<p>Reading Playing the Game right now and noting that the author mentions</p>
<p>how any student can have advantages in admissions if the student has what the university needs, ie URM, oboe, art, etc </p>
<p>and that some faculty and non-athlete students continue to
propogate the belief that student athletes are dumb jocks.....and only "group" given consideration in adcoms etc</p>
<p>and these student-athletes "hide" their sport status from profs etc... because of problems with prejudice.</p>
<p>Anyone familiar with this phenomenon personally ?</p>
<p>uh small schools don’t really care about sports so they can hide it. I mean if you were a professor at UF and you had tim tebow as a student…how would you not know he plays football?</p>
<p>that rant was impossible to read with all
the </p>
<p>I was surprised to read
that very capable students who are also athletes in the ivies (that are recruited as athletes for the various 25-30+ varsity teams)
have kept their status as a student-athlete quiet–because there are professors and students who believe these student-athletes aren’t bright enough or got cut a deal…and don’t “deserve” to be there…</p>
<p>Was suprised to read that and wondered if anyone could speak to that…</p>
<p>Well, when I am (knock on wood) a student-athlete at a top academic university in two years, I’ll do my best to refute this notion! :). I mean, I understand that athletes get a little more leeway, but for heaven sake; that does not justify clumping Ivy athletes under the heading “dumb jocks” (heck, I’m probably best described as a nerdy quasi-hipster who just so happens to be pretty good at a sport). Surely this attitude does not extend towards other hooked groups? Is there a condescending demeanor towards African-American students as well, just because the admission standard might be as high?</p>
<p>Most people don’t realize the amount of hard work and talent it takes to make it to D1 in basketball and football. Most kids start AAU when they are in elementary and train year round. Their commitments to their sport are way more than some BS president this president that.</p>
<p>There are many college athletes who are both dedicated students and dedicated athletes. There are also many college athletes who are not dedicated students, and just BARELY scrape by with that 2.00 GPA they need to avoid academic probation. Unfortunately, due to the way human minds work, people don’t remember the first type so much.</p>
<p>When the Yale and Harvard reps came to my kids’ school, they said that they have reserve a certain number of admission spots for athletes whose stats are lower than the rest of the admits.</p>
<p>So, you’re saying that if a prof knows that a student is an athlete, he may assume that the athlete didn’t have the stats to be admitted on his own.</p>
<p>I’ve never heard of profs treating kids badly because they assumed the student didn’t have the stats to really be there. Do profs do this to kids who may have been admitted with lower stats to improve the school’s diversity numbers?</p>
<p>I find it interesting to consider this question…
because the author quotes many admissions officers and univ pres from the ivies and the NESCAC…</p>
<p>whats an interesting thought is something the one adcom guy said about everyone gets a tip for something…
that all applicants are looked at for scores etc…
some get a tip for their music, some for their art, some for the URM, some for sports etc…</p>
<p>The author talks about how some profs say that there should be limits to sports but…do they say that about music practice, or time writing, or to the editor of the school newspaper? Meaning that there is perhaps this prejudice to blame athletes for advantages in admissions but we don’t bash the kid for his mathlete work, or the author who reads and writes all the time…or the URM for being admitted for diversity.</p>
<p>The discussion also included the lessons learned in sports, defeat, instant feedback, fight vs flight when things go wrong.</p>
<p>For me I just found the discussions about admissions and everyone’s unique-ness etc and how that AdCom sees the admit being interesting…</p>
<p>Evidently only the ivies use this Academic index but really all schools admit below the mean 1 standard dev for many students based on their giftings…methods vary.
In the end it leads me to appreciate the job an adcom has to do to bring together a community…Evidently too while the critics say student-athletes get higher admissions–that when you lok at the large pool that starts at the beginning of the recruiting/admissions (1,000s) and then the # of admits, its not any higher compared to any other subset…</p>
<p>The author interviews and includes how scholar-athletes at some schools do hide their athletic status because some profs do have that dumb jock biased still, as do some students. </p>
<p>People are people with their own set of values and beliefs and evidently the live and let live mentality , and giving the benefit of the doubt that all the students are their on their merits doesn’t always translate…when it comes to assumptions about athletes.</p>
<p>I found it interesting and wondered if any parent or student knew this to be a problem in the first person experience.</p>
<p>Ivies are generally DIII teams; they don’t have the same impetus to recruit solely on the basis of athletic ability as, say, the Pac 10 schools do. Football at Harvard isn’t the same as football at USC. (And Columbia alumni were disappointed when the football team snapped its more than 10 year losing streak!)</p>
<p>There was an article in Boston Magazine, I believe, a few years back about the MIT football team, entitled, “Well, Actually, They Are Rocket Scientists.” The players got no academic break.</p>
<p>Since you’ve posted on the MIT board, which suggests that you’re interested, I’ll speak to MIT.</p>
