on the track roster the previous season. Surprise, surprise! And the track/field team alone represents over 20% of the total student athletes.)<br></li>
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<p>Without eliminating any multi-sport athletes other than XCers, I got a total of 417 varsity athletes out of 1170 students. So at an extremely small college (entering classes of about 300), a little more than a third of the students are varsity athletes. It’s different for men and for women – 42% or so for men, 29% for women. There are more women overall, and some of the men’s team rosters are especially stuffed (57 track athletes, 37 lacrosse players, 25 tennis players).</p>
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<li><p>I’ve seen some of those Haverford varsity teams play. They are not overflowing with people who were considering D-1 scholarship offers. Some (not all) clearly include people who took up their sport in college. Or at least I’ve seen them lose, badly, to teams dominated by people who took up their sport in college. Which is a good thing, as far as I am concerned, but somewhat cuts against the idea that Haverford is all about its sports teams. It isn’t.</p></li>
<li><p>What in the world does “the only varsity cricket team in the country” do? Why, it plays against club teams. It’s incredibly cute that Haverford has a varsity cricket team, but let’s not whine about the supposed admissions advantage these kids are getting, because what it is is a lovely social activity for kids from Commonwealth nations and other Anglophiles, with the school paying for a part-time coach and some uniforms.</p></li>
<li><p>Speaking of double-counting, do you think there may be a little of it in those numbers of yours, Kajon? 37% minority and 17% athletes don’t overlap at all? And there are no minority or athlete legacies? International minorities? International legacies? </p></li>
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<p>37% minority has to include all varieties of ethnic Asians, who would be surprised to hear that they were getting a big boost into Princeton on account of their minority status.</p>
<p>SAY, if you you want to define everything other than grades and scores as a hook, then sure, most kids at Ivies and similar schools are hooked. If a kid is a varsity athlete, but isn’t recruited, I would say that he isn’t hooked. His sports talent may have helped him get admitted–along with all of his other stats and achievements–but that’s not the same as a recruited athlete. Again, if you mean by “regular” applicants those who are depending on grades and scores to get them in, then I agree that they are competing for a small piece of the pie.</p>
<p>An anecdote: when I was in college lo these many years ago, at an Ivy, I went to the gym for the open house for classes. I went to the class for fencing, because I had tried it for a couple of weeks at a summer program during high school. The fencing coach urged us all to sign up for the fencing *team *rather than just take the class. I could have been a varsity athlete! There may not be many walkons on the football team, but I’ll bet there are plenty on other teams.</p>
<p>Calreader- Maybe if you consider the coach taking your childs application to the admission committee for a pre-screen to be of no importance. The real key is that based on what the coach tells this applicant he/she then makes a decision to apply ED. Without this assurance they probably would’t apply ED to that school even though their acceptance is not assured. The coach puts through a number of applicants this way and not all get accepted but 3-5 more do which he adds to the two picks and he has his team depending on the sport. Keep in mind that almost every athlete gets admitted ED at these schools. If you won’t go ED the coach doesn’t have any interest in you. This is really how it works.</p>
<p>^
Calreader, I think it is 65. I overestimated at 80 in an earlier post.</p>
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<p>I’ll be sure to pass on to the Amherst students that are either here on CC or that my D knows that they might have fallen below normal academic standards. :rolleyes: </p>
<p>SAY, how do you know what their normal academic standards are? “Books?” :rolleyes:</p>
<p>Hunt- At the ivies there are very few athletes that weren’t recruited at some level.</p>
<p>SAY - You’re way overgeneralizing. Your description doesn’t fit the facts I’ve seen for a different school/sport combination than the one you have experience with.</p>