<p>If they are in the more important sports.</p>
<p>I love the third comment to the article on the CHE webpage: “And in a related story, the sun rose in the east this morning, and water remains wet.”</p>
<p>Darn! My cross-county-running son won’t be feeling the love.</p>
<p>He may still feel the love! The study shows a clear advantage for recruited athletes in non-high-profile sports, just not as big an advantage as for recruited athletes in high-profile sports. And the study’s methodology probably fails to capture some of the advantage:</p>
<p>– It compares recruited (and enrolled) athletes to enrolled non-athletes, not to accepted non-athletes. At selective colleges, accepted students will have meaningfully higher stats than enrolled students. Of course, that can apply to recruited athletes as well, but since the yield on recruited athletes is much higher than for non-athletes, the difference will be less.</p>
<p>– It doesn’t look at acceptance rate. At selective colleges, applicants with average stats have a very low probability of acceptance – way below average (because of the factor discussed above). Recruited athletes with average stats probably have close to a 100% acceptance rate.</p>
<p>That’s plenty of love.</p>
<p>^ Good points, JHS. </p>
<p>Interesting that recruited athletes made up 18% of the students in the data set; that’s a large number. This further confirms my view that if you’re not a recruited athlete, not a URM, and not a legacy and you’re applying to a highly selective college or university, you probably need to have stats somewhere in the vicinity of the 75th percentile of enrolled students (plus great essays, teacher recs, ECs, and all the rest) to have much of a chance at admission. “Hooked” applicants are going to make up 40+% of the entering class. They won’t all be in the bottom half of the class, of course, but if you’re unhooked and aiming for a spot in the bottom half, the competition will be fierce. Better to choose schools where you’re well into the top half, ideally in the top quartile. And if you are unhooked but in the top quartile, you might maximize your chances by applying ED, because it’s at that stage that highly selective colleges are looking to lock in recruited athletes, URMs, and legacies, and they’ll want to counterbalance any average or lower-than-average stats in those groups with some high-stats ED admits to start to construct the overall class profile they’re aiming for. Top quartile ought to do it. This was my (unhooked) D1’s strategy at her first choice, Haverford, and it worked.</p>
<p>If I am reading the report correctly, the GPA we are talking about (“the greatest gap in grade-point averages between athletes and nonathletes”) is predicted GPA while IN college, right? Not the admission GPA. It looks like the admission stats (“selectivity”) were based on SAT.</p>
<p>Am I wrong, or is this report saying playing sports at the division 3 level interferes with academic performance in college?</p>
<p>I didn’t see any mention of SATs, only GPAs. I assumed it was high school GPAs.</p>
<p>the second chart is titled the following:</p>
<p>Percentile Class Rank GPA after Two Years: 24 Highly Selective Colleges</p>
<p>Given the two year basis of comparison, I think they are talking about college GPA differentials</p>
<p>For male recruited athletes, about
two thirds of the GPA difference
can be explained by background
variables, rest is labeled
“underperformance”
For male walk-on athletes and
female recruited athletes, about
half of the GPA difference can be
explained by background
variables</p>
<p>The “background variables” include the admission stats, but the GPA here, refers to performance in college. Another slide describes the admission stats, i.e. SAT’s as MAYBE “homogeneous” at “highly selective” schools.</p>
<p>I guess the hundreds and hundreds of hours spent out in the driveway shooting baskets paid off as S2 is at Swarthmore. When people say that Obama didn’t get into Swarthmore yet my son did, I tell them, “Well, (son’s name) has a better jump shot than Obama.” I think colleges want a well rounded campus and sports play a part of that.</p>
<p>GPA in the study is college GPA after two years. And the answer is, yes, at top-20 schools Division III athletics seems to interfere with academic performance (although it may be the social norms, not the practice time). Obviously, that’s on average, not something that’s true for every D-III athlete. </p>
<p>And in absolute terms the difference may not be that much: for male recruited athletes at the highly selective colleges, the average underperformance vs. predicted GPA compared to similar non-athletes was less than .15 of a grade point. Furthermore, elsewhere the study shows that for men, the difference is almost entirely attributable to the highest-profile sports, like football, basketball, and hockey. It’s not hard to believe that, and not hard not to care too much about it, either.</p>
<p>To bclintonk’s point: The most selective 24 Division III schools – which is what we are talking about here – are all pretty small. So, yes, at those schools 20-25% of the men, and a somewhat lower percentage of the women, are going to have to be recruited athletes. Which in turn means that a non-recruit, non-URM applicant has to assume that essentially the 75th percentile in any statistical category reported by the college is probably more like the median for accepted students like him, or even below the median. But for larger schools, which are mostly Division I, the percentage of recruited athletes is nowhere near that high, and their effect on the “stats” range is negligible.</p>
<p>"The most selective 24 Division III schools – which is what we are talking about here "</p>
<p>When you say what “we” are talking about, do you mean it’s only among the 24 most selective (Highly Selective SAT > 1250, N = 24) in the study that significant differences are seen?</p>
<p>at those schools 20-25% of the men, and a somewhat lower percentage of the women, are going to have to be recruited athletes.</p>
<p>Is that in this study too? Sorry, I’m getting lost. Which of these schools are the N–24 and which have 25% males are athletes.
