How an Ivy got less preppy: Princeton draws surge of students from modest means

Colleges and Universities A-Z Princeton University
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Where did you see that African American/Hispanic students are not included in recruiting numbers at a NESCAC school? I have read quite widely about recruiting in the NESCAC and the Ivy, and I don’t think I have ever seen that. Nor do I understand how that is supposed to work? Are you saying that the NESCAC only tracks how it recruits white athletes? I really don’t want to further derail the thread, so if you would rather and have a link, I wold appreciate a pm.

And FWIW, Bowdoin, Williams, Bates and Amherst at least have all done some work over the last decade or so examining the impact of the NESCAC band system on their campus. At least I know I have read published reports from all of those schools on the topic. I don’t recall ever reading that minority kids are excluded from the recruiting bands.

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"I think you’d now often find

1 is recruited athlete

2 is legacy

3 is URM/AA

4 is URM/Latino"

This makes sense to me intuitively. Of these four categories, #1 and #2 are more constant over time than #3 and especially #4. Compared to a decade or two ago, being a URM/Latino applicant today is very different when not only everyone seems to claim, at least at the time of application, to be one but the level of well prepared Latino applicant pool seems to have gone up. While one can imagine a time in the future where being a Latino would no longer be considered a URM, it’s hard to imagine the same for #1 no longer being a hook.

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@Ohiodad51 Somehow I thought you’d read it? (CC blocks part of the URL but the link to the actual report can be found at https://acvoice.com/2017/04/02/the-state-of-athletics/ )

Middle paragraph on page 7 of the report (but pg 11 of the pdf file) describing coded athlete admissions. If athletes being considered are first gen, URM, legacy, low income or have super high stats/achievements not in athletics, then they are not counted against the coach’s total.

…which leaves coaches with an explicit number of tips/hooks/whatever comprised of students who are not URM, not low income, not academic stars, not first gen and not legacy.

Princeton is trying to increase Pell kids, or simply proud of having already done so Athletic recruitment is not likely to be a vehicle for doing that. The opposite effect is likely as in the ivies athletes are disproportionately white and wealthy. (Those stats are around, I can find them again if you like. )

…but Princeton is also large, and the % of recruited athletes, relatively wealthy as they may be, still affects it less than it does a smaller school. It may leave ample room for the 22% Pell grantees in the OP article.

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That is a good catch. Do the Ivies use the same system of excluding other favored groups from being considered tips/hooks?

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Tigger, OMom –

Just my $0.02, but I really don’t think you can justify URM/AA as #3 when ranking the power of the hooks.

Legacy imo is usually under-estimated by most folks (“just a feather on the scale”), which is what Hurwitz concludes. But legacy works VERY differently from the two uber-hooks (URM/AA, recruited athlete).

Admitted generic legacies (i.e. not big donor kids) usually have average to above average stats. Princeton sees basically unlimited kids with great stats. Legacy kids don’t get into Princeton with low scores. Instead, legacy kids with 34/35 ACTs are just much more likely to be pulled out of the big pile. Having a “tie-breaker” is huge when playing a game that produces many many ties.

The athlete and URM/AA hooks do actually allow kids with below average (for Princeton) scores to get in (although obvi not every kid in those categories will have below average scores). My guess is that URM/AA is still a stronger hook than recruited athletes. But those two are clearly 1/2 or 2/1.

Also would agree that overall, athletic recruiting at an Ivy or NESCAC place like probably cuts against diversity. On a net basis, the athletes are going to be pretty suburban and well off.

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@northwesty Hurwitz specifically controlled for legacy higher stats. So that’s not a factor.

[quote] The author, Michael Hurwitz, controlled for a broader range of variables, such as student character and high-school activities, than had traditional analyses. In doing so, he found that the other, more-common method underestimates the advantage for legacies.

Mr. Hurwitz’s research found that legacy students, on average, had slightly higher SAT scores than nonlegacies. But he was able to control for that factor, as well as athlete status, gender, race, and many less-quantifiable characteristics. He also controlled for differences in the selectivity of the colleges.
.

[/quote]

http://www.chronicle.com/article/Legacys-Advantage-May-Be/125812

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Regarding athletic admissions preference at Princeton specifically:

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2005/10/10/getting-in

^ and that is already 12 years old.

