These threads never cease to amaze me. Would there be this much angst and hand-wringing if we learned that colleges gave an admission preference to the kid that was filling the 1st chair flute.
Oh and Michael Doolittle – he is just pissed off and ranting because his kid didn’t get in to an “elite” school
I’d love to see some actual data and not 3rd hand anecdotes on the admission stats of athletes
@ucbalumnus She cheated in schoolwork.
Sorry, but forgot to paste the link to NCAA demographics, but I see you did.
Actually, musicians sometimes do get preference. YDD had a classmate who should have been kicked out of the ed. program, but wasn’t because they needed an oboist. That girl wasn’t making grades in her ed. classes and failed the basic skills test, but was allowed to continue in the program. That girl’s ACT score was below the average as well, which we know for a fact because the state accepts ACT scores above a 24? in lieu of passing basic skills. The advisor had her retake the ACT and she still couldn’t get a 24. That wasn’t particularly fair either. The difference though, is that music can be an academic pursuit, whereas playing a sport is at best related to a major like sports management. You can’t major in playing basketball, but you can major in playing piano. The other difference is no school opens the cafeteria early when the choir goes on tour, but they do for the sports teams with away games.
“I don’t think you are familiar with the Ivies in this regard.” Northwestern is not an ivy. Ivy adjacent, but not an ivy. The article is about “elite schools” - whatever we take that to mean. As I said before, knowing your grades sooner, as frequently happens because of eligibility reports being due, allows for better access to sometimes limited resources.
Since Northwestern football team usually have decent graduation rate and GPA, the son of your coworker must be a 5-star recruit for Northwestern to bend over backward and make an offer. After all, a kid with a C average in HS is likely going to last only 1 quarter at NU and NU is never known for one and done. Any 5-star recruit is followed closely by media including offers they have received. Care to share with us his name? We can do our due deligence.
Here’s another article. Your coworker’s story just doesn’t seem to add up. http://apps.northbynorthwestern.com/magazine/2016/winter/features/basketball/
Can we move back to the article and away from the back and forth about the coworker’s kid and Northwestern please?
Maybe NU has not had NCAA charges but they have both basketball and football players involved in point-shaving. One of the worst sports violations there is. https://www.google.com/search?source=hp&ei=FQjlWr24Ja6vggfL7JbYBQ&q=northwestern+point+shaving&oq=northwestern+point+shaving&gs_l=psy-ab.3…0j0i22i30k1.3682.12158.0.13014.28.19.0.8.8.0.89.1431.18.19.0…0…1c.1.64.psy-ab…1.27.1548.6…35i39k1j0i131k1j0i131i20i264k1j0i131i46k1j46i131k1j0i20i264k1j0i22i10i30k1.84.j1v71oIrROc
This thread is about elite colleges allegedly letting dumb jocks in to play for their sports. Point-shaving is a totally different animal. Schools have no way to screen or stop that.
I really don’t see the issue. As a society, we place much value on sports and if a kid has worked very hard and sacrificed their body since they were little, to be able to throw a football well, and gets an admissions boost, so be it. Some kids have spent countless hours and $ at the batting cages, while others at the math olympiads or speech competitions, all of these kids will get an admissions boost. Who is to say one EC should be more important or valuable than the other when colleges are reviewing applicants for admittance. Doesn’t recruiting that top athlete help meet the goals of the university just like “recruiting” that nationally ranked URM debater?
@socaldad2002, I guess that depends on what you view the purpose of post-secondary institutions. To me their purpose is education, and sport doesn’t fall into that category. Yes I believe that physical fitness is important and part of a balanced life-style, but no, I don’t think the drive towards becoming a professional athlete should be the purview of institutions whose primary function is supposed to be academic.
There are schools that agree with you, @gwnorth, and they don’t promote sports and in some cases don’t offer them. You can find those schools in little towns. What you can’t do is try to change Big 10 or Pac 12 or Ivy schools. At those schools, sports are a big part of the school and if you choose one of those, you an’t change that culture.
If you want schools where education is the one and only focus, go to Cal tech or Reed or Julliard but don’t expect sports not to matter at Amherst or Northwestern or, gasp, the Ivy league. Northwestern doesn’t have to be in a D1 conference if it doesn’t want athletics to matter but it chooses to be in the Big 10, where sports matter.
@gwnorth – for 999999% of kids at D3 schools it isn’t about the pro contract. It is about the love of the game. For the schools it is about school traditions and providing a focal point for the campus to rally around.
I think back to my undergrad days and the blast I had playing intermurals-- none of us were recruited athletes but it was a way to hang out and bond.
@jmnva06 I have no problem with intramural sport, or even varsity sport. What I have a problem with is giving an admissions boost to an applicant solely on the basis of their ability to play sport at an institution whose purported purpose is academics. I also have an issue with spending large amounts of money on sports programs at the expense of academic programs. By all means allow sport as an EC that promotes school traditions and physical fitness, but as an addition to, not the focus of, the school. There should also not be a different set of rules or preferential treatment for students solely based on their athletic prowess. Otherwise why even have academic ability as a criteria for admittance for athletes in the first place? Just recruit the best based on their athletic ability regardless of their academic proficiency and don’t require them to graduate with an academic degree. That way you could focus 100% on developing their athletic ability, but then that’s what professional sports is for, not university.
