the editorial seems to demonstrate that the editorial board doesn’t understand the recruiting process, comparing the 86% admit rate of athletic recruits to lower % for other preferred groups
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Yeah, the basic choice is whether you want to have so many competitive varsity sports teams or not. Harvard could decide to turn a lot of those teams into just club sports, or eliminate them altogether. But there is no point of fielding a varsity team if you are not going to recruit the players necessary to be competitive in your league.
And of course often the sports that people (fairly) identify as having relatively little ethnic or socioeconomic diversity are the same sports in which colleges like Harvard are most competitive. Because that really all goes together.
So Harvard can have varsity squash teams that win national championships, or it can eliminate recruiting for squash. But it can’t do both of those things.
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Not sure why you think the Crimson doesn’t understand the recruiting process. The stat’s they are citing come from the litigation and further studies using data from the litigation.
It is a fair comment to point out and question the number of varsity sports, especially in niche sports that require significant family resources to participate so that those recruits are predominantly affluent and white. On the other hand, I think like with legacy admissions, any change to athletic recruiting policy will just shift seats to other upper/upper middle class applicants. The AI for niche sports is higher than others so those kids just get thrown in the large avg excellent pool.
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Clearly, the writer does not understand the recruiting process. Recruited athletes at Harvard have all been pre-screened by coaches for academics throughout the process and are also must complete a pre-read by admissions before officially applying. Which would obviously lead to a much higher admission percentage.
Are the academic thresholds different for athletes? Probably, but not by as much as the general population seems to think.
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I would suggest the issue is that the editorial didn’t really do that, meaning it didn’t argue for eliminating or downgrading a lot of varsity sports at Harvard. It is pretty vague about what it is actually asking for, but the most concrete lines appear to be these:
Harvard should conduct a thorough review of its athletic admissions policy, including how, where, and why it recruits certain athletes. Harvard should find alternatives to the current process of recruiting and admitting athletes that do not rid us of the opportunity to have athletes in our student body.
Athlete recruitment should be consistent with the College’s values of diversity and opportunity. While athletes’ talents are valuable, so are other extracurriculars. As such, being an excellent athlete should be considered similar to being an exceptional chess player, debater, creative writer, or instrument player. The immense boost given to recruited athletes by virtue of a coach’s preference letter should be minimized and their accomplishments should be weighed just like those of their fellow students.
This is what a truly holistic admissions process would look like. An admission process where an applicant’s background and experience, athletic prowess, academic achievements, and artistic skills boost their chances of admission — not guarantee it.
That’s all fine if you are describing IM and maybe some club sports. But do they know that?
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The Crimson ignored the pre-screen process. It is not at all surprising that the admissions rate for recruited athletes is so high when a coach is not even going to make an offer to a student they do not think is admissible and all of those who receive offers are pre-screened by admissions for the purpose of issuing likely letters.
Of course, I acknowledge that there are recruited athletes who are admitted with academic stats below the mean, but the same can be said of other hooked applicants.
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I look forward to the day they no longer refer to Brown, Columbia, Cornell, Dartmouth, Harvard, Penn, Princeton and Yale as the Ivy “LEAGUE.”
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Not sure I understand. It’s an athletic conference.
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A couple of issues to address here. The article is not about the recruiting process, so there is no need to address it. It is examining the outcomes of athletic recruiting which favor white affluent applicants. I am sure the Crimson editors did their research on how recruiting works as part of routine journalistic standards. Also, I would not be surprised if some of them went through the recruiting process themselves - they certainly have friends who are recruited athletes. The article correctly identifies the part of the process that matters, “The immense boost given to recruited athletes by virtue of a coach’s preference letter should be minimized…”
As to the point of the article, I think they very much were targeting the number and nature of sports:
With 42 D1 intercollegiate varsity teams to recruit for — the most in the country — Harvard finds itself recruiting and eventually admitting athletes who play very niche, resource-intensive sports that all but necessitate an elite wealthy academic environment. Indeed, as of 2019, only 3.2 percent of white admitted athletes can be considered economically disadvantaged. Athletic admissions, as it is, works against efforts made to increase diversity at Harvard in the wake of the Supreme Court’s ban on affirmative action.
I think the point that they miss is that most if not all of those niche athletes have academic qualifications on par with non-recruits. If you got rid of sailing, skiing, golf, squash, etc… those places will likely not be taken up by disadvantaged applicants but similar applicants who just don’t play those sports (and those teams will be less competitive).
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when the editorial compares apples (fully vetted recruits with 86% admit rate) and oranges (admit rates of “47 percent for students who are children of faculty and staff, 42 percent for applicants on the dean’s list, 33 percent for legacy applicants, and the dismal six percent for the average applicant” - none of whom were pre-screened) it doesn’t suggest to me that they did their research on recruiting or know how the process works
either that or inability to be intellectually honest
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Sorry for the confusion, that’s my point. People refer to the collection of schools as the Ivy League when not discussing sports. The league is tied to their identity.
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If they did their research on how the recruiting process works, they really shouldn’t have compared the lawsuit’s “86 percent chance” for athletic recruits to the 6% admit rate for all applicants.