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What’s lost in the current discussion is another “hook” that more relates to this thread’s original topic, namely, First-Generation-Low Income (FGLI) students. Not as well publicized but top colleges are taking serious initiatives in recent years in addressing the needs of FGLI not only with admissions but on-campus experience, as well.

https://www.princeton.edu/news/2017/02/20/sifp-helps-first-gen-low-income-students-thrive-princeton

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I responded to @OHMomof2 by pm so as not to clutter the thread, but since someone else asked about it, I will say that I do not believe the actual statement made in the study means what you are all assuming. The language at issue is “when a coach identifies a student of color, low income or first generation student, the student can be brought to the attention of the admissions office without that student counting as a coded or athletic factor athlete.” This statement occurs in a discussion of “coded” athletes, who are kids with stats similar to the admitted class, who get a “bump” for being an athlete. I believe it is fair, if not required, to draw a conclusion from that statement that the athletic bump for coded athletes is similar to or even less than the bump for first gen/low income/minority kids. But the author goes on to say that the bump given to athletic factor athletes (67 kids at Amherst) is “substantial”. I think any fair reading of the study would indicate a distinction is being drawn, and I do not believe the author meant to imply that all first gen/minority/low income recruits are excluded from the NESCAC band system at Amherst.

It appears to me that the author is at least intimating that for a kid with “above the line” stats (academic stats above the median for the previous admitted class - or A band recruits in the NESCAC), the hook for first gen/minority/low income is equal to or greater than the athletic hook at Amherst (and presumably throughout the NESCAC). It would then be the coach’s call whether to try and “sneak” that kid through the admissions committee based on his status in an effort to save another athletic slot to use somewhere else. How often that happens, I have no idea. But I doubt it is universally true that all minority/first gen/low income athletes are not counted under this system, because then people would really start to complain. On the other hand, for kids the author refers to as “athletic factor” recruits (B and C band in the NESCAC), who likely would not be admitted but for the athletic boost, I am as confident as it is humanly possible to be that minority kids are counted as “athletic factor” recruits in the NESCAC. I even know two who were offered such spots.

The Ivy does not have a similar system. A kid who is a recruited athlete is either supported for a likely letter (and hence a “counter” in the system) or not.

My personal opinion after spending a number of years following Ivy recruiting is that at the very bottom of the academic ladder (Ivy 1 and 2 band, NESCAC B and C band or “athletic factor”) nothing beats the sports hook for the very small number of kids that receive it. Of course, and as the author of the Amherst piece highlights, the hook for minority/first gen/low income is not only undefined but not limited numerically. So whether that makes it “stronger” overall than the various slices of the athletic hook, who knows.

And Bowen really didn’t like athletes. That has been clear for quite some time. I read a critique of one of his books somewhere that had a great line “Bowen uses statistics like a drunk uses lamp posts. For support rather than illumination.” No matter his personal feelings, we now have very clear data on athletic admits in the Ivy. Each year the average AI for all recruited and supported athletes needs to be within one standard deviation of the previous four admitted classes. Within that system, a very small number of kids (as I said above, maybe 35-40) will be admitted with academic stats that are between one and two standard deviations from that average. The majority are going to be academically indistinguishable from their “NARP” (non athletic real people) class mates.

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I think what I said does stand. The kid isn’t counted in the coach’s limit if the kid’s other tips are strong enough to get him in (along with that word from the coach).

The result of this athletic recruiting system at this NESCAC though, is pretty clear:

But more problematic at this school in terms of efforts to increase socioeconomic diversity, is

…so this athletic admissions preference system is working against efforts to socioeconomic diversity.

And the results (not for Princeton, for the Ivy League as a whole), bear this out - white students are a majority (or in a couple of cases, plurality) of athletes in all sports %-wise, and it’s unlikely that this group is low income.

http://web1.ncaa.org/rgdSearch/exec/saSearch

^ you can see the stats for team sports in any league - NESCAC, Ivies, etc at that link.

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“Mr. Hurwitz’s research found that legacy students, on average, had slightly higher SAT scores than nonlegacies.”

OHMom –

Hurwitz is saying what I said. Hooked legacy students have above average stats. Which means the legacy hook works differently than the hook for athletes and URM/AA. Which is what Espenshade means when he talks about which hooks are stronger.

Putting aside whether URM/AA is a stronger hook than athlete (who really cares?), my point was that athlete and URM/AA hooks act differently than legacy hook. The studies do agree with that.

The legacy hook gets a 34/35 ACT kid into Princeton over the vast numbers of other non-legacy applicants with the same stats. That can be a very powerful boost in the world of 5% admit rates. But that’s a totally different thing than getting an athlete or a URM kid in with a 28 or 30 ACT.

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^ “the other, more-common method underestimates the advantage for legacies.”

You’re using the other, more-common method.

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What Hurwitz didn’t/couldn’t examine is degree of generosity and involvement among legacy families, and how that impacts likelihood of admission.

