I have wondered about the exact same question. I have no answer.
I always felt that administrators would say that to sooth the feelings of applicants.
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Well, realistically, most hard-working students could do the work passably at something. I couldn’t have majored in physics ANYWHERE! Give me a foreign language, and it’s a different story.
At many schools, one of the hazards of just squeaking in is that many options will be beyond you. But probably not all of them, especially if you’re okay with a B or lower.
Not at all. As others have written - if athletes with lower academic achievements can graduate successfully, that means that any applicant with similar academics to the athletes can succeed.
This is true for Stanford. I have had many Stanford graduates tell me that the amount of effort that they needed to put into high school academics in order to be accepted to Stanford was far larger than the amount that they had to put in to graduate from Stanford.
Looking at the admissions data for Harvard, around 80% of the applicants to Harvard have an academic rating of 3 or higher. Some 30% of the students who are accepted to Harvard have an academic rating of 3, and almost all of these graduate. Ergo, 80% of the applicants to Harvard are academically qualified.
This is true for all of the so-called “elite” colleges.
Then there is the fact that the grades that these kids got in their freshman year are little to no indicator as to how well they will do in college. So kids who did badly when transitioning to high school, but aced every class from sophomore year to senior year are almost certainly able to succeed at any college, including “elite” colleges. However, their lower GPAs in the Freshman year will result in them not even being considered, so you can also add those kids to the academically qualified students who are rejected.
Fact is, private “elite” colleges are not there to exclusively serve the “smartest kids in the USA”, they are there to for kids who will contribute something to the college, now or in the future. So the academics of the colleges are set up to include the many kids who are beneficial to the college, but were not the top students in the class. These set the level of academic qualifications needed to succeed, not the qualifications of the students who apply.
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You surely don’t mean all “elite” colleges, right? Athletics is at best a tertiary consideration at Caltech. It weighs a little more at MIT, but not nearly to the same extent as, say, Stanford. Both of these schools have extensive gen ed requirements in math, sciences, social sciences and humanities that set the minimum academic standards, not to mention that they offer few majors that would allow their less prepared students to easily graduate.
I always have problem when people define college “success” by a student’s ability to graduate. Isn’t that why we have low academic standards at many places?
MIT and Caltech and similar places have even higher percentages of applicants who are qualified, academically. The vast majority of kids who apply to places like MIT or Caltech are already at the top of their high school in STEM, otherwise these places would not even be on their radars.
While MIT does not post the GPA of applicants, it does post the SAT scores, and 80% of their applicants in 2020 who submitted SAT scores had math SAT scores of over 750, while 85% of the students who submitted ACT scores had math ACT scores of 31 or higher (74% had 34 or higher).
While SATs are not a good predictor of success, this does indicate that students who apply to MIT are mostly high achievers who are qualified to be accepted by MIT.
So yes, some 80% of MIT applicants are likely academically qualified.
There is a lot of self-selection for applications to college which the applicants perceive as having students who are far better, academically, than the applicants.
I know very few kids who flunked out/bailed out/took a break because they weren’t academically talented enough to succeed where they were. I know LOTS of kids who had or developed a substance issue, spent their free time gaming or playing online poker, majored in “fraternity life”, or similar. You really can’t look at a large pool of academic high achievers and predict who is going to make it and who won’t. And you certainly can’t predict whose family is going to run into a financial buzz saw so the kid needs to take a break to work, retool, transfer, etc.
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