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<p>Please do elaborate.
:)</p>
<p>(And are you sure it’s not more like ‘in an SNL way’? Because just personally, cur, I’m increasingly amused at people’s exaggerated “outrage” at not being admitted to 3 Universities out of thousands…</p>
<p>also amused at the sense of ego that claims the right of decision-making over applications not viewed or viewable.)</p>
<p>epiphany…agree…over the “outrage” over rejection at HYP and also over the armchair decision making as to who should or should not have been admitted.</p>
<p>Coming from Monty Python’s complaint department - let me contradict Soozie for the heck of it!</p>
<p>Dont know how far it is true but music is linked to people doing academically well and so it is not all that surprising to see a great musician who can ace all kinds of tests. However, it is really tough for a recruitment worthy athlete to manage to be in the top quarter or top half of a class in a private high school. The sports do take up a lot of time and after all that physical activity (I am assuming it was nt billiards or ping pong they are recruited for) it is hard to have the time to study or stay awake to study.</p>
<p>sm74…
Something I don’t understand…
On the one hand you seem against the athletic recruiting. Yet, I believe you have a child at a school with a huge football scene, right? You wrote elsewhere on CC:</p>
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<p>So, now on the other hand, the football game at your kid’s school was a bucket list experience and the college students and whole family had a great experience. So, it seems the the football experience had some value to the rest of the student body and even their parents (and alum in attendance too). And part of what made that great is that that particular college has a really great football program. How do they have that? They recruit strong scholars who are also strong football players. In turn, this great team contributes to what attracts some others to attend the college and adds to their enjoyment while they are there and after they graduate and even brings families to campus. Glad your kid’s school found some outstanding athletes who were good enough students as well. They seem to have value not only to the adcoms but to the other students, their parents, and alum who had a wonderful experience at the game.</p>
<p>Whatever. I’m more than a little tired of reading posts about how only 7 people got into HYPS and it should have been 10, when it comes down to basic math … all the elite schools combined cannot accommodate the top 10% or even top 5% of every high school in the country, there simply isn’t enough room and that’s how it goes. But that’s precisely what it means - there isn’t enough room at HYPSM for all the bright kids in the country - so guess what? They go to another 20 or 30 schools that are, for all intents and purposes, pretty darn indistinguishable! </p>
<p>And I’m also more than tired about reading about “who deserves admission” being couched in terms of GPA/SAT’s. Who is naive enough to believe that the 2350 “deserves” admissions more than the 2250? If you’re that naive - well, then you get to be “puzzled” over these things.</p>
<p>My kids (praise the Lord!) are heading to top 20 schools this fall. One a top 10 LAC (unhooked), one a top 20 university (and yes, with a legacy hook, for which I make no apology). We made it VERY clear that these were reach schools and that not making it simply meant there wasn’t enough room at the inn. They understood VERY clearly that if they didn’t make it into these choices, there were plenty of other fine choices out there, and they weren’t going to play that unsophisticated game of HYPSM-or-bust. Indeed, HYPSM was never on anyone’s list, quelle horreur! </p>
<p>If you’re not willing to say to your kid that there is life beyond HYPSM-or-bust, if you’re not willing to ensure your kid knows once, twice, and three times that even if he’s a 4.0/2400/cured cancer he has no guarantee of anything and should keep his expectations low … then you shouldn’t be playing.</p>
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<p>You don’t know that. The very assumption that anyone other than parents or perhaps extremely close friends “knows” what some other kid’s application is like is cringe-worthy. They might have had activities you didn’t know about, write a killer essay, have some personal epiphany they wrote about that they didn’t need to share with everyone in the neighborhood.</p>
<p>texaspg, your imagination needs work. :D</p>
<p>There are artistic performers whose rehearsal, practice, and travel schedule equals that of varsity athletes, and if those performances are physically rigorous as well, the participants also have reason to be exhausted. </p>
<p>(1) It is believable that a least a segment of both performing artists & athletes are smart enough to need less study time to excel at studies than perhaps many or most of those subsets. (Some parents have house rules that demand that grades be maintained at an already-high level if the activites are to be maintained.)</p>
<p>(2) Some athletes and performing artists bring the same level of healthy competition & drive to their studies as they do their activities</p>
<p>(3) Very few colleges and Universities in this country are “pure” academies. College life is a huge part of what attracts students to various campuses and what students believe adds to the vibrancy of the place. Admitting students who have been & will be athletes, or have been & might continue to be performing artists, sustains that campus life.</p>
