Being a recruited athlete is no doubt a big hook for college admissions, but I am very skeptical of such stories. Northwestern has one of the most restrictive Div I football recruiting in the United States. Northwestern’s footballl team has a 99% GSR grad rate, which is the highest among Div I football. The team had an average college GPA of 3.2 last year, which is again one of the highest among Div I football. A few years ago, Northwestern made news for rejecting a 3 star recruit with a 4.0 GPA and rejecting a 4 star recruit because his GPA was “0.2 too low.” The rejected 4 star (Faith Ekakitie) was also had offers from Stanford, Duke, Vanderbilt, and other highly selective colleges. According to Stanford’s CDS, 99% of Stanford’s class has a GPA above 3.5, and all have a GPA above 3.0. If Stanford’s theoretical min 3.0 GPA is at least 0.2 too low for a 4 star Northwestern football recruit, I doubt your co-worker’s kid really was admitted with a C average, even if he does play football.
You can search for the specific numbers at http://web1.ncaa.org/rgdSearch/exec/saSearch . Of the 25 listed sports, non-international Asian students are under-represented on all but 3 of them – golf, fencing, and women’s tennis. As a whole, under 5% of Ivy League student athletes are Asian, compared to ~20% of the student body.
Keep in mind that college athletes often have academic supports not offered to other students. Where I went, (not a sports school) players had mandatory team study hours, sometimes with TAs. If my athletically pathetic school did that, I imagine schools that are remotely good at sports do that and probably more. Also keep in mind the athletic-related majors at smaller schools who may have coach as a professor. If someone is a good enough player for something they need, schools will go out of their way to make sure they make grades. I’m not saying that elite schools take kids who are academic embarrassments, but they will take an athlete who doesn’t meet their usual standards. With the number of waitlisted students these days, that athlete is granted the spot of someone who does meet the standards.
Anyone else remember the one pro football player who started a literacy program after he got all through school, including college, with a very low reading ability?
@GloriaVaughn Things have changed quite a bit since the (I think the NFL player was Dexter Manly) player you mentioned graduated from college, unable to read. Also, only DI schools maybe some DII have the mandatory study hours. The elite DIII does not have that formal academic support system that the others do.
http://www.und.com/genrel/110817aab.html
Scroll down the article to see the rankings. I doubt NW is cutting a lot of corners with the grad rates they have.
@BrianBoiler I am well aware that things have changed since then. The NCAA has opened it’s eyes and cracked down on schools. The C student getting into Northwestern was more recently. Whether or not the kid went to Northwestern or not, mom never said. He may very well have stated at home and gone to OSU. I do know that mom clearly stated that her C average son got into Northwestern. Even the mom couldn’t believe it but saw the proof.
My daughter had mandatory study tables (D2 school) until she made at least a 3.0. For her, it was just one semester and it was in the library, 8 hours per week. Any student could go to them but only athletes did. I thought they were wonderful. She’d go from 7-9 every night and then go to bed (5:30 am lifting M-W-F). A parent’s dream.
NCAA doesn’t require study tables. It is up to each school or coach. D’s coach wanted 10 hours per week but the athletic director only requires 8.
Any student at D’s school can have tutoring, writing help, go to office hours, meet with TA’s. Athletes are ‘guided’ toward help, maybe earlier than other students. D’s coach gets her grades before D does, and even gets notified if D skips classes. D was confronted by coach for missing a class and she’d just gone to a different section that day. Her sorority also gets her grades and makes sure D is attending classes and getting the help she need before there are issues.
I don’t see how athletes getting extra academic help is a bad thing or how it disadvantages other students. As I said, any student can go to study tables (they are in the library, not some top secret location), get tutoring, go to office hours.
It is common for sororities and fraternities to have mandatory study for pledges to aid them in making grades so that they can be initiated at the end of pledging. The majority of schools offer tutoring in some form, writing and math labs, tutoring for certain historically difficult classes. Larger schools tend to offer them as group tutoring, but it can be set up in different ways. Some require you attend every session (miss one and you’re out) with a TA reteaching what was covered that week, but with limited opportunity to cover individual questions. Others offer one-on-one. Youngest’s school had a posted list of individual tutors for certain classes (along with writing and math labs) and at the bottom was, “if your class isn’t listed, contact us. We will find you a tutor at no cost to you.” If the tutoring is individual and the tutor only has one spot available but two students needing it and one is an athlete, I can see where it would be a disadvantage to the other students. Knowing grades sooner may be an advantage to get the open spots. Some schools use upperclassmen or prof.- recommended students as tutors. They are usually work-study which comes with a limited amount of money that they can earn. Larger schools may use TA’s only as tutors. Others hire adults or retirees and college grads (master tutors) as tutors and they are paid out of university funding. At the same time, they may limit the number of hours a week that a student may have a tutor (can’t meet with a tutor every day for every subject type thing). It becomes a problem when student athletes use a disproportionate amount of resources or when they get preferential access to resources. That’s an issue at some schools and not at others. At some schools, study tables are closed groups and open to anyone at others.