As far as I can tell, if you’re a kid whose parent went to, say, Harvard, but isn’t a significant donor or a big volunteer for the school, the legacy benefit you get is basically the potentially tiebreaking second look that @northwesty is talking about. This is meaningful, in that it makes you stand out slightly from tens of thousands of other applicants, but it’s far from dispositive - after all, Harvard and its peer schools deny the vast majority of their legacy applicants, and most of them look quite good in the context of the overall pool.

Under these circumstances, you still have to be a standout candidate - but you stand a reasonable chance of being one, because your family clearly cares about education and is probably high-SES, so were able to send you to good schools, provide test prep and other opportunities, etc.

On the other hand, if your family is very involved at the school, or, better still, major donors, it’s a very different story. In that case, your application gets more specific scrutiny - it may, in fact, be flagged by the development office - and greater allowances can be made.

I would add, as well, that the combination of legacy and another hook (e.g., recruited athlete or URM - and there are more and more URM legacies these days) can really make an application stand out, and confer major advantages.

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Ivy and NESCAC athletics are always going to be predominantly white and upper middle class as long as the Ivy and NESCAC continue to sponsor a plethora of sports played almost exclusively by white, upper middle class kids. Crew, lax, golf, tennis, fencing, field hockey, etc aren’t real popular in lower socio economic areas. Not sure there is any real mystery to that.

@OhioMom2, the assumption you are making is because the author said a coach could bring a low income/minority/first gen recruit to admissions’ attention without burning one of his slots that this practice is universally or at least regularly followed for all minority recruits. I do not know that to be true. Indeed my own experience would lead me to believe that while it does probably happen, particularly in sports that are not given enough protected slots to build a roster, it is far from a regular practice.

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OMom – legacies have above average stats. Athletes and URMS (as a group) have below average stats.

You really have to do some big contortions to conclude that the generic legacy hook is more powerful. But let’s say it another way. The point (which I don’t think you disagree with) is that those hooks work DIFFERENTLY.

Star athletes and good URM candidates typically populate the lowest stat quartile. The legacies typically are in the 50-75 quartile. Legacies then get a quite strong advantage in being able to be picked out of the 50-75 lottery bin. At schools like Princeton, the 50-75 bin is HUGE. So the legacy kids getting more ping pong balls is significant. They have a tie-breaker tool to use in a game that produces many many ties.

The athletes and URMs are in totally different game.

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@Ohiodad51 I agree. These sports are there for a reason and I think much of that reason is to make sure the Ivies and NESCACs get enough high income white kids - many also legacies - to keep their elite rep. It’s one thing to let a fifth of the class be poor kids attending a school that is mostly rich kids. But if you let in too many poor kids, even if that were possible given the inadequate supply of academic superstar poor kids, then it’s not an institution where the elite get educated anymore. So I suspect there is a very fine line Princeton et al have to walk.

However, one thing that is interesting to me about that list is that it’s not just the normal suspects, LAX and crew and squash teams, it’s the football, basketball, baseball and track teams too. All sports widely played in public high schools. Still mostly white and likely higher income, though less so than the boarding/day school sports.

I think those big sports play a role too, and it is in those, I believe, where academic standards are bent furthest, and those also have some of the largest rosters so a larger impact on spaces available after recruits are in.

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^at some point you run into the fact that certain demographics dominate the pool of kids with academic stats to get into Princeton. I am not sure what relationship you think exists though between recruiting in the more mainstream sports and the number of kids on pell grants though. There certainly is a fair amount of economic diversity on the football team at least. In fact I would assume there is more economic diversity in all the major sports than in the general student population.

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That may be true at Princeton, I have no idea, but it’s definitely not true at Amherst, according to the report.

It doesn’t break down basketball and football vs the “preppy” sports, but those would have to be very very socioeconomically diverse to be included in these figures and still get this result.

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You get some diversity on the football team, but not really all that much.

The kids that aspire to go to Princeton as athletes in all sports (not just squash and ice hockey) strongly tend toward suburban and higher SES.

https://i.ytimg.com/vi/NvwxtDpQfZ8/maxresdefault.jpg

College baseball (everywhere not just Princeton) has basically zero diversity.

http://cdnak1.psbin.com/img/mw=450/cr=n/d=804m2/mrzu9fcof3uhob67.jpg

Same with swimming.

https://cdn.swimswam.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/Princeton-WSD_2015_Ivy-Champs.jpg

http://www.goprincetontigers.com/images/2016/2/28/LWZLPFQFWWDVFBD.20160228030317.jpg

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…or the demographic that has the one or two standard deviations below the stats to get into Princeton.