Harvard Crimson op-ed on Athletic Recruiting

Athletic Recruits
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I agree that (at least on College Confidential) people are focused on the elite schools. But personally, I think the bigger ethical problem is at the big schools known for sports. Some years back there was a huge scandal at my home state’s flagship when it all came out that the athletes in the “revenue sports” were having all their homework done, papers written, and even tests taken by athletic department employees. These young men were NOT being educated, and I’m sure our flagship was not the only one running this scam.

I consider the relationship US schools have with sports to be an unholy alliance. Really at all levels, but especially at the college level. Why again is it a good thing that colleges are in the business of BOTH education and running the minor leagues for sports? Let’s end the charade, get these athletes into a real minor league, and pay them.

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They aren’t. Plenty of athletes are just as smart and capable as their non athletic peers. At the same time smart non-athletes aren’t necessarily boring and clumsy.

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I agree. Especially the one and done athletes. Let’s end the pretence.

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More and more people of color are playing sports, even niche sports, including my daughter. When she was in 5th grade, she was the ONLY minority in the all star tournament (60 girls). We have Citylax, made up of kids who would not otherwise have an introduction to lacrosse and from that team I know kids who got scholarships to go to a country day school and college scholarships from there. We also have Native lacrosse which promotes the sport to Native American youth and adults. The coaches have to put in the effort.

Jim Brown went to college on a lacrosse scholarship, not football.

Many athletes get ‘leadership’ points on their applications from being captains when on their youth and high school teams.

There are more people of color in tennis, golf, soccer than there were in the past.

Harvard and the other schools may not care about diversity, but I think they do. One way to keep the numbers more like they were in the past without asking ‘race’ on the application is to expand recruiting for sports. Just one way, and there are of course others.

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Yeah, THAT I have a problem with. But I suspect that is not so much an issue for Ivy League crew teams.

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I think that Harvard does care about diversity - as do I. One of my complaints about athletic recruiting at Harvard (and other schools like it) is that it so, so heavily favors white students (mostly affluent). Athletics at Harvard are far less diverse than the student body overall (83% of recruited athletes are white while only 35% of Harvard undergrads are white). And while there are more people of color involved in sports like tennis, golf and soccer, they are still majority white - in many cases by huge margins. Numbers alone dictate that it will be a long time before participation in niche athletics is diverse enough to provide a meaningful way of diversifying the student body at elite schools.

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Well, if Harvard’s overall proportion of white students is 35% (I’ll take you at your word), seems like they are much more diversified (racially) than the overall US population, no? Meaning they clearly don’t need athletics to provide diversity.

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Since it appears whites are underrepresented at Harvard and its peers (35% at Harvard), perhaps if it wasn’t for “predominantly white niche” sports, their enrollment percentage would be even further non-representative of the national college population.

But seriously, how much more racially diverse can Harvard get? (SES is another matter entirely).

Enrollment data

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This is primarily an issue for football, and as we’ve talked about on other threads this will never change because of $$$$$. And clearly (sadly) the $$$$$ outweighs the significant and/or elevated safety risk of CTE, ALS, and more.

As for the basketball one and done situation, I promise you the players don’t like that either. Those who can go right to the NBA from HS and forego college should. Those who can go to the NBA after their first year of college or second year or whenever, should do so. They can’t run the risk of a career ending or limiting injury happening in college before they’ve had the opportunity to earn professional level money and support their families. Again, I’m talking about those who are legitimate NBA prospects, which is generally not Harvard players.

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Yes, it’s especially an issue for football and basketball. But I think it’s actually a problem in other sports when universities take on the role of developing talent for the Olympics or other national-level teams. I know someone quite well who attended a HYPMS on a team that prided itself on being a major incubator for Olympic talent in that sport. This person’s academic stats were substantially below normal admit standards to the point that they were in no position to take advantage of the top academics this school is known for. In addition this person couldn’t even access their preferred major due to conflicts with their competition schedule. This person had no trouble graduating, but then again it was well known that the athletic office handed out a special “easy classes” list to the athletes (this has been confirmed in reporting.)

I just see higher education and intense sports as being fundamentally at odds. It is well accepted that to be on a D1 team means students MUST miss classes in order to travel to competitions. Classes are at the core of what education is all about, and yet sports require athletes to skip… Just a total conflict of interests.

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Now that’s irony. Take a sport that originally came from the Native Americans, change it to the point that they stopped playing it, and teach it back to them.

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Okay, but note that not all Native tribes had a tradition of playing lacrosse, and many of these current outreach programs which promote the game in Indigenous communities are located in areas where the game was not a part of the cultural heritage of the peoples from those regions.

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Football players aren’t missing many classes…their season is short, confined to one semester/quarter (for most teams) where the players typically are taking a light course load (the vast majority of D1 football players have to take summer classes), many games on Saturday, and half the games are at home (outside of class hours). Basketball, baseball, softball miss more. Debate teams and the various bands/orchestras all miss classes for competitions too.

I would love to see data (don’t know of any) that show how many classes in an average semester athletes miss vs debate vs band vs a student in none of those. Often the teams/orgs have requirements for attending class, making plans with the prof if you do miss class, attending study groups and the like. And ‘regular’ students miss a lot of classes…if I were to place a bet, I would say a non-athlete misses more classes than an athlete, but that’s just speculation based on data that show class attendance has dropped dramatically since covid (same in high schools all across the land too).

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I don’t think they ever stopped playing. There are still top players in college like the Thompsons from Albany. My daughter played against the Haudenosaunee
last summer (and they were very, very good).

Lacrosse can’t be played like the Natives played it because they had no boundaries and played over acres and acres, and for weeks at a time.

