Or perhaps an inability to control their own confirmation bias
That 86% is directly from the Harvard lawsuit data. They never discuss the 14% who weren’t accepted. Not all those who are offered slots (after positive pre-reads) do get likely letters/admitted, but I can’t imagine that’s 14%. Some will inevitably fall out because of bad first semester grades, a suspension, legal trouble, etc.
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One thing that I get curious about in these discussions is - what does the actual average applicant look like? Does any one have any data or even guesses on that?
What is the legacy advantage (yes there is one) over a seemingly equal applicant? I mean, I think even unhooked kids, if qualified have more than a a 3% chance of getting in, maybe 5%, 10% even 15%. Who knows, but more than average. The legacies I know are submitting stats that are on the top half of ACCEPTED students. What do those stats look like against the overall pool? Because looking at our school there are plenty of kids with significantly lower stats than the colleges accepted average still taking their shot. What happens if we control for that?
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I don’t know, but also would love to see the data. I think the vast majority of domestic applicants are relatively ‘strong’, even if that majority might be somewhat lower since test optional came on the scene. I believe the lawsuit data did show legacy applicants had relatively high stats.
That is consistent with what Harvard has said in the past and student surveys (including Princeton’s) Yes these kids had all the advantages, but so did the non-legacy kid who’s dad went from Williams to Wall St. If we want to talk about legacy advantage, let’s stack them up against those kids.
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Most of the time I hear elite schools say that 80% of applicants are fully qualified academically. That sounds about right. Obviously you have some kids doing a Hail Mary, but it isn’t the bulk of applicants. At our HS Harvard is the Ivy that most kids try that with, but even then most applicants (looking at scoir) seem to be in range.
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I believe that. I imagine that the bottom 25% is still fully qualified. That doesn’t mean that an applicant that fall within the top 25% has the same chance as one that falls in the bottom 25%. I’d venture that a lot more of those 80% applications are closer to the bottom 25% than the top 25%
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Granted, it is out of date now but the Harvard lawsuit showed that only .5% of applicants got a “1” academic rating, 42% got a “2”. I think most others got a “3” or “4”. Other than recruited athletes (70% acceptance) applicants with a “4” academic rating had virtually no chance of admission. What I don’t recall seeing is what percentage of each ALDC category fell into those academic groupings.
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The problem with ALDC is that each group is distinctively different and really should not be lumped together. Legacy who are only legacy get very little (in reality probably none) of bending of the standards. What their status does is put them top of the pile of very strong applicants that will not fill any niche bucket. The legacy who happen to have lower stats (while still being qualified - no school is taking applicants they don’t believe will cut it) almost always fall into one of those other groups as well and it was THAT aspect that got then in, not a legacy advantage.
That makes sense. Since this thread is on athletic recruitment it would be interesting to see where those kids fall - do the 70% of recruited athletes getting in with a “4” represent a large number of athletes or is that a small pool to begin with? I will say, there have been athletes from our HS (helmet sports) that have gotten into Harvard with less than competitive academics, but I imagine there is greater leeway in that regard depending on the sport.
And in fact MIT and Caltech are DIII schools. Harvard is DI. I don’t think Harvard could remain DI with that sort of recruiting approach.
Again, maybe this editorial is hinting at the idea Harvard should in fact abandon DI athletics. But if so, they didn’t actually propose that.
My read of the Harvard lawsuit data was that if you were unhooked and deemed academically qualified, you had about a 10% chance of admissions at that point. To actually get admitted, you needed to also score as very strong on activities (including non-recruited athletics), at which point your odds would close to double, and then finally as very strong on the personal factor, at which point you would likely be admitted.
With legacies, it was true at least a lot of them passed that initial academic threshold anyway. But still, after that point they had something more like a 40% than 10% chance of admission.
So on the one hand, not a lot of legacies had obviously low academic qualifications for Harvard. On the other, because just being academically well-qualified is still far from enough to get admitted to Harvard, the advantage for legacies with sufficient academic qualifications was still very meaningful in that era.
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So I would be a little cautious about that. Back in the era of the Harvard lawsuit, that would seem to include the range in which people were being admitted as recruited athletes and such. I don’t think they want to say those people are not qualified academically, so that motivates statements like that.
But then for unhooked applicants, it appeared to be more like 40% or so were deemed academically qualified enough for serious admissions consideration.
And then if you listen to, say, Yale explaining why they went to this new initial review system, they say it is because now they are getting more and more applications that realistically have no shot. And I would guess this means for Yale, and likely many other such colleges, the percentage of unhooked applicants with a realistic shot based on academic qualifications is now well less than 40%.
