interesting article in The Atlantic about athletics in college admissions

Athletes in the non-headcount sports can also be in the admit-deny category sometimes mentioned here on CC. Even if a school gives the coach the ability to offer admissions to top athletes, if there isn’t more money coming from admissions, the student won’t be attending.

@waitingmomla, maybe I am not being as clear as I assume, but I have said repeatedly that admissions offices can set whatever standards they want for recruits. Schools like ND absolutely set standards above the NCAA threshold. The admissions director at Notre Dame could theoretically say nobody under a 34 ACT and a 3.9 in core courses with four years of math and seven APs. That is absolutely their decision. But once those standards are set, then for the 85 guys on scholarship for football there, assuming they meet whatever standards are in place, the decision to admit is made when an offer is extended and the kid commits. This is different than in the Ivy where a recruit has to hit his objective targets under the AI system and admissions has to independently pass on the application during the likely letter review. It is why one commits to Notre Dame but commits to the process at Yale. That is the point I am making. It has nothing really to do with what the relative academic standards at Notre Dame and Yale actually are.

I disagree with this premise. There’s a lot of great universities in the world and not all of them are in the US, such as Oxford, Cambridge, and Tsinghua.

@roethlisburger you really need to read what the quoted poster said. Are you saying that the UK has the best higher education system in the world due to two universities? or one in China?

@Ohiodad51 I think you are being clear. No offense, but what I’m saying is I don’t necessarily believe what you’re claiming is factual for the non-ivy elite D1 schools – “the decision to admit is made when an offer is extended and the kid commits” The reason I don’t necessarily believe that is because - one example - Notre Dame clearly says on their own site that this is not true. They say, outright, that letter of intent is not an offer of admission. Again, I’m not trying to make this ND specific. I’m just using this as one example to assert that it’s not necessarily true that non-ivy elite D1 schools move the final admission decision for athletes from the AO to the athletic dept. Is it true of some D1 schools? I’m sure. Most D1 schools? Maybe. But I am not convinced it is true for the academically elite (non-ivy)

“In order to be eligible to sign an NLI, a high school or preparatory school prospective student-athlete must first register in the NCAA Eligibility Center and complete the amateurism certification questionnaire. Once a prospect has signed a National Letter of Intent, the prospect has then committed to the University of Notre Dame for one year as long as they are accepted for admission and meet NCAA eligibility requirements. The National Letter of Intent is not an offer of admission.” https://www3.nd.edu/~ncaacomp/nli.shtml

@Ohiodad51, I think you’re making too broad a blanket statement on Ivy exceptionalism. Wisconsin, for one, is a school that uses a more Ivy-like process. They don’t have fixed numerical test score and GPA minimums for athletes. Athletic recruiters know in a general way what Admissions is looking for in an athletic recruit, but recruiting offers are made and athletes commit without any guarantee of admission. The recruit needs to submit an application which is reviewed on a case-by-case basis by the Admissions office before admission is granted. Admissions is adamant that the final decision is theirs alone.

Because the coaches know in a general way what Admissions is looking for, it usually works out—most recruited athletes are admitted, often with GPAs and test scores that wouldn’t cut it in the non-athlete applicant pool. But sometimes committed recruits do get rejected—something the coaches find frustrating when it happens… In fact, Wisconsin lost a high-profile football coach, Gary Anderson, because of it. Anderson lost several highly coveted recruits who he deemed worthy of admission under the Admissions office’s guidelines, but Admissions rejected them. So Anderson quit and decamped for Oregon State where he only needs to worry about meeting NCAA numerical minimums.

The NLI is not an admissions to ANY school. It is often signed in Nov and at the time of signing many students have not yet received a admissions letter. One of the ‘outs’ of the NLI is that the student isn’t accepted academically to the school. Lots of things can happen between Nov and the following August, including grades falling below NCAA standards, being arrested, not passing drug tests, etc.

Some schools do set the standards higher than the NCAA. Wisconsin lost a football coach who wanted to accept JUCO transfers whose gpas weren’t up to Wisconsin standards.

Notre Dame is pretty good at determining whether a kid will make grades. However, sometimes they get it wrong, and it usually results in a kid decommitting and commiting elsewhere. Last winter ND had a RB that flipped to USC because he didn’t have the grades to clear ND admissions.

Interesting since USC and Notre Dame are peers, hard to believe USC has lower standards.

^^Just proves every school can set its own requirements.

@Huskymaniac You obviously do not know any runners. Our S19 is a cross country and track runner. It’s a 52 week per year sport and never stops. XC goes right into training for winter track which leads right to track and then to summer training. The kids run upwards of 70 miles per week in addition to cross training. It’s brutal. Takes about three hours every day except Sundays. During the school year, the kids go straight to practice after school and don’t get home until about 6:30. They are exhausted but need to shower, eat, and get their four hours of homework done. On meet days, they leave right from school and aren’t home until 9:00pm. Those are very late homework nights.

Our son played VERY competitive USTA tennis through ninth grade and traveled for club soccer in eighth and ninth grades. He said neither of those compared to the commitment needed for running or the exhaustion he feels daily. He loves it and may continue to college. To say that football or other sports are harder than running is just incorrect.

