<p>I agree with this. The recruited athletes that I see at Williams for example, are top students and athletes. There is nowhere to hide from the intense academics like there is at a larger university. Those athletes that go to an Ivy or top LAC want a great education along with the ability to play their sport. I have no problem with an admission tip for the top 10 kid in HS with a 2200+ SAT. It’s a different kind of kid. My Williams D knew the odds when she applied.</p>
<p>Well, another scenario could prevail: all slots could be reserved for recruited athletes, or 50 percent, or any arbitrary proportion. No one ever said it was a level playing field. And there are schools much less interested in athletics, which could be a reasonable destination for students who object to these practices.</p>
<p>And students have opportunities to maximize admissions hooks by becoming athletes if they so desire.</p>
<p>Neither of mine (one of each gender) ever met a sport he or she liked, which I thought a bit of shame, but not because of college admissions.</p>
<p>Neither they nor I begrudged their friends who were one up in admissions. Everyone seem to end up well situated.</p>
It is a bit sad, but it opens spots for more student athletes the next year. I’m not at all sure that kids who get in because of tuba or dance or whatever don’t also drop those activities. If they don’t it’s probably because they don’t demand as much time. Before you musicians and dancers start screaming, a D1 athlete (and yes, the Ivies are D1, although the top LACs are D3) practice pretty much daily, year round. Their teams often play in off-season leagues. S’s roommate freshman year was on the baseball team at his Patriot League school. He had practice 6 days per week all year and games even in the fall - let alone during baseball season. S never saw him - he was never in the room because he was always at practice. And this was at a very academically oriented school.</p>
<p>We know a young man who was admitted to an Ivy as a coach recruit, his hook was wrestling. The kid hates wrestling, but he’s really good at it. He admitted he sort of wished he wasn’t a coach recruit, because he had really hoped to stop wrestling after high school (he wanted to be able to eat like a normal human). Instead, he feels like he owes the coach at least one year. After that, he’ll see how it goes.</p>
<p>
I don’t find 100 points on a combined SAT score to be huge.</p>
<p>FYI - my son never played a varsity sport. My daughter played 2 but was not in the “recruited athlete” category in either.</p>
<p>GTAlum: I posted this a few pages back, but I’ll reiterate here the story of a nice young athlete (not nationally ranked) from our local HS who scored around 1880 on the SAT with a 3.2 GPA (which was bottom 10%). He was recruited and accepted by Williams. With those stats, athletics were quite a bit more than a tip factor!!! </p>
<p>Personally, I think that if Ivies/LACs want to accept athletes with extemely low scores/grades, that is just life… But let’s not kid ourselves by thinking that it is merely a tip factor. Maybe sometimes it is a tip, but sometimes it is a 3 ton weight.</p>
<p>Otherwise, I don’t really know what it is you are trying to say.</p>
<p>Are you saying the admissions committe was wrong and that he was not capable of doing the work?</p>
<p>Okay, so we’ll call it a “hook” at a school like Williams. Of course, Williams is quite open about actively pursuing the best possible athletes they can get. It’s practically in their mission statement.</p>
<p>ETA: What is your position on the kids who are horrible at taking standardized tests but have perfect GPA’s and all AP classes? I mean, you do realize there are a percentage of straight A kids who simply can’t do well on their SAT’s. They are not admitted to these schools, either.</p>
<p>Someone seriously thinks that recruited athlete is a tip? It’s not. It’s always been a hook. Hooks are specific categories, and especially favored in early rounds: recruited athletes, URM’s, celebrities, Development prospects (donors). Tips are other things (geography, SES, sometimes certain majors, etc.)</p>
<p>Anecdotal evidence about one student at Williams doesn’t say much because we aren’t looking at transcripts, essays, etc. However, I agree with the above post that a recruited athlete is a hook; a walk-on athlete may be closer to a tip.</p>
<p>This has been debated so many times on CC. One point is that the athlete may bring in enough alumni dollars to fund need based aid for a whole group of folk who are not recruited athletes.</p>
<p>but, what if the point is simply excellence?</p>
<p>What if the point is excellence in every area, including athletics, theater, music, just excellence, just being around people who are good at what they do, who are committed and working hard in all areas?</p>
<p>I’d be careful not to undervalue that kind of energy all over a campus, including on the fields and in the gyms. It all plays into the zeitgeist of the school. </p>
<p>One last thing: These top schools have had a paradigm of excellence, which included athletics, for a long time, now. They graduate their students consistently in the mid-90% range. The athletes they admit, @ 20%, are clearly doing the work and graduating, clearly they are capable of meeting these rigorous academic demands, as well as intense outside schedules. It seems the adcoms are doing their job pretty well.</p>
<p>I’m reminded of Garrison Keillor’s Lake Wobegon tag line - “and all the children are above average”. HALF of the students at any school have below average GPA’s and SAT scores.</p>
<p>And, as someone way back said, these are private institutions - their admission criteria are their own. “Ought to be stopped” does not apply. The school decides the priorities of each class - for example, it seems that legacy admissions at some of the top LACs are no longer as much of a priority as once had been. If they didn’t they could just take a combination of GPA and SAT scores of applicants and count down from the top until they completed their admission class, as some public institutions used to before URMs had to be accounted for.</p>
<p>That’s absolutely right, poet. From the outside it looks like this is just another case of a sports-worshiping society giving preferential treatment to the jocks. In reality, Ivy athletes are some pretty remarkable kids. First of all, recruited athletes in the Ivys must have an academic index (calculated by combining SAT and class rank) within 1 standard deviation of the mean AI of the student body.</p>