<a href=“http://www.collegesportsproject.org/institutions.html[/url]”>http://www.collegesportsproject.org/institutions.html</a></p>
<p>I think some of the differences are significant in the next set down by selectivity, but the extent of the underperformance, both before and after college, is much smaller in that group.</p>
<p>I see. </p>
<p>And the 20-25% comes from the chart that says in highly selective schools, 2355 are recruited athletes, and if you count walk on athletes and non athletes together (6288+1452=7740), 2355 is @23 percent of total 10095. </p>
<p>Got it!</p>
<p>Bowen and Bok reported on this in their 2001 book, The Game of Life. In fact their study goes on to conclude that varsity athletics has a greater impact on student/academic life at these small institution than it does at large Div 1A colleges. At many small colleges varsity athletes make up as much as 25% of the student body while at a large college like my alma mater Ohio State they comprise less than 5% of the student body. In my Civil Engineering class there was one varsity athlete, Mike Good a golfer. In my entire engineering class there was only one football/basketball athlete, Dave Foley who graduated in MechEng and went on to play in the NFL for a number of years.</p>
<p>Bok and Bowen contend that even if varsity athletes at small colleges are good students, they impact the campus culture far more because of their high relative numbers.</p>
<p>My son was an excellent high school football player. He received some attention from D1 coaches, but realistically, he was too slow for that level. He had offers from several D2 colleges. I think it is pretty typical for D2 schools to offer small scholarships. That way dad and mom can brag–no need to mention that the “scholarship” is minimal, a few thousand dollars or less. One D2 school coach said he couldn’t offer him an athletic scholarship, but he was sent an offer of financial aide that cut the cost of the school in half–and that was before I filled out a FAFSA etc. </p>
<p>He received the most attention from D3 coaches. D3 head coaches and assistant coaches must spent the entire off season on the phone, because our phone never stopped ringing. </p>
<p>My son went to a D3 school that had a reasonable reputation and that was in a good location. He’s dyslexic so high school was a challenge for him. He had an ACT of 26, but his class rank was 48%. The school had a requirement to be in the top half of his class. His coach told me he had six “athletic exemptions” per year he could use in admission. My son got one of those.</p>
<p>I spent some time talking with a dean. I wanted to be sure my son wasn’t going to be put into a position where he couldn’t be successful. She assured me that they didn’t admit anyone who they didn’t feel could cut it there. And it has worked out well academically.</p>
<p>I can’t say with certainty that “athletic exemptions” exist everywhere–but I’d guess there is an equivalent at most schools.</p>
<p>I do know that D3 schools are prohibited from giving more scholarship money to athletes than non athletes in the same financial situation. I don’t know how (or if) this is monitored.</p>
<p>How did it turn out?</p>
<p>Judging by my experience of S I don’t think the conclusion that one needs to be in the 75th percentile in stats to gain admission to one of the 24 referenced schools is true.</p>
<p>At a small LAC almost each kid is a recruited athlete. No, I don’t mean that literally. I am merely suggesting that “fit” and “class building” play such a large role in admissions that each kid is handpicked. </p>
<p>My kid had average stats for his school, one of those 24, but he does play the violin and excel at Latin. Since his school has so many aspiring doctors and hedge fund managers I think interest in two humanities subjects with few yearly majors (around six) gave him almost the advantage of a recruited athlete.</p>
<p>In fact, he was rejected at the school where he was in the 75% and accepted at those where he wasn’t.</p>
<p>I know generalizing from one example is not a good research methodology, one example is enough to call into question speculative conclusions.</p>
<p>I think in the DIII school acceptance game at elite institutions if one is not a recruited athlete there are strategies that can make a candidate as desirable as a recruited athlete.</p>
<p>There are schools (Dartmouth – not DIII, but just as example) where numbers rule and others (Brown) where they don’t.</p>
<p>Same is true for DIII LAC’s.</p>