Especially interesting is the link to a website set up by the author Michael Doolittle in which the author speaks candidly about the important yet under-publicized role of sports in elite college admissions.
Yes, things are out of hand. I personally know a girls lacrosse player who was given a verbal commitment to Harvard in the fall of her HS freshman year. Basically guaranteed a place before she had gotten a single HS grade or played a single minute of her sport in HS (LAX is a spring sport). Four years later she will be starting Harvard this fall - things worked out great for her. She goes to a good HS but is far from being a top student at that school - not taking anywhere near the highest level of classes they offer.
My D just finished the recruiting process last year and it was definitely eye-opening. I have been shocked at how low some of the stats are for recruited athletes at Ivies. People seem to think you need to have top grades and test scores to get recruited (we definitely thought so), but if you are a strong enough athlete the standards seem to be surprisingly low.
If it makes you feel better, lacrosse players can no longer be recruited before Sept 1 of their junior year in high school.
All commitments are verbal until the National Letter of Intent is signed (and those aren’t signed in the Ivy league) in senior year.
I’m not sure what people would find surprisingly low regarding academic credentials but the academic index utilized in the Ivy would suggest the academics are good enough to clear that minimum hurdle.
The point of Doolittle’s article was not that athletes are under-qualified academically at elite institutions although he points out that athletes as a group perform worst academically than their non-athlete peers. But I think the bigger point is that colleges, especially elite colleges, give such a huge preference to admitting athletes over other types of students. This institutional advantage of athletes seem to counter some of the professed goals of the universities themselves such as diversity and academic excellence. Doolittle is not criticizing the athletes as he believes that they are just working within the system. His criticism I think is leveled at the admissions process where athletes are given such a huge preference relative to other students and at the unwillingness of any institutional players to examine this process.
I cannot open his site on my computer as it is an http and not https and my work computer filter won’t allow me to bypass it. So I haven’t seen his data set, but he only sites the Div I Ivy league in the article and some of his evidence is very dated. I’m curious if he would consider Middlebury an “elite institution?” The point is that the Ivy league is an athletic conference that has higher standards than the rest of the DI institutions. While there are athletes that are below the admit standards of the rest of the class, they are by no means not good students.
This article is another from the argument that elite institutions should be fair and balanced on academics alone from the point of view of someone who found themselves on the outside looking in when the dust has settled and quickly point to an OUS institution because they do not do holistic admissions. I cannot see his site, but I’m sure it is full of statistics that confirm his point of view
But, when one looks at the scorecards, the US Elite institutions dominate the world university rankings. More than half of the top 100 (and 16 of the top 25) universities are in the USA according to 2018 Times University Rankings. Part of the reason is that the US University system is unique in that it offers a campus experience that includes a population of students that is diverse in makeup. Diversity means more than racial, gender, social economic diversity, it means bringing different points of view and experiences to the community. For the most part, the US University system values the athletes, the thespians, the quiddich players, the film buffs, the poetry writers, that make a US academic community.
It isn’t only the rankings. It is the demand. More than 30,000 applicants for the class of 2022 at UChicago for roughly 1,500 spots. Most paying a whopping $78k/year to attend. Why should they change?
The purpose of these elite Universities is not to educate the best academic performing high school students. Their mission is to increase the “Body of Knowledge” that leads to a better global society. The high school student is a raw material that they use to accomplish that mission. If their mission was to educate great academic performing high school students, why not add capacity. At $300k/student in revenue, they could easily double as demand is so great? It is because they believe they can accomplish their mission at their current size and student body make-up.
World university rankings focus on research output, which relies heavily on the quality of faculty and grad students. Surprise, the criteria of selection in these cases look no different than in other countries, nothing holistic about it at all. They do NOT rank the undergraduate experience.
Also, the leading private universities in the US are much smaller than their peers in the international context (and in most cases, even more so in proportion to the size of the population) which means that the predominance of US universities is artificially inflated.
Which doesn’t mean they don’t belong there, but that they may take up 10 spaces where another countries top universities might take two.
I agree with this in principle, but how many fill buffs and quiddich players are getting in with less then stellar academic credentials?
@Tigerle except the population of grad students add to the diversity picture of the campus. Top name researchers draw undergraduates. You cannot divorce the grad program from the undergraduate program. There may not be a world undergraduate ranking, but if you look at the US institutions in the Times ranking, the same US institutions occupy the list as the ranking of US undergraduate institutions. Or just look at the worlds top high school students applications to these US universities. Why are the top international IB students trying to get into the US university systems? It isn’t because of the price.
@gallentjill I agree, maybe because those groups are well represented in the stellar academic population and athletes are not as often represented? Why are URM given an admissions bump? Why are legacies given a bump? Why are first generations given a bump? Because to get the community universities desire, they choose to do so.
I’m all for the International Model experiment. Why doesn’t somebody do it? Either an existing elite institution or a new one? If it was the way to go, smarter people than us would make that switch. But since the dominant players in the market do this model (maybe Ivy a little more than the elite DIII, because they want to compete at the D1 level, hence you need D1 caliber students). If someone wants to go to the OUS model that de-emphisizes the whole applicant, I’d love to be proven wrong.
@BrianBoiler The international rankings only look like the US undergraduate rankings as long as the ranking magazine happens artificially separate the research powerhouses from the rest (eg LACs). The Forbes ranking doesn’t, and suddenly looks quite different. And while the presence of strong grad programs may add to the undergraduate experience (debatable, I usually read the opposite) it doesn’t mean it works the other way round. The strong presence in international rankings, of course, adds to the international prestige - the brand. It’s a luxury good. Apparently, the unpredictability of admissions (“the secret sauce”) adds to the attractiveness of, maybe, being one of the “chosen”.