Of course if these people were recruited athletes, maybe a lot more. But if you are unhooked, I would not assume being in the top 80% of Yale or Harvard applicants is going to be sufficient to qualify for full holistic review. I suspect these days it is probably more like 30% of unhooked applicants meeting that standard, or possibly even less.
Academic 3s were not in much better shape. Only a 4.2% admit rate, and that level could be largely explainable with hooked applicants of some sort. So I think the odds of an unhooked academic 3 getting admitted were very low in that era.
Academic 2s, on the other hand, had a 12.4% admit rate. Again, likely that is blending in hooked candidates, including legacies with a much higher admit rate as academic 2s. But that is where I get my estimate that probably unhooked academic 2s had around a 10% chance of admission.
Princeton has good breakdowns in their incoming student survey. I’d suggest the answer is it is some of both. There are some recruited athletes in ranges where it is virtually impossible to get admitted otherwise. But also some in ranges where it is not impossible to get otherwise admitted, but the recruited athletes are much more common.
Well, the average Academic Index of Ivy League athletes can be no lower than one standard deviation of that of the rest of the class, and you can be sure that sports like football and basketball are going to push that limit.
This means the average recruited athlete is at the 15th percentile of all students in that college. That’s pretty noticeable.
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Do you (or anyone else) know if Harvard is even attempting to calculate AI anymore? It’s not problem without a test score. For the athletes most (but not all) likely have test scores to share with the coach even if they end up applying TO, but that’s not the case for everyone else who applies TO…so I don’t know how they would calculate a full class AI.
I don’t know what is going on with that across the league but from what I heard, as this past recruiting season went on, it evolved from “don’t worry too much about it” in the fall, to “we need a test score as part of the pre-read” in the Spring. My take is that schools are realizing they can’t always assess preparedness without the testing for context if they are dealing with a school they are not overly familiar with.
My very recent, but possibly incomplete, knowledge is that Harvard’s Ivy League peers are not calculating or even discussing AI. Teams/Coaches are discussing admission standards, which can include test scores in some cases, for the classes they bring in, but the consistent message we’ve heard is that on a student-by-student level, AI is not relevant and it has not yet been replaced with something else.
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That’s a good point, as the AI originally consisted of grades, SAT, and SAT subject tests. Only the first component still remains.
But as to the original poster who said that the academic qualifications of athletes wasn’t that different from the overall class, the AI was the guardrail that limited how much worse athletes could be. Sounds like that guardrail no longer exists.
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“Recruited athletes have an 86 percent chance of getting into Harvard “
This statistic is misleading, (and surprising). For all of us familiar with college athletic recruiting, recruited athletes in the Ivy League are heavily vetted and most receive Likely Letters (LL)that are essentially guarantees of admission. The 86% statistic is misleading as it should be 100% of vetted recruits and I worry about the 14% who were not admitted if they had successfully passed the vetting process. Perhaps this 14% represents athletes who did not receive a LL, or had academic issues their senior year.
While many niche sports have historically been the province of the wealthy, it is worth noting that sports programs like fencing, squash, golf etc. are much less expensive to run (in both HS and college) than football, basketball, lacrosse, etc. Getting rid of niche sports would not have much effect on athletic budgets, and in the case of some of these sports might actually hurt overall diversity efforts. For example, in college fencing, many of the recruits are Asian-American, and in college squash, many of the world’s best players are from Africa, the Middle East, Asia, and South America. A look at the rosters of Ivy League (and other top college) teams would indicate that sports like squash and fencing could be some of the most ethnically diverse student groups on elite college campuses.
It has been said before the Ivy League was originally formed as an athletic league, so sports are completely relevant to putting together a student body. While Harvard has the greatest number of varsity athletic teams, some other Ivys, notably Brown, Columbia and Dartmouth, have gotten rid of some men’s athletic programs to comply with Title IX. Rather than kick these schools out of the country’s oldest sports league, perhaps these august institutions should consider adding these varsity programs back to make league participation greater and ultimately more inclusive.
Athletics are an important part of the college experience, both for the athletes and non-athletes. Belonging, camaraderie, institutional-pride and support are fostered.
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Can only speak to three schools. We have seen Harvard, Princeton, and Penn requiring ACT/SAT scores for junior year recruitment this fall. No TO, even when athlete met an institutional priority (URM). So a big change from last year.
A lot of AI or AI-like balancing. Slam dunk athletes with low ACT scores (29) being offset with high ACT/SAT recruited athletes. (EDITED) This could be sport specific and seems different from last year with respect to the sport test score policy, that we know of, at 2 of these 3 schools.