As others have mentioned, the athletic recruit pool is pre screened and fully filtered before applications are submitted. If they’re looking for a number to compare to the 6% admit rate for all applicants, the appropriate number would be the entire pool of potential recruits who reach out to coaches. I can guarantee, at least in my sport, that coaches turn away or ignore at least 90+% of those inquiries.
The diversity issue is certainly an interesting one. I’m skeptical of relying on student surveys without any indication of how much of the pool of athletic recruits actually responded. The university almost certainly has the hard numbers. They might be limited in what they can share, but that’d be an interesting avenue to pursue.
I think they could make their arguments without relying on some of these questionable statistics, or at the very least provide some context.
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But they never actually say that, which is strange to me. They instead seem to be suggesting Harvard can just change the way it recruits for those sports.
Of course maybe they meant us to read between the lines. But I think if the point of the editorial was to advocate for doing a mass wave of eliminating or downgrading varsity sports at Harvard, they should actually have said that.
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To me, they were identifying how the number and type of sports result in a significant preference for already advantaged applicants. The second to last paragraph is pretty open:
Harvard should conduct a thorough review of its athletic admissions policy, including how, where, and why it recruits certain athletes. Harvard should find alternatives to the current process of recruiting and admitting athletes that do not rid us of the opportunity to have athletes in our student body
The last paragraph does suggest an MIT/Caltech type approach, which if it is not followed by others they play in sports that matter to the campus at large (football, basketball, ice hockey, lacrosse, maybe others) will result in Harvard being a perennial doormat, which goes against the positives of sports/athletes that the article raised earlier, “The talents of our peer athletes add vibrancy to campus life. Harvard, like many colleges, benefits from the school spirit fostered through sports matches. Students come together, taking time away from their classes to cheer on their teams.” Not much school excitement or spirit for teams that don’t win.
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At most schools, and in most sports, athletic recruiting favors wealthier (and often whiter) students. While talent, hard work, and grit are required to be an elite athlete at a D1 recruitable level, it’s hard to get there without money, transportation to practices and competitions, and time not watching siblings or working. My hunch is that this may be even more the case than it was decades ago as so many athletes are now developed through year-round elite clubs rather than high school and YMCA athletic programs.
This isn’t a novel argument. It doesn’t matter if these excellent student athletes have been pre-screened – we all know that the recruitment path is an extremely tough one. At some level, if a school is seeking a diverse student body, they need to accept that a disproportionate number of wealthy (and likely whote) student seats will be occupied by athletes and that similarly, there will be a stereotype of sailors, golfers, hockey players, etc that will largely be borne out by reality.
Not sure what response the writer expects beyond shining a light on this. Applicants who are disadvantaged are those who look like the athletes but aren’t recruitable. No wonder the author argues for preferred for other ECs!
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The editorial references the recent interview with Harvard’s AD:
“I’d say all of our coaches are certainly wanting to recruit as inclusive of a class and cohort as possible, so I think it’s something that they are mindful of,” she said. “They are also obviously looking at academic credentials and athletic talent and all the things that will help with being a great Harvard representative.”
…
“All of the sports that we sponsor at the varsity level have the ability and the expectation that they will be recruiting for their sport programs, that they will be — as we just talked about — inclusive in that process,” she added.
She emphasizes multiple times that they are making every effort to be inclusive, and given the recent SCOTUS ruling the school will look for every opportunity to fill the diversity gap outside of race-preferenced admissions (the admin said so publicly).
Is Affirmative Action in recruiting a consideration?
I didn’t think it was, but then the NESCACS delayed their pre read time line “to wait on the SCOTUS ruling.”
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I definitely think it was, and not sure how it will be going forward. If a recruited athlete can also fill an institutional priority such as underrepresented minority or low income or first generation, that would be another point in their favor on the pre-read.
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I think that’s right, and it’s not like it’s a new or novel light of any sort - news flash, athletic recruiting is a well-known hook into the Ivy League and many other highly-selective schools.
I generally agree with the sentiment that the writers sort of know what they’re talking about, but the argument isn’t well thought through. The 86% number is strange, because I’m not sure what the 14% are - surely the admissions acceptance rate for committed/LL-receiving letters is much closer to 100%, or Harvard would be seriously disadvantaged in the recruiting process.
Similarly -
The immense boost given to recruited athletes by virtue of a coach’s preference letter should be minimized and their accomplishments should be weighed just like those of their fellow students.
A “preference letter” isn’t the correct terminology for an athletic recruit. If it’s an actual recruit, then weighing them like their fellow students means you no longer have an athletic recruiting preference, and so you are no longer competing equally against the rest of the Ivy League. If they are trying to say something like “soft support,” than the boost is certainly not immense (and not near the 86% number).
The opinion board could have come out with a stronger opinion - “we’d choose to treat athletics as any other activity in admissions over being competitive with our peer schools” - but instead they are just hand-waving the inevitable results of the recommendation.
One thing that has changed over the last decade or two is the industry around preparing “big sport” athletes to be recruitable - becoming a top prospect in football, basketball, and (especially) baseball now really does carry a huge price tag, and so student-athletes in those sports are definitely more financially advantaged as a whole than I expect popular perspective would guess.
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nvm