The pinnacle of football is the high school game. In fact, I’ve never lived anywhere that had club teams for football. The strongest recruits are from all over the place, but largely the south and CA. Coaching only plays a small part of getting to the next level. It’s far more about physical attributes, size and speed. That means choosing the right parents.
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Football is one exception, because of the physical nature of the sport. No year-round tackle football.
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I’m not sure what club sports you are talking about but in our area most recruited athletes (and there are some every year) play for the local HS as well as on club teams (excluding football which doesn’t have clubs). This includes swimming, soccer, lacrosse, basketball and hockey. The best hockey players typically attend private schools, though, as opposed to the local HS.
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And I wasn’t saying anything differently. The pinnacle of football is HS football. There’s no year round football.
Yes, most recruited athletes play club and HS. BUT, at least with soccer, as @GKUnion mentions, the highest level of club soccer will often NOT allow club players to play HS soccer and with their clubs. That was the case for one of my relatives. He/she was NOT allowed to play HS soccer, because of the year round travel to tournaments and also the risk of injury playing with the less-skilled players in HS.
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I have heard the same about soccer at a few clubs, but when you said “limited exceptions” I took it to mean that most clubs (of all sports) disallowed HS participation and that isn’t what happens in this area.
“Limited exceptions” was not mentioned in any of my posts here. That was GKUnion.
I’d bet most HS kids playing a club sport also play for their HS too, if that sport is offered. I have a friend whose D was in the Olympic v-ball program, she played club and HS too.
I coached HS AAU at a high level and all the HS athletes played both HS and club. But, I can’t say it’s every US Development Academy soccer team, but the few that I’m aware of, do not allow an athlete to play for their HS soccer team.
Right. I guess I was confused . . . looks like things are similar in your neck of the woods as they are here.
The growing HS graduate population has allowed state universities to expand greatly while the top 20-50 schools haven’t expanded much, forcing a squeeze. Rice is expanding its student body. Other top schools? Public honors program enrollments have also expanded greatly over the last 20 years.
@Thorsmom66 Sorry, my limited exceptions comment pertained to the limited private school exemptions in the DA/MLS soccer leagues for high school participation.
Got it. I have heard about the club soccer thing.
This is not it at all. Enrollment in elementary and secondary schools has essentially been flat since 1965. The jump is based on rankings and the misguided concept of T20-50. We used to just essentially have good, better and better, not a specious quantitative ranking. Now that we do, too many students and their families misguidedly focus on too few schools.
From 2000 to 2018, the percentage of HS grads directly entering college grew from 57% to 64%. There were also 800K more HS grads in 2018 vs. 2000. The result is a 46%, or 730K student, increase in grads heading to college from 2000 to 2018.
Another factor is the ease of applying with the Common App. There is also a handful of “top colleges” that are need blind. That may have attracted many more students with significant need to apply to those schools. Meanwhile, college costs have increased dramatically.
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High school graduates, by sex and control of school: Selected years, 1869-70 through 2027-28 gives the following:
| Year | Number of high school graduates | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| 1959-1960 | 1,858,023 | |
| 1969-1970 | 2,888,639 | |
| 1975-1976 | 3,142,120 | Local maximum |
| 1991-1992 | 2,480,399 | Local minimum |
| 2024-2025 | 3,767,550 | Projected local maximum |
There have also been changes in the percentage of high school graduates attending college.
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Total enrollment peaked in 1971. The total number of students graduating has increased, largely due to focus at the bottom end of the spectrum and pushing them over the line. They aren’t typically the students going to college, let alone worrying about attending a prestigious institution.
Getting back to competitiveness, as opposed to just math competitions, I finally found the thread that I read a couple of years ago by someone who had compiled a list of top award winners who enrolled at MIT for the class of 2023.
Naturally, MIT will be very STEM heavy, but it still surprised me just how much world-class talent that it gets to enroll there. By my count, there were 65 unique names listed, and this does not include those who “merely qualified” for something like USAMO, but just the winners and honorable mentions (roughly top 10% of USAMO qualifiers).
I guess some may view medical school admissions as a cutthroat competition but I hope that most future medical professionals don’t consider those who attended lower ranked medical schools to be “losers.” I also hope that those considering medical school are striving to become educated during their undergraduate studies, rather than treating their educational opportunity as a box checking means to an end.
But isn’t med school admission widely dependent upon the MCAT? Or are side-door testing competitions being used as proxies for academic qualification? If so, are such tests only taken by a small number of applicants and is participation and success heavily dominated by one gender? Because, although the estimates vary as to extent, that seems to be what is happening with some of these niche competitive tests for adolescents.