@gwnorth your definition of the college’s purpose doesn’t make it their definition and since it is their institution, they get to define the purpose. Simply stated, a universities purpose is to grow the body of knowledge and make a positive impact on the global society. To do that they convince “raw material,” or students to pay lots of money to accomplish that goal. A side benefit to the “raw material” is that they get an education.
Now, that was written somewhat “tongue-in-cheek,” and public universities may have more of a mandate to educate students in it’s state, but what I wrote is closer to the purpose of the american university.
I still argue, that if it was better to not include athletics, colleges would not include athletics. Since most all of the top universities do, I’m going to conclude that they know what they are doing and it appears they do it pretty well.
@BrianBoiler, call me cynical but I believe that colleges primarily include athletics because it is a big revenue generator, and not because it fits into their mandated purpose. Even so, I’d have no problem with that if the revenue generated were being used to fund academic programs rather than being primarily reserved to promote more sport to generate more revenue.
Very few schools make money from their sports overall. Some more make money on specific sports that offsets part of the cost of other sports, but spots overall costs money to them.
Not a single DIII University makes a nickel on their athletic department and only a relative few DI schools are in the black in the athletic department. And it is the elite DIII schools that most people are upset about the admissions bump. Do we really care if OSU gives a slight bump to a small percentage of their applicants? However Williams has close to 50% of their students playing a varsity sport. Not all get a boost, but 1 in 2 are good enough to compete at arguably the best athletic DIII in the country.
And I should add that Williams is looked at as one of the top LAC in the country. I don’t have a problem with their admissions policy. They are doing what they think is successful and it isn’t to generate a little extra money. They do it because it adds to what they think is a winning campus environment that helps them accomplish their goals.
The bottom line is people need to realize that their child or in the case of some posters, they themselves are only one ingredient in a schools recipe to success. The best thing to do is find a way to convince those schools that you best help them, not the other way around. Find out what they are looking for and give it to them in the application. Some schools want just the academic stats (like Cal Tech). Others want really smart athletes like Williams. Others want people who are generally into loving learning and applying themselves in a way that betters the global society. Don’t ever expect a school to change its recipe to be fair to an individual student.
Most schools spend more on athletics than they earn from athletics. Schools DO contribute to the academic programs. Many schools have academic programs that directly benefit from the athletic programs or exist because of the athletic teams, like physical therapy, sports medicine, marching band, sports journalism, television and radio production facilities. The sports programs provide jobs to students. The teams fund gorgeous rec centers and other facilities that all students get to use.
Would you also suggest schools not offer art, music, or theater if those aren’t offered as majors at the school? Daughter goes to a STEM school with very few courses offered outside of STEM, but the school recognizes the need for a more rounded life, so has a nice (and funded) theater group, a small orchestra, an art museum on campus. No credits, no minors, just to add to the quality of life at the school. It’s actually been increasing the number of sports to attract more students to the school. My daughter would not be there if there were no sports (especially since she needed the athletic scholarship to afford the school).
Schools that don’t offer sports may or may not spend that money on academics. Does Amherst or Williams skimp on the English department budget in order to offer field hockey? If Williams dropped sports entirely, would everyone run to Amherst? I don’t think so, but I do think Williams would get a very different type of applicant and the culture of the school would change. Quickly. Reed of the East?
Ivy league schools offer about 35 varsity sports (and many big power schools only offer 18-20). Do you think Harvard has trouble finding applicants so needs to offer those 35 sports, offer admission boosts to let in good athletes just to be nice? No, the experience is that athletes make good students, that sports make the college experience better so the Ivy schools not only offer athletics, they offer a lot of sports.
“Not a single DIII University makes a nickel on their athletic department and only a relative few DI schools are in the black in the athletic department. And it is the elite DIII schools that most people are upset about the admissions bump.”
In the Ivy/NESCAC world, athletics is an admissions hook. Other common hooks include ED, legacy, URM. The studies (Hurwitz, Espenshade, Bowen) say that the athlete hook is stronger than you would think. Almost as strong as the African American hook; much stronger than legacy, ED, Latino hook.
Like ED and legacy, Ivy/NESCAC athletes (as an overall group) tend to be higher SES. So recruiting a lot of athletes (in these non-athletic scholarship schools) tends to have a nice side benefit of bringing in a good number of full or fuller payors. Non-scholarship, lower key sports is actually decent business for colleges.
But the prime reason why these schools give such a comparatively strong athletics hook is that you keep score in sports. If Yale is going to have a basketball team, it can’t consistently lose to Harvard 20-80. You have to be competitive. In contrast, the Yale Daily is never going to run editorials about how bad the Whiffenpoofs have become and how the Whiff music director needs to be fired.
Given the extreme competition for their seats, it is somewhat surprising that these schools set aside 15-35% of their seats for athletes. In some ways, Harvard and Williams are more nutso about college sports than Bama is. But they are free to allocate their precious seats however they want.