<p>Once admitted, Ivy athletes don’t get the privileges and special tutors their scholarship school peers may have. They’re getting graded on the same curve and handling the same workload as every other student - and doing it while spending 3-4 hours each day at practice and traveling on weekends. </p>
<p>So what was the complaint? 1 out of 5 students in the Ivy League are athletes, within the mean statistical academic range of the other 4 of 5, they’re graduating at the same rate as their peers and they’re spending 15-20 hours each week involved in their sport? Yeah, boy that’s an outrage</p>
<p>Shulman, Bowen, et al published "The Game of Life:College Sports and Educational Values in 2002 which used extensive data bases which indicated some of the issues enunciated in the OP. The impact of athletics on college culture is far greater in small colleges and universities vs large Div 1A universities.</p>
<p>A few review exerpts.</p>
<p>“It may be one of the most important books on higher education published in the last twenty years. It is certainly one of the most interesting.”–Louis Menand, The New York Times</p>
<p>“The conclusions are truly depressing and significant. . . . The Game of Life is the most important sports book written in years.”–Frank Deford, Sports Illustrated</p>
<p>“A landmark study that should be welcomed by college presidents. . . These findings breathe new and potentially subversive life into old doubts about the role of highly competitive collegiate athletics. . .”–John Hoberman, The Wall Street Journal</p>
<p>“The Shulman-Bowen data show that recruited athletes not only enter selective colleges with weaker academic records than their classmates as a whole, but that, once in college, they consistently underperform academically. . . .Moreover, they say, the academic standing of athletes relative to their classmates has deteriorated markedly in recent years.”–Edward B. Fiske, New York Times</p>
<p>Is there publicly available and comparable data on this? </p>
<p>If it is as justifiable and reasonable as others suggest, then they have no reason not to make that information available. In fact, why wouldn’t they? Especially because actual ‘real’ selectivity numbers could be re-calibrated and lower for many schools (which is always in a schools’ interest).</p>
<p>I find it difficult to work up much outrage over this subject. Recruited athletes get a huge boost in admissions just about everywhere. Oh, Ivies and NESCAC schools are no exception? Ho-hum.</p>
<p>What may come as a surprise to some “newbie” parents of prospective students is just what a large fraction of the entering class at Ivies and top LACs is made up of “hooked” applicants—recruited athletes, URMs, and legacies, primarily. What it means as a practical matter is that your “unhooked” kid’s chances of admission at these schools are probably significantly less than the advertised admissions rate. Especially if your unhooked kid’s stats would place him/her in the bottom half of the entering class, in which case his/her chances of admission probably approach zero at the most selective schools, insofar as a very large fraction of the places in the lower half of the class will be reserved for “hooked” applicants getting an admissions boost. Not to say that everyone with a “hook” is in the bottom half of the class, to be sure; but statistically speaking, a “hook” isn’t much of a hook unless it means that a bunch of kids with lower-than-school-average stats get admitted. So bottom line, if your kid is unhooked and below the median GPA and SAT scores for a highly selective school, you might save yourself the false hope and the application fee and accept that most of those spots in the lower half of the class are going to go to recruited athletes, legacies, and URMs.</p>
<p>“the story of a nice young athlete (not nationally ranked) from our local HS who scored around 1880 on the SAT with a 3.2 GPA (which was bottom 10%). He was recruited and accepted by Williams. With those stats, athletics were quite a bit more than a tip factor!!!”</p>
<p>I agree, that seems a bit extreme. Of course, such athletes, as noted by another poster, don’t get any breaks once in school. Williams academics are tough for my D (who is also balancing a sport but not recruited) with a 5.2 GPA (1/500) and 2370 SAT. Hats off to the kid with poor admission stats who can not only keep up, but want to keep up by going to such a school. Conversely, a recruited athlete from our local public is at Williams with excellent stats required merely a tip (not sure he would have needed it or not). I was not aware of how many hooked athletes there are there.</p>
<p>bclintock- You are completely correct at the very top schools that many students with the same average stats falsely believe they have a good chance of admission when in fact unless their stats are above the 75th% their chances are rather low. As for the student with the 3.2/1880 it will almost certainly be a boy in either football,BB, or hockey which are the hardest sports to recruit top students. If you are a cross country runner or in another minor sport it is very unlikely to get in with those stats.</p>
<p>ptonalumnus should take a look at this post. He was very quick to berate me when I stated that there are very few slots left after all hooked canidates are admitted. I feel vindicated. Although, I knew what I had stated was correct. It is always nice when the majority states it as well.</p>
<p>I think the author of the article quoted by the OP is being a bit cagey (assuming he’s even got the right figures}</p>
<p>He says:
Then he says:
Then he says this:
Do you see what he did there? He suggests that all of the athletes have scores lower than the average–but it appears that it’s just the high-profile sports, something which everybody knows. And since he mixes up other schools that give scholarships for lower profile sports with the Ivies, it’s even more confusing. What does it mean if a kid is “recruited” by Princeton for fencing or golf? Is it any different from a kid who has other attractive extracurricular activities? How much difference does it really make in admissions? Certainly if two kids have the same grades and scores, the one who is a fencing champ will get in. So what? This article doesn’t actually tell you anything more than that, except for the high-profile sports where coaches are allowed to make picks for applicants with lower scores. And as I said, that’s hardly news. So: so what?</p>
Although, I knew what I had stated was correct. It is always nice when the majority states it as well.</p>