Also, the SCOTUS decision ruled that discriminating against Asians is illegal, and that using race is unconstitutional in determining college admissions.
It is NOT unconstitutional for private colleges and universities to consider legacy, development, faculty, or athletics when it comes to college admission.
For those who continue to be against athletic recruiting, perhaps a constitutional amendment is necessary to achieve the exclusion they seek.
This whole white, wealthy complaining is a dog whistle. As I mentioned up thread, in the sports my kids are involved with, many of the top college teams are minority white and majority Asian/non-American. To get recruited you have to be really good.
It is worth noting, the niche sports are the ones that the Ivy League and other elite schools are actually good at (nationally ranked in the top 10). For these top schools to achieve the national ranking the niche sports enjoy in revenue sports like football and basketball, admission standards would really have to be lowered. The niche sports are less expensive to administer and they have a long history of excellence at many of the top schools. Why would anyone want to change this?
Athletic recruiting, for those who have experienced it, is the last meritocracy in elite college admissions.
Considering that 83% of recruited athletes at Harvard are white, that seems to fly in the face of your assertion. Not to mention that niche sports are largely the purview of wealthy students. For the record, I’m not opposed to athletic recruiting and, of course, recruited athletes have achieved excellence in their sport through hard work and dedication. Regardless, because athletic recruiting tends to favor wealthy, white students it was only a matter of time before it came under scrutiny - that doesn’t mean it is going anywhere because it isn’t. As for being “meritocratic”, in a country where most kids can’t access the sports so prized at Harvard and other elite schools, I’d hardly call it a meritocracy.
Have you ever met a hockey, lacrosse and field hockey team?
In any case, the football and basketball teams are also much more white than what you expect from TV. The sad truth is that schools don’t have as diverse a talent pool for those sports that still meets the academic bar. Should it be the case that only Ivys don’t get to recruit bc their pool is not as diverse? Because UT is recruiting too and I am pretty sure there are plenty of players with way lower academic standards than many of the kids getting rejected.
This reminds me that it has been about three months so it might be time to open up the “Are Elite Schools Worth It” thread for another exciting discussion on why academics aren’t all that matters to Elite schools in the US system.
That would be where we typically point out time and time again that eliminating (insert your favorite preference) results in a negligible increase in the chance of admission for the typical applicant to any of the Ivy/NESCAC schools that are part of this conversation. Athletic preferences, Legacy preferences, Employee preferences, etc. aren’t why the typical “average excellent” applicant isn’t getting in. They aren’t getting in because Harvard gets about 60,000 applications for about 2,000 spots and adding or subtracting a few hundred spots doesn’t change the math very much. Being a recruited athlete and having a highly valued skill does give some a “golden ticket”; a golden ticket based on highly developed skills that they have trained years to develop along with very strong (with limited exceptions) academic skills. For the NESCAC the academic bar is even higher to become a recruited athlete. Math dictates that their golden ticket doesn’t really affect the chances for any individual in the greater pool of applicants in a meaningful way and their acceptance doesn’t “dilute” the academic strength of the student body in any significant way.
The Crimson editorial acknowledges the value of athletes and recruiting to Harvard. They offer a minor lament about “fairness” and wish that the recruiting process resulted in a lesser guarantee. That could be done (like MIT and JHU) but be careful what you wish for. MIT and JHU succeed by over recruiting (at least in some sports) knowing that some will not get through but not knowing which ones. This is not optimal for the kids, the coaches or the teams while having no real impact on the number of recruited athletes brought in because fielding an extremely competitive team is in institutional priority for these schools and you need a certain number of players to field a competitive team in any sport.
Frankly, I really wish everyone just internalized the fact that these private colleges are not even pretending to be pure meritocracies, that their admissions policies instead are driven by optimizing over a variety of different institutional goals.
And to be really blunt about it, it works. The four non-tech-specific colleges with the largest endowments are Harvard, Yale, Stanford, and Princeton. The next college after Princeton is Penn, and they are already down at only like 60% of Princeton’s endowment. Columbia is under 40% of Princeton, Brown is under 20% of Princeton, and it keeps going down from there.
The tech colleges also factor in extraordinary research funding, but even so MIT is far and away the tech college with the largest endowment. CMU only has like 16% of their endowment. Caltech a little less, although they are small enough that means their endowment goes a lot farther.
Of course public universities can compete in some ways through scale efficiencies and state support rather than large endowments. But then to fulfill their state mandates and get to that scale they cannot be as selective as their private peers. Which apparently is a dealbreaker for people who are feeling just edged out by HYPSM, in the sense almost undoubtedly if you were actually that close to HYPSM you can get into a great public college, and yet clearly these people feel like that is not good enough for kids of such merit.
But in any event, my point is that HYPSM are HYSPM because they are far and away the richest colleges, significantly richer than even their closest competitors. And it quickly goes down from there.
OK, and then some people complain about these colleges doing things which are not purely meritocratic, that seem to disproportionately benefit and/or appeal to wealthy people.
And I am shocked–shocked!–to find that the wealthiest private colleges are intentionally catering to the wealthiest people.
