Just found this article – 7 years old now but probably still relevant. Is Wesleyan University compromising its academic reputation to make money from football?
The Cardinals have won three more Little Three (Amherst, Williams and Wesleyan University) titles since the article was written, including yesterday’s contest against the Ephs:
Cardinals Complete Furious Comeback to Defeat Williams, Securing Consecutive Little Three Titles - Wesleyan University
I think that that percentage is likely inflated - do you have a source? Thanks!
This is what I googled up:
They say, “All data is compiled from current NCAA rosters published publicly on a college’s athletic website and from an individual colleges main website.”
I note in the discussion they point out the issue about walk-ons, but as others above also pointed out, there are people enrolled as recruited athletes as first years who do not remain varsity athletes all four years.
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It should be noted that the source is doing the same back-of-the-envelope math that everyone here is. IOW, they don’t know. In fact, they state,
These high percentages of athletes within the student body at many of the small liberal arts colleges does not mean that these athletes were all recruited.
Most of the time, between 20% and 50% or more of the athletes on NCAA teams are made up of “walk on” athletes,
FWIW, my back-of-the-envelope math is that the percentage of recruited athletes at SLAC is 25%, and that they comprise 50% of ED admits. There may be slight variations between individual institution. Regardless, I also file under "it is what it is "
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Colleges have significant reporting responsibilities (to the Gov/DOE) with regard to athletics. Accurate data for each school can be found at the Equity in Athletics site:
https://ope.ed.gov/athletics/#/institution/search
For each college, these data show the number of students on each team, the unduplicated number of college athletes in total, revenues and expenses by team, and more. The number of multi sport athletes can be significant at some d3 schools, for example at Bates, total male participants by team is 484, but unduplicated is 392. Females: 436/348. These data will not show you the proportion of recruited athletes vs walk-ons, one would have to make some assumptions to approximate that split.
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So fascinating too that big SEC schools like Georgia and Florida have fewer athletes than Williams or Amherst. So the percentage on athletes on campus at the big schools is tiny. Thanks for sharing that link to the numeric data.
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The percentage is obviously impacted by the denominator. 2000 vs 30000 will impact the percentage.
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That is a way better source! Thanks.
Edit: Looks like that is 740 unduplicated for Bates, out of a reported total enrollment of 1821, so 40.6%.
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And different SLACs field different mixes of varsity teams.
Using the new much better source, we had Bates at 740 (unduplicated), which was 40.6% of their 1821.
I looked up Carleton, and it was 227 male, 165 female, so 392 total, which is 19.5% of their 2008 total students.
In this case, it is much more a difference in the numerator than the denominator.
At a guess, what we are going to find is that SLACs in the same league will tend to have fairly close numerators. To check this, I will look at Colby (also NESCAC) for Bates, and Macalester (also MIAC) for Carleton.
OK, so Colby was 393+320, 713 total (31.5% of 2262). Macalester was 230+177, 407 total (18.5% of 2201).
I think that is pretty good confirmation. With SLACs, I think likely the sports league in question is going to be a huge factor in determining the total number of varsity athletes, and then the overall size of the college will finish off determining the exact percentage.
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Right - when we recently at a NESCAC school our tour guide told us she played a varsity sport and then later mentioned she was a walk-on her sophomore year. So if Bates or Colby has 32-40% athletes, I’m guessing about half were recruited.
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So the one source said 20% to 50% walk ons was a typical range. Just anecdotally, that seems to really depend on the sport and league. Like, the NESCAC colleges we send recruited athletes to seem not to have a lot of walk on opportunities in those sports, but I don’t know about every sport.
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My guess is that there are few to no walk ons at schools that are very desirable, either because of their selectivity/prestige, or because their teams are among the best in the country.
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That’s my math as well. As for athletic attrition in upper grades, I know of several athletic recruits that use their sport to get them in the door at the highly selectives and then drop their sport after the first year. S24 was recruited at a school that posted faster times in his sport but the coach knew he would participate in his sport all four years and had growth potential. The coach commented on his frustration with freshman recruits that drop after the first year.
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That raises a question of how many of those 20-50% walk ons are second-year or later fill ins for recruited drop outs.
Like I could see that being a percentage which starts lower, but increases by class year and ends higher.
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The Washington Post article you cited offers the most directly relevant data I’ve seen when I’ve tried in the past to get a sense of how many recruited athletes colleges admit. It’s been mentioned several times on this thread how the number of varsity athletes isn’t the same as the number of recruited athletes. Ie, the 39% mentioned earlier for Bates is for total varsity athletes, not recruited. To skip to the chase, I think the percentage of an incoming class that’s recruited athletes at a D3 LAC is about 15% on average. I think around 1/2 of their varsity athletes are walk-ons, on average. I think the average percentage of recruited athletes in highly ranked private D1s is about 10%. Publics will have smaller percentages by virtues of their larger denominators. These are attempts at averages based on data I’ve seen; the ranges are substantial!
