Definition of a hook?

Applying to College
21

@sherpa - I obviously don’t know you or your kids (or what sports they were recruited for or where), but I will posit that they were born with a level of athletic potential for their sports appreciably above average, that you (and, I’m guessing, your spouse, and possibly a great coach or two in your area) nurtured this from a young age, and that you navigated the recruiting game with them to help them land in great places - for which you’re all to be congratulated.

This takes nothing away from your kids’ long, hard work and discipline (which I acknowledged in my post), but I’m pretty confident that without you, your guidance and, above all, your genes, they wouldn’t have got where they got to (I think in fact you at least partially acknowledge this in your last sentence) - which is why I consider being a recruited athlete, like any other hook, to be something that comes, in large part, from being born in the right circumstances.

Of course, if there are significant numbers of students born with average athletic ability who by dint of exceptional work and dedication are able to make themselves into recruited athletes, I’ll concede that being a recruited athlete isn’t highly dependent on who your parents are. I think, though, that those kinds of kids, when you find them, are the exceptions that prove the rule.

22

@sherpa I stand by my statement, but will say that the point I was trying to make was said more eloquently and in depth by @DeepBlue86

23

@DeepBlue86 - I wish I could both “like” and label as “helpful” your post #20 above, with which I thoroughly agree. We seem to agree that, unlike being born with a particular skin color, or into a family of incredible wealth, the attributes required to become a recruitable athlete are in part innate, but are also a product of personal commitment and family support.

I hope we could also agree that what you wrote in post #15, “I think of a “hook” as something that at least in part is an accident of birth and that you can’t just decide to develop”, isn’t entirely accurate with respect to the “recruited athlete” hook, and a more accurate statement might read:

I think of a “hook” as something that at least in part is an accident of birth and that you can’t just decide to develop, except in the case of athletic recruitment, in which case the innate athletic attributes received at birth must be nurtured and developed.

I apologize for being overly analytical and somewhat defensive, but too many times on CC I’ve read some version of “a hook is something beyond your control” and feel a need to clarify.

@skieurope - If you stand by your statement that “the hook, with very limited exceptions, is established the moment one is pushed out of the womb”, then we’ll have to agree to disagree, for while I agree that one’s race or legacy status can be identified at birth, I cannot concede that an infant can be identified as an athletic recruit.

24

@sherpa

So true! Isn’t this the same with all of the talents and gifts that help kids succeed in college and life? The most accomplished students have a combination of luck - born with innate intelligence - and hard work, family support and nurture. This is equally true of artistic gifts. Not everyone is born with the ability to master an instrument, but natural ability means nothing with out the years of hard work and support. I don’t think this is overly analytical at all. I think its important for people who attribute their success to hard work to recognize their good fortune in being born with potential and for those who attribute others’ success to luck, to recognize the hours and years of sacrifice and hard work.

25

Actually, I don’t quite agree with this statement, because I think it minimizes what other hooked candidates have to do to be admitted to elite colleges, as I’ll explain further.

Just having the hook makes an applicant get special consideration, but it won’t help very much if the applicant doesn’t bring the rest of the package. Plenty of URMs are denied by elite colleges, HYPS deny between two-thirds and 80% of their legacy applicants, most kids from square states (like anywhere) aren’t contenders for the top tier, a kid’s application has to clear the bar even if their father’s an oligarch, and maybe Malia Obama could write her own ticket, but not without being pretty capable (which she seems to have been), and the kid of a minor celebrity would be held to at least as high a standard.

In that sense, I don’t think being a recruited athlete is qualitatively different from being hooked in other ways - part of the advantage comes from birth, but parental and environmental support, coupled with smarts, effort and discipline in the candidate, are what gets someone over the line.

It seems to me that the way you feel, while understandable, is ultimately not very different from the way the parent of a black student admitted to Harvard feels when people imply that her child got in because of affirmative action. When people make those kinds of thoughtless comments to that parent (or analogous comments to you, to the effect that “of course your kids could get in anywhere - they’re recruited athletes”, with the subtext that academic standards are looser for them), it minimizes the achievement of the parents and child and reduces the child to a category. Both that child and your children were born with something that gave them the potential to get special consideration, but it was their hard work, discipline and baseline level of smarts (together with everything you did to support them) that won them the prize, as opposed to others who were spotted similar points in the birth lottery but didn’t make the most of them.

26

IOW the OP’s child has no hook.

27

@sherpa , Yes, I oversimplified it. but we will agree to disagree. Not to diminish the tremendous amount of training that a recruited athlete endures, one cannot make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear. A newborn will not immediately be identified with athletic potential, but if the pediatrician estimates that the kid will grow up to be 6’5 260#, gymnastics are not in his future.

Hopefully we can agree on this. :slight_smile:

28

I think the OP’s kid could find being Asian advantageous for LACs outside the top 10-15.

29

Agreed. Now if the child were male, different story. I know of at least one school where male ballet dancers had stats worse than football and basketball. That’s the institutional need coming through.

30

“they’re recruited athletes”, with the subtext that academic standards are looser for them)"

They’re definitely looser at least for the revenue sports, min requirements for gpa/sat, which many (even selective) schools use is 2.3/980 and that’s a sliding scale so if the gpa is higher the sat can be lower. Here’s the thing though, most of the athletes score above the minimum so that’s not main issue, it’s the 2.3 in core classes that the adcoms scrutinize. Now that being said, some schools will want higher gpa, esp in the core test scores.