For some reason, as well, the runners are all very good students. The top ten junior runners on his team are all in the top five percent of the class at our very competitive public high school and three of those kids are all-state runners. Two will probably run D1 somewhere and the third is talking to MIT and Harvard coaches. From what I can garner from talking to the GCs and parents at our school, the combination of athletics and smarts is the ticket to having lots of choices when it comes to college. I don’t know how much I like that, but it seems to be true. All of the kids we’ve sent to Ivies in the last three years (I think there are about a dozen) were all recruited athletes. We have a ton of really bright kids at our high school with 30+NMF kids each year in a very competitive NMF state but those Science Olympiad kids, the theater kids, the Forensics kids, the music kids just don’t seem to be able to get to the tippy top schools. They get into top schools for sure (Duke, Vandy, NU, Michigan, etc.) but the kids going to Ivies or to Stanford are always athletes.

@CU123 USC is a very good school, however, they do cut corners and the athletic grad rates show that (yes, a few student-athletes leave early to play professionally, but the vast majority do not).

“Interesting since USC and Notre Dame are peers, hard to believe USC has lower standards.”

They’re not peers in terms of academic standards, ND has much tougher standards to get in and stay eligible. USC has much lower standards, they will take students that took “online” classes to get their high school diploma, ND won’t approach that kid, they’ll look much closer at the transcript.

“So that again would lead me to believe that the AO has the final say, not the coaches.”

That depends on the coach and university. I’m sure the oldies like me remember Lou Holtz the ND coach, he had power to get kids in to ND that the admissions office would usually have said no. Harbaugh had similar power at Stanford, and no one at Duke is going to say no to Coach K. He’s making it clear that he’s recruiting kids who are not going to attend class and after the ncaa tournament in April will get an agent and leave school. De facto, the president works for him, not the other way around. The more money involved, the more the coaches have a final say.

Can one of you who believes that the admissions dept at Notre Dame, Duke, Northwestern, etc conducts a review of athletic admits after they sign a NLI point to a single person in a major sport who signed a NLI and then was not admitted? And no, “losing out” on recruits doesn’t count. Nor does Gary Anderson leaving Wisconsin. Both of those examples (the two presented on this thread) actually support my point. The kid at Northwestern decommitted (well before signing day) because his gpa was two tenths of a point too low, or at least that is what was reported. Anderson very publicly complained about Wisconsin’s rules on credit requirements for juco transfers. This was also widely reported. Those are clearly examples of the application of objective factors, and neither has a thing to do with the type of subjective review the Ivy schools undertake.

I think some think this is a one-two done deal. There’s communication between coaches and admissions. They neither dictate nor sit there wondering if the kids they want will pass muster in a few months. The schools that do this well…do it well.

And don’t forget the AI is about an average in a dept. “The overall athletic A.I. can also be balanced by recruits with considerably higher A.I.’s who play other, lower-profile sports, or by recruits with exceedingly high A.I.’s who are stacked at the top end of a team’s roster.”

@Ohiodad51 “Can one of you who believes that the admissions dept at Notre Dame, Duke, Northwestern, etc conducts a review of athletic admits after they sign a NLI point to a single person in a major sport who signed a NLI and then was not admitted?”

Of course none of us could know that information – for all the players, for all the major sports, for all the years, for all of these universities we are talking about. And, no offense, neither could you. That’s the whole point. You might have some experience/knowledge of the ivy league because your son plays there (and other reasons I think you stated in an earlier post). But as you also stated, you do not have direct experience with all of these schools. Therefore, some of what you are saying about these other high ranking D1 schools is conjecture. It is your opinion and you are certainly entitled to it. However, the one known fact that we do have in this discussion, is that one of the schools in question - Notre Dame - clearly states on their website that 1. Letter of Intent is NOT an offer of admission and 2.Once a prospect has signed a National Letter of Intent, the prospect has then committed to the University of Notre Dame for one year AS LONG AS they are accepted for admission. https://www3.nd.edu/~ncaacomp/nli.shtml

So an ivy says they do something, and that’s taken as gospel. But an elite non-ivy school says they do something and they are not afforded the same credit? No offense, but I don’t agree with that logic.

My point with regard to ND was merely that they spoke with the kid that didn’t make grades and let him flip (to save face). It was not an NLI situation, it was a commitment issue.

Morgan Moses signed a NLI with UVA (2009) but had to attend Fork Union for a year in order to get the grades he needed to be academically eligible. He enrolled at UVA in 2010. That’s one that first came to mind. He was ultimately admitted but had he not made grades at FUMA, he wouldn’t have been. So, I guess you call that a conditional NLI?

Saying an NLI is not “an offer of admission” doesn’t mean coaches are sitting there, chewing their fingernails for several months, wondering if Johnny has a shot.

It says the actual offer comes from admissions.

I never said the coaches are sitting there chewing their fingernails. There’s a difference between that and the AO having the final word. That’s how I read the statement. If you read it differently, then we are each certainly entitled to our own, if differing, impressions.