That is what is making more and more students apply - the brand name, the experience, the prestige. The “mystique”. Deep pockets, the promise of meeting full need, don’t hurt. It’s not objective, just like admissions are not. Something may be popular because it is of higher quality than something else. Or it may be popular despite of it. It’s not necessarily an indicator of quality.
@Tigerle I do see the addition of the LACs in the Forbes model, but all the top research unis are there too. If the graduate program didn’t play a factor, you wouldn’t see the top research unis in the same general bucket on both lists. There are schools in the US that admit on stats alone, but they are not in that top grouping on any list. So quite different in that a few elite LACs are in the top 20 but all of the 15 on world university list are included in that upper echelon of the undergraduate lists. Might be 3 on one ranking, 9 on another, 7 on a third, but that top bucket consists of the usual suspects.
Probably depends on the student. A more advanced student in the subject may find the availability of graduate level courses and research to be desirable to have available. A more ordinary students may not find that it matters.
Although Doolitle’s link is deleted (rightfully by the administrators), I urge others to find the link and read Doolitle’s blog post. The link should be available on the article webpage in The Atlantic.
A local girl was given a verbal to Harvard lacrosse as a Freshman. My son(also an athlete) was outraged,“Dad, she’s not smart, and cheats!”.
I don’t know exactly what happened, but 4 years later she was NOT admitted into Harvard. Just an anecdote from my neck of the woods, but just as valid as some of the anecdotal info in the article, and above. The athletic path is not the smooth ride that some on the outside looking in think it is. There is a lot of work, pressure, disappointment, and outright failure involved. As a friend of mine who was a Big 10 athlete said, “If I had to do it over again, I would never have swam!”
I do know that the racial make up of a lot of the teams at the academically elite schools skews White( a point made in the article), but they are only a small fraction of the overall college population. Basketball and Football skews AA, and Baseball Latino(I think). There are so many schools out there, and so many sports, that it’s hard to say how race fits in. I would guess that Asians suffer than most from racial imbalance when it comes to special admissions to college via sports, but I have no data to back that up.
Here is a link to the NCAA regarding demographics in sport. Keep in mind that it only includes NCAA members, not NAIA, etc…
Did he mean that she cheats in class or in lacrosse, or both?
At smaller schools, the percentage of students who are athletes is larger. A given set of sports has a similar number of athletes at every school that has that set of sports, but makes up a larger percentage of a 5,000 student school than at a 20,000 student school.
Although college basketball and football do have larger numbers of black athletes, black athletes are not the majority in the Ivy League or in Division III overall, though they are the majority in Division I and II overall for these sports. College baseball is predominantly white, despite some Latino presence (men’s soccer has a somewhat greater Latino presence, but still far lower than the white presence).
When my oldest told my sister that she didn’t get into Northwestern, my sister responded with I know who got your spot. One of her fellow employees was bragging about how her C average son got into Northwestern (with financial aid) to play football. I’ve seen kids that graduated with mine, get into out of their academic league schools to play sports but then never graduate college. I know that the high school hands them grades since they need a C or above to play sports. One showed his level of intelligence when he asked the teacher why he got an A on his homework when he only did half of it. If the others missed 2 answers they failed the homework. Neither the high school nor the colleges are doing them any favors.
Some colleges do not have to lower their standards for athletes, since their regular admission standards are similar to the NCAA minimum academic standards. Example:
https://admissions.olemiss.edu/applying-to-ole-miss/freshmen/
NCAA minimum academic standards are here:
http://fs.ncaa.org/Docs/eligibility_center/Quick_Reference_Sheet.pdf
Wisconsin recruits against NU for many athletes and I dont know of many that get in with a C average at either school. B is is more typical. https://247sports.com/college/wisconsin/Bolt/Wisconsin-Football-Leads-Nation-in-APR-37465531
Take a quick look at the Ivy schools’ tennis and golf team pictures.
It is likely he got a full ride athletic scholarship. For D1 football, it is usually all or nothing as football is a headcount sport. If the coaches helped him get in, he’d be either a scholarship player or a preferred walk on, and preferred walk ons get no need based financial aid. If he was a C student, unlikely to be getting merit aid.
When committing to the Ivies, the student is ‘committing to the process’ and the process includes getting accepted academically. Athletic admits overall need to be within one standard deviation of the student body as a whole, so they aren’t letting a bunch of C students with 24 on the ACT. Lacrosse no longer allows an offer to be made or accepted until Sept 1 of junior year. In the recent past they did have ‘commits to the process’ as young as freshmen, but that gave the Ivy time to make sure this recruit could get in. The coaches did follow those freshmen’s gpa and scores, did follow athletic improvement. Now they only have junior year to directly talk to the player (but the parents and high school/club coaches still know how to get the kid ‘Ivy ready’). Most of the student who showed up on the recruiting lists for Ivys as freshmen and sophomores did go to those schools because the coaches looked at their grades and early test scores before ever making an offer. Sometimes the kid athletically outgrew the Ivy (Harvard is not the top women’s lacrosse program, but Yale, Brown, Dartmouth, and Princeton are top 25) and went to Syracuse or Maryland. Sometimes the student just couldn’t get the test score needed for an Ivy.