The recruiting process it self is very meritocratic for the most part. Coaches reputations and livelihoods are require trying to get the best that they can.
Getting access to the years of high level training needed to become visible and recruitable isn’t meritocratic at all and is something that I very much lament. It is a huge problem in youth sports today and in many ways mirrors the issues in our K-12 education system.
I just want to add that JHU makes an exception for its lacrosse teams. It is an institutional priority for them to recruit strong lacrosse players because of their long tradition playing lacrosse and because their lax teams are D1 and play in the Big 10 conference, while the rest of their sports are D3.
If you want to compete with the big boys, you can’t recruit with a different set of rules that the rest of your conference doesn’t follow.
I don’t think it’s only about money. I believe they truly believe that supporting athletics is beneficial to their mission and to the overall student body. Most of these schools started and maintained large athletics programs long before there was any link to big donor money.
Look at U Chicago which had a storied football program in the Big 10, a former president tried to kill their athletics program stating that sports (including recruiting of low academic caliber athletes) distracted from its academic purpose. They eventually brought it back and even expanded it over the years but at a lower level of competition.
I’m sure that quite a few U Chicago administrators and alumni wish that they had never left the Big 10 so they could reap the benefits like Northwestern, Vanderbilt, Duke, Notre Dame, and Stanford.
For team sports, it is not all meritocratic.
There is enough room for wheeling and dealing under the table and enough space on the roster to park players who coaches know will never see a second of playing time.
I agree there is a very long tradition, going back to the Ancient Greeks, of believing that student involvement in athletics is conducive to healthy development of both mind and body. And I for one completely buy into that being something a residential college can value.
That said, critics are entirely right that they could carry on that tradition at the club and IM level. They do not actually need competitive varsity teams for that type of purpose, and in turn they do not need more than normal valuation of athletic ECs to support club and IM sports.
So personally, I think maintaining varsity sports, and the associated recruiting practices, versus just club/IM, is very much about institutional development these days. And a lot of that is basically about money in the end.
This is an interesting comment, and I don’t dispute it at all. In the last several years, the kids I have seen “parked” at the highly selectives are the 36 ACT/4.0 (with Honors) kids who balanced out the lower band kids. Have seen kids parked for $ reasons at elite D1 teams in the South, but not at the selectives.
I haven’t really seen this, but our sport is time based. There are also kids who walk-on and aren’t quite strong enough to play much but make an excellent addition to the practice squad.
Have you been to a Duke-UNC basketball game or a Michigan-Ohio State football game?
There is something unique about sports that unites the entire institution (students, faculty, and alumni) and engenders a collective pride about belonging to that school.
These events bring out the alumni (who in other institutions would never come back) as well as the surrounding community. The “halo” effect and free publicity are priceless. Duke celebrates their “Cameron Crazies” and the fact that they camp outdoors for weeks to secure basketball tickets. Stanford celebrates their annual Directors’ cup victories and Olympic success. Harvard celebrates winning the annual Harvard-Yale football game. Where would Notre Dame be these days if it never had a football team? And if this also causes alumni and others to donate to the school, that’s a bonus. Even Northwestern and Vanderbilt students are proud of their sports teams (especially when they win) even though they are usually doormats in their respective conferences. On a smaller scale, you see the same thing with the NESCAC schools.
Intramural or club sports don’t have that effect. No one watches or cares.
Comparing big-time sports, essentially practiced by hired guns who have a good chance of never graduating, to what is happening on the playing fields at elite schools isn’t a very good comparison. And that is taking into account the most popular sports - football, basketball, hockey etc. When it comes to niche sports, few people are attending and few have more than a passing interest (if that). The primary consumers of those sports are the athletes, their teammates and family members (and perhaps some of their friends). That isn’t to say they aren’t worthwhile, but I think it is a stretch to suggest they are source of collective pride or that they help build community.
There has been an interesting split in “meritocracy” (really institutional priorities) over the years since I went to college in the early 80’s. Back then, Yale was 20-25% legacy. Non-whites were 15-17%. I am not sure if FGLI was even tracked back then. For the most recent class, only 11% are legacy, 59% are non-white, 21% are first gen and 22% are Pell. This is a very different student makeup from 40 years ago, reflecting changing institutional priorities.
Contrast this with the evolution of youth sports. Most of my “athletic” friends in HS, including those who were recruited by the likes of Princeton, Columbia, Swat were 3 sport athletes who were also multisports in college. While I am sure there were other sports leagues during the summers, the only prevalent one that I recall was Babe Ruth for baseball. Today, it is big business for club/travel teams in almost every sport that is played somewhere at the collegiate level. My kids in flyover land would never have been noticed by the schools on the East and West coast that they were interested in but for the fact our family could afford to put them on club/travel and send them to specific camps on the East and West Coasts. They were recruited for their talent, but they would never had gotten on the targeted schools’ radars but for the resources they enjoyed.
Here’s an example of pride in athletic accomplishments by a school not known to have much pride in anything sports related. The bookstore was selling NCAA championship T-shirts for months.
But yes, I heard the championship game was lightly attended; but the game was played in North Carolina.