31

I have always thought of a hook as something that gives an advantage to an applicant over the general body of applicants with equivalent academic accomplishments. These hooks may vary in potency and type dependent on the institution in question. In my mind, with the exception of athletic recruits, a hook depends on who your parents are, not what the applicant has accomplished. So the prime examples are:

URM, child of major donor, child of world/national leader/celebrity, legacy, faculty child, first gen, geographic diversity

An athletic recruit has a hook not because of who his/her parents are but because their application goes through a different process in many schools driven by the coaches, even if the AO has the final say. Here we are talking about a true recruit, a person that is within a “quota” given to the coach/sport by the college. Yes, many athletes are born with favorable genes, but unless you have insane size, speed, coordination, it takes a lot of effort to be a recruited athlete. You can say the same thing for an accomplished musician, artist, writer, math genius, etc… who are outstanding even among the best candidates – applicants born with superior innate abilities who worked hard to fully develop them. We normally don’t say they have a “hook” because there is no formal quota system for them. There are certainly candidates of such immense talent and accomplishment that they are almost automatically in the accept pile once they send in their application, more so than a “hooked” applicant.

A “hook” never guarantees admission because some level of academic accomplishment is necessary. The stronger the hook, the lower the bar.

Op’s daughter has strong attributes to make for an interesting applicant, but they are not hooks.

32

@skieurope, thank you for agreeing to disagree, which is odd to me, because I tend to agree with almost everything you post.

You make my point better than I do. A typical assumption is that, to be an athlete, one should be large and strong. But as you note, long limbs and bulging muscles do not define all sports. To take a couple examples, competitive runners come in all shapes and sizes, and wrestlers complete in weight classes of 125, 133, 141, 149, 157, 165, 174, 184, 197, and 285 pounds. Given a full understanding of a group of infants’ parental genetics, and even accurately predicting said infants’ eventual collegiate age weight, I highly doubt one could successfully predict the eventual wrestling skills and college wrestling recruitabilty of a group of newborns, or make a straight faced argument that such recruitability is, in your words," established the moment one is pushed out of the womb". :slight_smile:

33

@DeepBlue86 -

We’re on the same page here, but there’s an important distinction to be made.

Again, we agree that being hooked isn’t enough; the applicant needs to have “the rest of the package”, by which we both mean academic achievement.

To be clear, an unstated assumption I’m working under is that we’re discussing non-revenue sports at academically elite colleges, not football at Cal or even Stanford or basketball at Duke. If we include those, the argument I’m about to make falls apart.

But if we’re discussing the vast majority of, say Ivy League athletes, that is, those who participate in baseball (M), cross-country (M,W), fencing (M,W), field hockey (W), golf (M,W), lacrosse (M,W), rowing (M,W), soccer (M,W), softball (W), squash (M,W), swimming and diving (M,W), tennis (M,W), track and field (M,W), volleyball (W), and wrestling (M), then we are talking about athletes who, just like Malia Obama or the child of an oligarch, must bring stellar academic credentials to the table.

Some will argue that academic standards are relaxed a little for Ivy League athletes, but for the sports mentioned above, that is barely, if at all, true. For example, when my son was being recruited by Princeton and Harvard, the clear expectation was 700’s across the board together with a 3.8+ UW GPA with a rigorous course load.

It wasn’t my intention to “minimize what other hooked candidates have to do to be admitted to elite colleges”. As a parent of recruited athletes I’d be the first to agree that a hook, absent strong academics, is nearly worthless in elite college admissions, which is why I often refer to the wonderful admissions possibilities for “academically highly qualified recruited athletes”, which is but a subset of recruited athletes in general.

So I would argue that the “recruited athlete” hook is both the most “develop-able” hook there is and also the most reliable. Develop-able as discussed in my post above, and reliable, in that a recruited athlete will have coaches advocating specifically and individually for their acceptance. A college might want, generally, to enroll more a specific race, for example, but that doesn’t translate into targeted advocacy for a specific individual, advocacy which, notably, is transferable among many target colleges as opposed to only one or at most two, as is the legacy hook.

34

Keep in mind that the OP’s question was what is a hook. I think everyone agrees that a recruited athlete is a hook.

35

^ Yes, recruited athlete is a hook, the key word here is “recruited”, which means the school has to have a recruiting coach advocating your admission. Just being an outstanding athlete, or a male ballet dancer is not enough, case in point: Nathan Chen, the national figure skating champion and an Olympian was rejected by Harvard this year.

36

Call me a cynic, but I wonder if they would have accepted him if he’d won the gold medal.

I actually think the OP’s kid IS hooked as a URM at the right type of school. The CTCL level LACs, for example.

37

Why would they? If he was not recruited then he was in an unhooked pile and his figure skating prowess was just an amazing EC. That’s essence of being hook or not— you are either in one of the hooked cohorts or in an unhooked cohort which is usually a lot more competitive.

38

International level accomplishments and/or fame often result in admissions to tippy top schools. Malala, Michelle Qwan, Malia Obama, Emma Watson are examples.

39

In general, “hook” is any quality in an applicant beside the general academic standard that admins look for to meet their institutional needs and wants.

Traditionally well known hooks are legacy, recruited athlete, URM, development case (rich donors), children of politicians, celebrities and star faculty and admins. Not so well known hooks are those with special gifts and talents in various fields.

Hook changes over time, however. Being a WASP at one time was a default “hook.” Not so much today. It wasn’t too long ago that Jews and ethnic minorities were kept out of HYP and other institutions of higher learning. See: “The Chosen: The Hidden History of Admission and Exclusion at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton,” by Jerome Karabel.

Only a decade ago, too, the first-generation, low-income (FLI) were given hardly any consideration. Today, it’s a hot topic of college conferences and the admission statistics at least at top colleges reflect the changing trend of greater percentage of admissions in this group.

Just as institutional needs and wants change over time, so will “hook.”

40

“Nathan Chen, the national figure skating champion and an Olympian was rejected by Harvard this year.”

But Chen was accepted by Yale and committed.