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In 4 years my daughter missed very few. Her team did very few overnights (mostly played within 3 hours of the school). Her coach didn’t allow them to miss classes except for games out of town. No skipping to go to the beach.

I’d say Stanford and Cal players are going to miss a lot next year when they are constantly traveling to the east coast.

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That is a very broad generalization - our child is D1/Ivy league athlete/junior year student and they have never missed classes for any competition including championships. I do think it depends on the sport, teams in league etc - but it is not a MUST for all D1 sports. What attracted our student to this league was school 1st and sport 2nd - any spare time pretty minimal.

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I think there’s huge variability. My D3 baseball player missed a substantial number of classes. Double headers would start at noon on weekdays, for example. And for weekend tourneys they would leave during the day on Friday. It’s one of the reasons he quit at the end of his second season and transferred. Baseball is ridiculous that way. I feel for the west coast big 10 teams next year.

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Our experience was this.

Attendance at all practices was mandatory EXCEPT for classes, labs, and exams. That means optional events like weekly studying sessions (with the TA) or office hours (with the professor) did not have priority over practice. So players never attended those.

Attendance at all games was mandatory. That meant they might have to skip class or lab. Labs were the ones that conflicted that most because they were usually several hours long and were scheduled during late afternoon or early evening. If you missed class, the notes were often posted online, so that wasn’t as big of a problem. If there was a big game coming up, players would skip class/lab, so they could attend practice. Players who were taking basic sciences during the season definitely missed a lot of lab time and that was very hard to make up. But that only affected a few players, since there were very few STEM majors. Social science majors, which had no lab requirement, were the most popular for student-athletes. I am not aware of anyone missing or having to make up a test.

For many D1 teams, there is private tutor support which can offset the disadvantage of missing class or having less time to study. I have heard of some teams in which the coach can proctor exams off-site when the team is traveling.

Every sport and every team is different. There are good reasons why there are very few varsity players who are engineering majors.

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My daughter only had one class that couldn’t be taken outside of practice times, and she took the class and missed practice. She was an engineer and did not miss labs. Her coach got a notice if she missed class. She did one time, but it was because she went to a different section of the same lecture, but coach was on her before she even got to practice, before she could explain.

The school arranged things so tests, labs, etc worked with the athletic dept (ex., all math tests on Thursday nights, so no games on Thursday nights)

I know that many athletes don’t care, but this was a STEM school so most did care.

I know I missed a lot more classes while I was in college than my daughter did and I wasn’t an athlete.

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This thread seems to have veered away from the issue of preferential admissions for athletic ability and confused it with the issue (not raised by this article or by anyone else opposing preferential admissions for athletes, legacies, race, donor status, etc.) of whether or not colleges should even have sports teams. This move didn’t happen accidentally - it’s a common debate technique in which the opponent attacks by mis-characterizing the original statement. Unfortunately, I see it used a lot on here; I don’t know why - I thought this was a discussion, not an aggressive debate to score points, and I thought that posters on here might see the unjustness of a preferential admissions pipeline for athletes, as opposed to students with other talents and qualifications, especially in light of the recent Supreme Court decision overturning affirmative action admissions.

Of course no one is advocating for eliminating sports teams at colleges, just as no one is advocating for eliminating the dance squad, or the amateur theatricals groups, or the ping pong club! The issue here is preferential college acceptances for non-academic reasons, which no matter how anyone wants to extol the virtues of “holistic” evaluations of applications in order to find the hidden gem coming from disadvantaged circumstances, actually has its origins in blatant, good old genteel WASP “old boy network” antisemitism. Before 1922, the Ivies admitted based upon performance on an admissions test. Most people didn’t even go to college, and for those who had the money, it wasn’t so difficult to get accepted to a good college. But by that time, the striving sons of Jewish Eastern European immigrants, almost entirely publicly educated, were outscoring the sons of the WASP elite on the exams, so much so that Harvard’s percentage of Jews had tripled between 1900 (7%) to 21% in 1922. Then Harvard president Lowell decided that Harvard needed to limit the number of Jews admitted, and came up with “holistic” admissions, for the sole express purpose of limiting the number of Jews. There was even a rating system, based upon surname and photograph, of “J1, J2, J3” to classify applicants as conclusively Jewish, probably Jewish, or maybe Jewish. Pity the unlucky WASP applicant with dark curly hair and a large nose! Harvard’s infamous “character” rating originated at this time too. “Holistic” admissions was designed as a non-quantifiable means of “shaping” the class to the Harvard administration’s likings - and it didn’t like Jews.

Applying a separate and NOT equal admissions pathway for athletes, in which the student’s athletic ability is evaluated first, and only afterwards is their academic achievement assessed as being good enough to warrant acceptance (a far, far lower bar than that applied to applicants who don’t fit into one of the preferential admissions categories) tends to favor applicants who have access to training in certain sports that are mostly reserved for the wealthy, and usually non-URM, just as does wealthy donor child, and also legacy preference.

Now that the Supreme Court has banned affirmative action, many are saying it’s time to get rid of legacy preference, too. But isn’t it time to also get rid of the separate and preferential admissions pathway for athletes? Sure, this would reduce the quality of sports teams. But do elite schools really need to field highly competitive sports teams for fencing and sailing, lacrosse and swimming, volleyball and field hockey, and so on? Couldn’t most of these sports be played at the club level, without a preferential admissions pathway for athletes? Students would get the joy of playing the sport, but another preferential admissions pathway that favors the wealthy non-URM applicant would be appropriately eliminated, just as affirmative action and now, hopefully, the legacy preferences have been admitted.

The really tough one is going to be the wealthy donor child preference. Even Harvard, with its gargantuan endowment, would find it tough to forgo that, since the reality is that huge donations are often made with the realistic expectation that one’s marginally qualified child will be accepted, as Jared Kushner was.

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