<p>A kid in my school who has a <90 GPA, terrible SAT scores, and no EC's except Lacrosse and football got recruited by JHU. He is a really good lacrosse player and is one of the best around where I live. Do you think this is fair when people who have great GPA and SAT's are rejected by colleges like JHU while they decided to accept someone like the person above?</p>
<p>Nobody ever said life was fair.
JHU is a division 1 lacrosse program. If the kid is that good, Duke and others may come calling too. This happens in division 1 sports. He has unique skills that the university wants. This debate has been raging for years, and the situation is unlikely to change anytime soon. But be content with the knowledge that lacrosse may get him in, but it won’t get him to graduation unless he can do the work. </p>
<p>He has a skill others don’t have. Just as those with near-perfect test scores and grades have a skill he doesn’t have. I don’t feel too bad for the high scoring students, it isn’t like they are being shut out of good colleges altogether.</p>
<p>Selective college admissions are about having something that the college wants. It may be a sport, an ethnicity, or a test score. Some schools, such as the top public universities in Texas, only care about your class rank regardless of the difficulty of your high school (e.g. top 7% for UT-Austin). Its just the way the system works.</p>
<p>Fair? Ummm. That’s the way the US college system works. It’s not like some systems that go strictly by test scores or other numerical system, where the school draws a line and those above it get accepted. That a school has athletic teams means that it needs players for those teams that are competitive. SOme sports bring a lot of revenue and advertisement to a college. Lacrosse is a big deal for JHU. They get far more students that have the academic criteria to make the admissions cut than those who can play lacrosse at the level they recruit.</p>
<p>Even the top schools like HPY do not accept purely on an academic basis. Forgot the % of those accepted to Harvard on academics, but it was not even a majority. Other factors come into play.</p>
<p>That’s life. Colleges are not looking to simply take the kids with the best stats, they are looking to create a diversified class that fills the various needs of the school. One of those needs is athletics. And give some credit to the athlete who spent hours and hours improving his skills and competing in sports.</p>
<p>Supply and demand.</p>
<p>Some schools are looking for a student who can play athletics well. Others are looking for bright students with high SAT scores and NMF qualifiers. Even others are looking for students who are involved and will contribute something on campus. You never know the full story, and I have a hunch that he has a quality that is worth recruiting him for. Two out of the five admittances to ivy league schools at our h.s. this year were athletes outside the top 10. Yet do I begrudge them for it? No, because they have a quality that the college wants/needs where really smart kids are in abundance, they want someone that can do the work and contribute to sports culture, even if their stats are slightly lower</p>
<p>@An1100345 That slot the lax recruit took was NEVER available to you or other non-lax recruits. That was allocated years ago – and there’s nothing you can do about it. If there were set asides for great theater people, or concert pianists or super science researcher or ranked world chess players or princelings of foreign oligarchs – they weren’t set aside for you, as a general applicant. That’s how it goes. </p>
<p>I believe you’re from China, correct? The American colleges’ emphasis on sports must seem very bizarre to you. However, it’s a long and rich tradition in US colleges.</p>
<p>With that fact in hand, you decide if you want to contend for the other slots available.</p>
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<p>High gpa & test scores are a dime a dozen nowadays</p>
<p>Wow, never knew this would generate this much replies. I was just asking since my friend was telling me that this is completely fair. Thanks guys. I just feel like the spot will be wasted if he can’t graduate since he will be struggling in JHU. There are many other people who would love to go to JHU.</p>
<p>JHU has one of the country’s top LAX teams. If he’s a top recruit, they will offer him (and other student athletes) the resources to succeed and graduate. This is not a new situation for them you know. Sure lots of people want to go to JHU. But JHU also values a men’s lax team enough to set aside slots for top players. </p>
<p>The other student may think he spend hours to practice everyday for the past ten years so he got admitted. While other students only do their work at school and practice for the test for a few months for SAT/CT and got admitted. It is not fair. :)</p>
<p>Performing athletics at an elite level is actually an achievement and is arguably a reasonable basis for admissions preference, as compared to other hooks which involve no action on the part of the applicant and are simply an accident of birth.</p>
<p>No, of course it’s unfair, and especially galling when scholarships are included, but it’s nothing new. As long as college athletics have existed, athletes have gotten special breaks. I remember how incensed I was, more than forty years ago when a childhood friend - the eldest of five children, whose father stocked produce in a supermarket - failed to receive adequate financial aid from Holy Cross, while a doctor’s son in her class, with deplorable grades and mediocre test scores got a football scholarship. She was class salutatorian, I think (in a class of over 1000 students), and a NMHSQ commended student. He wasn’t even a particularly good football player, and he flunked out of HC. </p>
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<p>You are assuming he won’t graduate. At a school like Hopkins, a coach can pitch for a student they want, but they do have minimal standards in admissions the athlete must meet. If admissions truly thinks the athlete can’t do the work, they will turn them down. It is a balancing act at a school like Hopkins to find good athletes who are capable of doing the work. But you are making an assumption that may not be true. He may not be at the top of his class. He may not be pre-med. But you are assuming he won’t make it through, and I think that isn’t necessarily a valid assumption.</p>
<p>Yes it is fair. The revenue that lacrosse player will generate goes towards the financial aid that high achieving students need to attend. They should be grateful.</p>
<p>Schools rarely make a profit on athletics - it’s all plowed back into the athletic programs. A few big name football and men’s basketball programs make money, and a true accounting would call even that into question. At best JHU lacrosse breaks even according to the latest numbers I’ve been able to find. When you look at all the sports across a school, as a whole, you’ll be hard pressed to find more than a handful that make any money. And no, it’s not possible to keep just the profitable sports</p>
<p>If you added up every athletic program in the country at all schools, American education would be better off without sports from a profit perspective, and it’s not even close. Maybe not a great idea, but the idea that they contribute to the bottom line is a myth.</p>
<p>@AnnieBeats - It would be nice if things worked that way, but most athletic programs are self-sustaining, and actually contribute very little to the general scholarship pools. </p>
<p>Athletics in and of itself may not be contributing to financial aid, but athletics definitely helps garner attention, which helps create revenue. With athletics, it seems reasonable to think that more alumni stay connected to the school when the school has good and respected teams. It also creates more interest. Texas A &M saw an increase in applicants that correlated with the rise of Aggies football, specifically, Johnny Football. Those applicants pay application fees, and that revenue gets funneled back in. So it helps more so in indirect ways.</p>