It’s not too hard to find data on number of varsity athletes at a given school (IPEDS has a count for each.) To me what’s most valuable in the WaPo article is the discussion after their table of varsity athletes by school where they offer data on actual number of recruited athletes for the few schools that responded to their survey request. It’s not a large sample size, but it’s the most directly relevant data for the question at hand.
There are four LACs which they offer recruit data for. We can divide those numbers by their approx incoming class size to get recruit percentages.
CMC: 17%
Davidson: 24%
Colgate: 12%
Richmond: 10%
Note however that Davidson is an outlier in that it’s an LAC that competes against D1 schools. Including Davidson in this small sample, the average percentage comes to 16%. Excluding Davidson, the percentage comes to 13%.
If curious about % walk-on, we can divide the number of recruited athletes at a school by the total number of varsity athletes, then subtract that from 100%. I’ve read elsewhere that the attrition of recruited athletes ranges from around 10-35%. Using 25%, we can quickly compute a guess for the percentage of walk-ons per schools:
CMC: 69%
Davidson: 9%
Colgate: 48%
Richmond: 37%
Again, the D1 LAC, Davidson, is the outlier. Excluding them the average appears around 51% walk-ons.
For comparison, we can do the same for the three highly ranked D1 privates that shared the necessary data.
Percent of undergrad student body recruited followed by percent of varsity athletes that are walk-on for:
Brown: 13%, 29%
Yale: 13%, 30%
Duke: 9%, 33%
Mean: 12%, 31%
These numbers don’t attempt to take into account transfer effects, which could very plausibly lower the % walk-ons.
For those who want to continue with varsity athletics at the college level for fun and social purposes, but fall short of recruiting standards, these numbers might provide some reassurance, particularly at the D3 level. There are of course athletic alternatives to varsity sports, such as intramurals or club, but for some students a more structured athletic experience is important and can elevate perceived overall quality of life.
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If you are talking about selective LACs, or LACs with highly ranked teams, then I think neither of these assumptions are correct.
In the sport I know best, men’s soccer, the attrition in a normal year is on the order 5% or so (1, maybe 2 kids, some years there are zero leaving the team). And walk ons are a vanishingly small number. Like 1 or 2 every 5 - 10 years.
Of course this isn’t true for all sports, or all LACs.
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I don’t see how you’re calculating these numbers? That’s not clear from The Washington Post article and (based on a ton of a anecdotal knowledge) there is no way that 2.5x more varsity athletes are walk-ons than recruited athletes (or that transfers come close to impacting those numbers).
I think you may be using your attrition assumption (or some other assumptions) to calculate this, so I’d just say that your assumptions there are likely incorrect. (I’m also not actually sure what these %s mean - like what the denominator is? - this is all pretty confusing.)
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The “Percent recruited followed by percent walk on for:” was shorthand for what was described more fully in the prior paragraphs, but I can see how that was confusing. Sorry about that. I have edited the earlier post to make it more clear.
“Percent recruited” refers to the percent of the total student body that was recruited.
“Percent walk on” refers to the percent of varsity athletes that are walk ons.
If a soccer team has, say, 5 recruits in a given year, and if over 4 years one of those 5 leaves the team, the 4 year attrition rate for that recruited athlete cohort would be 20%. So we would only expect the one or two per year that you mention. The calculation I did for % walk on assumed 25% of the recruits quit eventually, but it’s possible the bulk of those quitting are in fact walk-ons.
As for walk-ons being a rarity in your experience, it’s possible that the walk-ons aren’t always made known. A walk-on could still have been in touch with the coach who invited the player to day 1 of training camp despite not being an actual recruit.
I can certainly see there being variance from one school to the next and by sport.
As for where the 25% attrition figure comes from, it’s a ballpark average from various sources over time. Here are a couple sources but I recall others. One is specific to D1 recruited athletes, the other is for D3.
From the D1 article:
“Roughly 27 percent of current seniors — 83 out of 308 — who played a varsity sport at some point in their time at Harvard did not play for that team this academic year.”
From the D3 study:
“Forty-six students (12 females, 34 males) discontinued playing varsity sports during or after the 2014–2015 academic year for a total athletic team retention rate of 73.56%.”
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1558866119840466
If we drop recruit attrition to zero, then the % walk-on for the aforementioned schools become:
CMC: 58%
Davidson: -21% (ie, they have more recruited athletes than total athletes, so there must be some attrition)
Colgate: 31%
Richmond: 16%
Brown: 5%
Yale: 6%
Duke: 10%
These numbers would make it even more clear that a unrecruited athlete who wants to continue their sport as a varsity athlete is more likely to do so at an LAC, provided it’s not an LAC competing at the D1 level!