<p>(4) The combination of intellect & athleticism is not a modern one. Not for Elite U’s, and not for a number of cultures throughout history. For a recent film example, consider the movie, Chariots of Fire.</p>
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<p>texaspg…I’m glad you brought this up. What really impresses me about many athletes who gain admissions to elite colleges is that these students manage to pull excellent grades all the while with this huge commitment of sports. It is challenging, more so than simply excelling in the classroom. They have to excel at both and both are very time consuming. My oldest D was a three season varsity sport athlete in HS (excelled at her sports too), while also being the valedictorian, taking the hardest classload and then some, while also being in the concert band (All States level), jazz band, select wind ensemble, piano lessons, clarinet lessons, dance classes 25 miles from home, and leader in student government. Perhaps what made her an attractive candidate is that while being the top student in the class, she also was managing all these other things…her schedule was intense. She often went to school before it began in the morning for student government and committees. Had varsity sports after school. Had dance classes and piano lessons at night. Had sports events all weekend. Once she got to her Ivy, she managed to excel in academics (great grades, top award in her dept. at graduation, selected to be TA as an undergrad in two departments, student leader for undergraduates in her department, acceptance to many of the top grad schools in her field, all the while playing on a varsity sport team that in one season had practice every afternoon plus two early mornings and in another season involved being off campus from 6 AM until 2 PM two midweek days and being away EVERY weekend the entire weekend off campus, plus one full week of missed classes for the National Championships, and for two years, also played on a club team in another sport. It was a lot to juggle while still excelling in academics. I can see why these sorts of kids are attractive to a college because they still were great students while doing all this other stuff in HS and then contributed so widely to the campus life beyond the classroom, while excelling in college in the classroom as well (my D’s fellow teammates went onto med school, PhD programs, law school, architecture school, etc.). I witnessed teammates studying organic chemistry during down time at the athletic events!! </p>
<p>However, this is not only true of athletes. I have another kid in the performing arts. Her schedule in HS was just as insane…her ECs in several facets of the arts were every afternoon, every night and all weekend just like her sister, involving a great deal of travel (forgot to mention the many miles traveled daily for her sister too given the rural area where we live and where all these ECs were located). She also was a very strong academic student, and like her sister had accelerated in school and went beyond the curriculum and so on. She had won state and national awards in her field. She could offer a college not only academic smarts but talent to contribute to the arts on campus and could demonstrate she could balance both areas and excel at both at the same time. Once she got to college, her schedule was ridiculous…her college program involved classes from 9-6 each day, rehearsals every night til 11 and on weekends. She managed to be a “Scholar” at her college, graduated with honors, won many scholarships and her college nominated her for a national award which she won in her field. </p>
<p>So, colleges find a candidate attractive who has juggled demanding academic courseloads and excelled academically, all the while being very committed to an extracurricular endeavor (sports or any other area) where they also excel. If I were an adcom, I would accept someone who could manage to do both over someone who could only do well in the classroom (or just out of the classroom). It is far more challenging to do well in schoolwork while putting in huge hours into your ECs with leadership positions and excelling in those areas with achievements of note all at the same time.</p>
<p>Does this include people whose parents attended Harvard grad school?</p>
<p>I cross posted with epiphany and my thoughts mirror hers. It isn’t just about sports but any very dedicated EC (not a club that meets once/week). Colleges want students who will contribute to the campus life and not JUST the classrooms. This is particularly true of very selective colleges. This thread here is about Harvard and I can tell you that EC life at Harvard is HUGE.</p>
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<p>bobtheboy…typically you are not considered a legacy if your parents attend Harvard for grad school. I went to Harvard for grad school and would not consider my kids to be legacies at Harvard as Harvard doesn’t either. My kids also have a grandmother who went to Radcliffe and that would not count either. But neither of my kids were interested in applying to Harvard. Just saying.</p>
<p>epiphany - If I had an imagination, I would write a movie plot and close my complaints department on CC.</p>
<p>I am not disputing smart athletes - if they did nt exist, Rhodes scholars would nt be relevant right? However, you do find a lot of athletes not doing academically too well whereas if you go to a high school and ask for the report cards for the highest level orchestra group in that school, you probably wont find any people listed in the bottom quartile of their class.</p>