I am very skeptical about the Northwertern story here. I compared the scoring bands in the latest CDS of Northwestern vs Penn and Cornell, the percentages at the lower end are very similar to each other. Even if the story were true (highly doubt that), it’s not typical. Only one percent (20 students) had ACT between 18-23 at Northwestern.
Facts are facts. The other employees had no idea where her son had applied to and, well, most of them probably didn’t care. If he hadn’t been admitted she most likely wouldn’t have said anything but that fact that he was admitted was a surprise to her too. So he fell into that 1% and was admitted.
In the year that he was admitted, for enrolled students (as I stated, I don’t know if he enrolled there to chose another school), 3 were in the 18-23 ACT range and 29 in the 24-29 range. I found this in the same source of information from Northwestern. “Talent/ability (as admission factor):
Special consideration given to students with demonstrated talent/abilities in
areas of interest to the institution (e.g., sports, the arts, languages, etc.).”
Putting aside the issue of the “unqualified” or even “underqualified” being admitted to elite colleges, there is still a problem if essentially athletic prowess is winning all ties among the applicant pool. Why bother being student body President, or a top flight debater, etc., if the true winning EC is sports even without the admission guarantee.
Take a couple of steps back and think about it. At a LAC, the student body is 1/3 varsity athletes, 1/3 URM/legacies/special cases (and as discussed, the overwhelming majority of athletes are not URM but white kids playing white kid sports), and the last 1/3 is everyone else. Most of the applicants to a LAC probably fall into that last category. If you are an unhooked, non-URM, non-legacy candidate, the odds for admission are far worse than you think.
A story at the office water cooler about another employee’s kid is not always an accurate source of information. For example, maybe the “C student” comment related to a previous story about getting a C in a particular subject, but he still had a decent overall GPA. Maybe she meant he was recruited, not that we was accepted. Maybe she was lying. Maybe you misheard or misremembered a key detail. There are many possibilities. I’d consider facts to be stats published by more reliable sources. Some facts about Northwestern football that any of us can easily verify are:
-The Northwestern football team currently has a 99% GSR graduation rate, which is the highest in Div I football.
-The Northwestern football team currently has a 3.2 GPA at Northwestern, which is among the highest in Div I football
-The Northwestern football team has a history of not accepting top star recruits for academic reasons, which has led to several complaint articles in the NW newspaper
A story at the office water cooler about another employee’s kid is not always an accurate source of information.
It was his mother to stated it so that would fall under the category of accurate statement. She clearly stated that he was accepted, not recruited.
Northwestern was also known for having a losing team. In fact the own the title of longest losing streak. What any college says they do and what they really do are often not the same thing. Northwestern itself stated that special consideration is given to students with talent/abilities in an area that the school is interested in.
Northwestern had a poor football record decades ago, before the current team was born. The losing streak you are referring to started in the 1970s. Yes, Northwestern’s admission policies have changed since the 1970s, but I’d expect they’ve gotten more stringent over that period, as Northwestern has become more selective. The college currently has an 8% acceptance rate.
The same statement could be made for nearly every selective college, with holistic admissions. It means they consider more criteria than just stats alone in admissions decisions. It does not mean that they only care about stats sufficient to meet the NCAA eligibility in talent/ability and are accepting students with a C overall GPA
It’s not just varsity athletics. I went to the college tour of a smallish but very highly rated school (one digit selective)
two years in a row with a child and a nephew. Both times the Div3 school spent 25% of the tour time talking about filling 18 varsity sports, 37 club sports and 32 intramural sports.
It needs to go in the CDC what percentage of students with minimal mobility skills are admitted.
And I saw an interview with Richard Sherman’s mother who swore up and down that he was attending Stanford on a merit scholarship and not an athletic one. That is just plain not correct. He was on a full athletic scholarship. He’s been in the NFL for about 10 years, and his mother still thinks he went to college on an academic scholarship.
Northwestern football is D1. The coaches can’t give partial scholarships, so it is all or nothing, and you said the mother said he got ‘financial aid.’ There are rules about recruits and once the football recruit has contact with the football coach, he becomes a ‘preferred walk on’ if he doesn’t get an athletic scholarship. That means he can have no need based FA from the school. If the school gives him merit aid, it has to be in line with other students receiving that type of aid.
I think the co-worker just didn’t know, or didn’t want to share, all the facts. Her son was either a recruit on a full athletic scholarship or he was a walkon and got no financial aid. Either way, he was admitted because the football coach asked that he be.
@GloriaVaughn
I don’t think you are familiar with the Ivies in this regard. If you were you’d know they do not offer their student athletes any extra academic support that isn’t also made available to the general student population.
Yes, after the story gets passed around second or third hand, details may be misremembered. Remember that game of “telephone” where A tells a story to B who retells it to C who retells it to D … and when it gets back to A the story is very different from the original?
The less academic compromise schools make, the more difficult they’d have winning teams.