For example a number of posters have written about the Mathematics Olympiads, where the honorees almost always turn out to be boys. In the 45 years it has participated, the United States has sent 287 competitors to the International Mathematics Olympiad. Only 3 of the 287 competitors have been girls, just over 1%. There hasn’t been a single girl on the United States team in 14 years (since 2007), and girls usually represent only about 10% of the approximately 500 kids invited to compete at USAMO and USAJMO each year. It isn’t because girls are worse at math (they aren’t), it is because culturally, many girls want nothing to do math as competition.
Given that achievement in the Mathematics Olympiad is apparently being used as a proxy academic qualifier, this imbalance strikes me as problematic, and the problems go further than just admissions. Like it or not, the AO’s at these elite schools shape academic and extracurricular pursuits from early childhood on. If these elite schools want kids who have taken the most advanced courses, then the parents, kids, and even (some of) the schools will hustle kids into ever more “advanced” curricula, potentially sacrificing depth of knowledge along the way. If these schools want math competition winners, then math will be treated as a competition, with the “losers” left behind and the culture such that half the population of potential math stars want nothing to do with it. If these schools want a spike, then kids will choose a single pursuit at a young age, etc.
@eyemgh, I am pretty sure your link shows that there was an enrollment peak in 1971, but subsequently there were higher peaks and enrollment is higher now than it was in 1971.
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Although the math olympiad has gender bias, most of the other competitions don’t. If you don’t believe me, check the percent of female finalists at Regeneron STS, ISEF grand award winners, etc.
Since the elite universities maintain certain gender ratios, the lack of female participation doesn’t affect their chances for admission. It just makes it harder for the men without awards from competitions.
Gender imbalance in STEM is a huge problem, but it doesn’t start and doesn’t end with the competitions. It starts much earlier than that.
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I expect USAMO represents such a small portion of admits to be near negligible. There are a wide variety of other possible national level awards, most of which don’t have as an extreme gender imbalance. Women are indeed underrperesnted in some majors, but I don’t think lack of national contest participation is a primary cause. I think of it as closer to an related effect – fewer women are interested in a particular field, so fewer women partiipate in academic contests and fewer women choose to major in that field. There also a variety of other contributing factors to why women are underrpresented in both majors and national awards winners. And there are also many other demographics that are severely underrpresented among USAMO besides just women (check out the last names of USAMO qualifiers at https://www.maa.org/sites/default/files/pdf/AMC/usamo/2021/MO%20List.pdf )
When women or men are underrpresented among applicants to a particular highly selective college, it is not ususual to give gender based preference to achieve a gender balance across the full school but much more rarely within particular majors. This often results in a gender imabalnce in certain majors like math, even if there is good gender balance across the full school.
For example, highly selective tech colleges often give a boost for women since such women are underrepresnted in tech. Without such a boost, there would be a severe gender imabalance among the full college, and there often is at not super selective tech colleges. However, highly selective have more highly qualified applicants than they can admit, so they are able to achieve a balanced gender ratio while still having extremely well qualified students. Some example admit rate comparisons are below from the latest College Navigator year are below.
Cornell Engineering School – 16% of women admitted, 6% of men admitted
Harvey Mudd – 29% of women admitted, 13% of men admitted
MIT – 12% of women admitted, 5% of men admitted
Caltech – 11% of women admitted, 5% of men admitted
CMU* – 23% of women admitted, 13% of men admitted
*Overall is listed. I expect the admit rate ratio to vary widely by subschool
Women are only underrepresented in certain fields of STEM, like tech mentioned above and math, not all fields. For example, women are often severely overrepresented in biology, which is the most common STEM major. Using IPEDS classifications, the percent of female STEM majors are below. 49% of all Ivy Plus STEM bachelor’s degrees go to women and 51% go to men – roughly an equal balance overall, even though women are underrepresented in certain STEM subfields, such as math.
Percent Female STEM Majors
Brown – 53%
Columbia – 44%
Cornell – 51%
Dartmouth – 49%
Harvard – 46%
Penn – 50%
Princeton – 47%
Yale – 47%
Caltech – 45%
Chicago – 46%
Duke – 50%
MIT – 46%
Stanford – 47%
Sum of All Ivy Plus Colleges Listed Above – 49%
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Indeed correct. I missed that. That said, It’s not radically higher even at the peaks. It’s a pretty flat curve. More are graduating, and digging deeper into the data, more are attending 4 year institutions. I still maintain it’s a hyperfocus on too few schools based on rankings that is impacting selectivity. I have nothing concrete to back that up though.
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The “losers” are those who do not get into any medical school. Of those pre-meds who actually apply to medical schools, only 40% get any admission at all (and usually just one out of dozens of applications). Of course, many frosh pre-meds are weeded out long before applying, when they see that their college GPAs will make them auto-reject applicants to medical schools (and more choose not to apply after they see their MCAT scores).
Applying to medical school is basically like applying only to reach schools, because there are no match or safety medical schools for anyone.
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