<p>It takes a certain level of dedication to excel in academics as well as athletics or music or whatever else. They do bring more to the table in a college than someone who claim to be averaging a few points ahead in class and a couple of hundred points more in SAT. If Steve Ballmer wants to make sure that kid needs to be an athlete at Harvard, who are we to say no?</p>
<p>My S was an excellent soccer referee while in high school. He did not consider that one of his primary qualifications for college, though, and I don’t think he even mentioned it on every application depending on the format. However, his Ivy must have taken note of it somehow, because one day a staff member called him up and asked him to officiate a special game on campus (not NCAA). He had never met this staff member and had no idea how she knew he was a certified referee. So maybe one reason he was admitted was because of that small detail. And actually, thinking about it in retrospect, while in college, he refereed for the local youth travel league, for a men’s league, and for some regional tournaments in a neighboring state. He was therefore an ambassador for the college in some sense, and that may have been something the school valued. The elite schools want to educate leaders in every field of human endeavor.</p>
<p>205mom said:
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<p>How about the hard-working brilliant students who happen also to be legacies? Would you like to punish them for the inherited status of legacy, over which they have no control?</p>
<p>Do you have any understanding of the fact that many legacies are competitive for admission </p>
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<p>And are you not aware that the parents of many legacy children fund the tuition of
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<p>who are not legacies, who are admitted, and who otherwise lack sufficient funds? And those legacy parents continue to contribute to that University, not knowing if their own child will get admitted, or even be interested in applying?</p>
<p>Do you have any idea how many legacies to various Elite Universities are not admitted?</p>
<p>(No, I thought not.) :rolleyes:</p>
<p>Disclosure: No one in my family, immediate or extended, attended an elite U before my duaghter was admitted to some of those. And the same is true of the children of many other CC parents whose children you do not know.</p>
<p>Do you also “raise your child right” by teaching him to be grateful for strangers who are financially generous to him? If he were to apply for a scholarship – funded by donors – on any level of his education or effort (such as a contest applied for, an honor or awared applied for), would you be ashamed of him if he accepted the financial award associated with such money?</p>
<p>There’s not a ‘gpa money tree’ or ‘test score money tree’ somewhere, whereby scholarships invisibly appear due to “hard work.” Donors – real live people – decide to award students financially, due to merit. Other times it’s foundations that do that, but foundations also exist due to individuals funding them.</p>
<p>texaspg…you might be interested to know that when D1 graduated HS, and I observed the top 10 kids in the class (they were each honored at the graduation), that I realized that almost all of them also were involved in at least one (some two or three) varsity sports. It’s true. Some also were involved in music (as I wrote, my kid, who was val, was in both sports and music…and dance too). So athletes at our HS were well represented at the top of the class.</p>
<p>texaspg, your post 492 seems contradictory to me. First you imply (concede) that artists could also be very smart, but perhaps not that many athletes are. Then you nevertheless concede that The Student Athlete is a viable reality. Then you claim that both artists & athletes “bring more to the table.” </p>
<p>Which is it?</p>
<p>The points that some of us keep trying to make are three:</p>
<p>(1) generalizations are useless, because the thread subject is one particular elite U (which has in common a selectivity level with at least several other elite U’s). The ‘special admit’ category discussion which expanded on that is not a discussion about athletic admits in general, such as to public universities (flagship & not, elite & not). People on this thread would concede that for many U’s and colleges (many Division I publics, and many non-Tier 1 privates), one need not be as brilliant a student as non-athletic-recruits, if one is a brilliantly performing athlete.</p>
<p>(2) The class of brilliant academic is not mutually exclusive with the class of brilliant performer (athletic or artistic).</p>
<p>(3) As many other people have said, the set of admitted legacies overlaps with the set of brilliant academics. And the more selective the university (e.g., Harvard), the more that tends to be true.</p>
<p>Soozie - Is this a coed school with a mix of boys and girls in top 10? I find girls a little more determined about ensuring they do well in school (you dont hear a lot about coaches bending many academic rules recruiting girls but it seems quite common for boys).</p>
<p>Epiphany - You can see my movie plots get twisted.</p>
<p>My point is that you can expect a larger percentage of athletes to be bad academically but most musicians seem to be good at academics.</p>
<p>texaspg…my kids’ high school was a public school…yes, coed. As this was the class of 2004, I can’t recall how many girls and how many boys were in the top 10. There is a good chance that there were more girls than boys in the top 10 because, well, it is often the case that teenage girls sometimes outshine the teenage boys in school. 