<p>I was a student-athlete in a varsity sport my freshman year, and experienced no prejudice - I knew people on the team in one particular class who had trouble with a prof over conflicts between competitions and exams, but everyone with any sort of time conflict had trouble with that prof, not just athletes. I didn’t advertise my status to faculty - why would I have unless it mattered for some reason? - but I wasn’t deliberately hiding it. I was open about it with fellow students, and nobody took a negative attitude toward it - most MIT students are involved in sports somehow, whether on varsity, club, or intramural teams, so it wasn’t anything unique or strange. The people I knew who were very good at or committed to their sport, at varsity or club level, got respect from fellow students for it, as the people who were very good at pretty much anything did.</p>
<p>When I went to UF, my shadowee(er?) person felt the need to point at almost every “jock-ish” looking person and say something like “You know how they got in…”.</p>
<p>I’m not an athlete, but that kinda ****ed me off.</p>
<p>Dnerd: yes, that’s a prime example of people being predjudiced against student-athletes. Very rarely would someone blatantly say that of an African American or hispanic student – however a level of intellectual snobbery is less condemned. See it for what it is, and do your best to counter it.</p>
<p>A few years ago, I was watching the Cartoon Network w/my 10 year old daughter. One of the commercials clearly had its comedy emphasis on the oafishness of an overweight boy. Frankly I was appalled. I asked my daughter: “What are the kids laughing about on this commercial?” She said she didn’t know. I pointed out the fact that the object of the humor was the big kid and how frankly, opposed I was to that kind of characterization. Our household knows that we treat people equally w/o regard to appearance.</p>
<p>Predjudice comes in many forms and often, we’re unaware of how common it is. I’m not saying go PC and declare everything off-limits (one of my favorite comedies is “Blazing Saddles”) but one must keep eyes and ears open, I would think.</p>
<p>Off topic, but: All Ivies compete in Div. I, but they do not offer scholarships. Except for football (which is Div. I AA), all Ivy sports compete against Div. I teams, and in national competitions, that would and does include the Pac 10.</p>
<p>In our area, we have had several football players recruited by both Harvard and USC.</p>
<p>While it is not true of football, there are several D1 sports in which the Ivies are nationally competitive. Harvard is currently ranked 4th in men’s soccer, for example. You don’t get a team that good by putting flyers up in the dorms and holding tryouts. </p>
<p>So they do recruit. And athletes do benefit from lower academic standards for admission and more accomodating admissions procedures. (Most Ivy recruited athletes will be told in October if they will be admitted.) This is not universally popular at the schools.</p>
<p>Dartmouth’s recently retired admissions dean has written " football programs represent a sacrifice to the academic quality and diversity of entering first-year classes. This is particularly true at highly selective institutions that aspire to academic excellence… I wish this were not true but sadly football, and the culture that surrounds it, is antithetical to the academic mission of colleges such as ours."</p>
<p>I am sure this point of view is shared by many of the Ivy professors. </p>
<p>It doesn’t have to be though. I’m not a “let’s cancel football like at Swarthmore” proponent. I think intercollegiate sports and football in particular have an important place in our colleges. But given the insane demand for admission to the Ivy’s those schools could admit enough athletes to populate their teams without reducing their academic standards at all. The teams would be as good, but who cares? They’d still be playing.</p>
Look at how Caltech is doing with its athletics. This is why the Ivies have to lower standards for athletes a little bit, to avoid complete humiliation in sports. Remember that what holds together the Ivy League is athletic tradition above everything else; that’s what makes it a league.</p>
<p>That’s not to say there aren’t people out there who are both athletically and academically stellar. Ross Ohlendorf, a former Princeton pitcher and now a successful (and soon to be multimillionaire) pitcher for the Pittsburgh Pirates, scored a 1580/1600 on his SATs and was a straight-A student throughout high school. The fact is though that he is an exceptional case and that most humans have a balance of talents, whether being more talented academically or athletically. You can probably count the number of Ross Ohlendorf-type people with your fingers. </p>
<p>Of course, I’m not saying Ivy League schools have to set professional-level standards, but even going down the talent-chain you still will not find many student-athletes who can play at a D1 level while reaching “typical” Ivy standards (say, 2250+ SAT and 3.9+ GPA). If you lower that standard to, say, a 2000+ SAT and 3.6+ GPA, then the athletics can be D1-caliber, but that is essentially what the Ivies are doing now.</p>
<p>Would a 2000 SAT and a 3.6 make it within 1 standard dev of the AI mean ?
It seems low.
I know that each school has their own mean based on entrance data–is that the middle 50% from the common data set or something else?</p>
<p>I guess if schools want to say, we won’t compromise for athletes–they should also not compromise for URM, art, music, etc…</p>
<p>Read the threads of who gets in EA/ED etc at the upper schools–and lots of internationals get in without the SATs at the schools mean…
but that would affect diversity.</p>
<p>No, that would only happen if the scheduling was not adjusted. They’d play each other and they could play other schools w/ similar academic profiles. Again, the demand for admission is so strong, they ought to be able to compete w/ Patriot League teams for example. And even if they couldn’t, so what I say. The Harvard – Yale game would still be the Harvard – Yale game. </p>
<p>And to fogfog’s question, kids w/ 3.2’s and 1900 SATs are very admittable to Ivy League schools if they are recruited athletes. And that’s why the whole issue of prejuidice arises.</p>