However, I do recall that the sal was a boy (the val was my D). This boy was not a musician (my D was an athlete and musician). He was a star athlete. In fact, at graduation she won the Scholar Athlete Award for girls and he won it for boys. He went to Middlebury where he excelled at his sport and my D also played sports at Brown. While I said most of the kids in the top 10 were athletes, many also played music, but not all.</p>
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<p>…except at the most highly selective universities in the country, which have their pick of academics + athletes + musicians – among those interested in applying, that is. And remember that unlike some schools which are more athletically focused, schools like the Ivies are less interested (in general) in a-recruit-at-all-cost. Depending on the sport, overall such schools will likely focus on athletes who are also ‘extreme’ performers academically (especially compared to other athletes) than extreme performers athletically, because generally they will not get both in one student. The reason is that the Ivies are invested in retention and graduation rates, and in post-college success, and tutoring only makes it so far at any demanding university (include many excellent publics). One has to be at least a very good student to be able to focus and absorb college-level material at the end of a practice day. Lesser students will take longer to digest and produce academic material within any physically exhausting week. </p>
<p>OTOH, if folks are so appalled at the Ivies admitting a handful of very high B+/A- student athletes, then no one is asking you to apply there. One is free to apply to U of Chicago, or to other fine schools which have few or no sports. </p>
<p>I have no dog in this fight, as neither of my daughters is an athlete. But I support the interest of a college in attracting a wide variety of student interests in non-academic activities (as spectators), and also of the reality that sports of some kind foster that elusive thing called school spirit. It’s hard to rah-rah about academics alone. Sports competitions, within a conference, provide a focus for that college identity, which in turn later helps promote alumni interest, alumni events, alumni labor, and alumni money – a lot of which contribute to grants for admittees who are outstanding academically, not athletically. It’s a system that works well all together.</p>
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<p>Whoa! Get a grip! </p>
<p>I don’t think anyone is suggesting that legacies should be “punished” or somehow held to higher admissions standards than applicants as a whole. I only hear the critics of a legacy preference questioning why legacies, with all their other advantages, should be given an extra thumb on the scale by having their legacy status treated as a “tip” factor in admissions—meaning, presumably, that as between two otherwise equally qualified candidates, it’s the legacy candidate who wins out. Is that an advantage? Of course it is, it’s a huge advantage. Yet the defenders of legacy admissions want to argue out of both sides of their mouths, and say that 1) legacies are just better qualified than other applicants by virtue of genetic superiority and cultural advantage, and they’re the ones who would have been admitted anyway (notwithstanding statements by the colleges themselves that they treat legacy status as a “tip” factor), and 2) of course it’s unfair to give legacies an extra leg up in admissions, but life is unfair, the entire admissions process is unfair, so just get used to it. </p>
<p>The first statement is just flatly contradicted by what the colleges themselves tell us; and in any event, even if it were true, then it would be an argument that an explicit legacy preference is unnecessary, and not an argument in favor of such a preference. The second statement is probably more true, but it will come as little consolation to the parents of brilliant and hardworking non-legacy students who may have had equal qualifications to some legacy admits, but without that or some other “tip” factor in their favor were denied admission.</p>
<p>Let’s be clear: private colleges are free to admit whomever they want, and are under no obligation to be “fair.” But from a broader social policy perspective, I also think it’s reasonable to question how much we as a society want to rely on, and publicly subsidize (through, for example, privileged tax treatment and the award of hundreds of millions of dollars in taxpayer-supported research grants), colleges that nakedly discriminate in favor of hereditary privilege—which is what they themselves effectively say they’re doing, in acknowledging that they privilege legacies in admissions. On the other hand, in certain other respects these colleges operate as vehicles of upward social mobility, which to my mind is a good thing. So these two factors need to be weighed against each other. Given the relatively trivial numbers of Pell grant recipients these elite privates educate, I suspect the balance weighs more toward exclusion than inclusion, but I’m willing to entertain evidence to the contrary.</p>