What I always find interesting is the often overlooked fact that athletes graduate at a higher percentage than the regular student body across all divisions of the NCAA. In looking at just the div iii schools (since that is much of what is being discussed here) athletes have a 4 year graduation rate 6% higher than the general student population. Every ethnicity and sport, male and female (except pacific islanders) has a higher athlete percentage.
Maybe the question should be “why don’t these schools admit more athletes to up their numbers as they have proven over the last ten years, to be the students most able to complete their degree?”
So then I guess they shouldn’t give any preference to those that play musical instruments or dance either? They are all gifts and they all have a place in a college. College is not only about academics, it’s about developing leadership, discipline, independence and learning to collaborate.
Note that you get different results if you include all Div III schools, rather than limiting to colleges that volunteerly report their athlete grad rate numbers:
Div. 1 Sports on page 37. Only Mens Football, Mens Basketball, and oddly enough Mens Tennis are profitable. The losses of all other sports suck up the profit of the other three and then some (read net loss).
Div. FBS subdivision, the numbers are even worse. Universities do not make money on sports. ESPN etc. do, but not universities. At one point in the early 2010s there were only 9 athletic departments in the US that were profitable where they dumped money back into the university.
If you want to major in communications at Stanford you can get by with an ACT in the 20’s and great support from the athletic department. They won’t let you into STEM majors with subpar scores.
@lastone03
I agree 100%. In fact, it saddens me that sports isn’t considered MORE in the admissions process! Recruited athletes are only a small part of all student-athletes in high school. Just like bringing clean water to a village in Africa is a hook, so is being a recruited athlete. But what about the kid that was just a good athlete in high school? Beyond recruited athletes, playing sports gives applicants zero value in the current admissions process. Yet, raising money for flood victims in India will help get you in. Why? There are plenty of kids that work hard at being a varsity athlete in competitive team sports like football, basketball and baseball. Many of these kids are three or four year varsity level athletes but aren’t quite good enough to eventually be recruited. It takes a lot of work to make a varsity team in one of these sports as a freshman and it takes even more to work your way into the starting lineup. Part of that process is learning how to work within a team environment and be a leader. Those are critical skills to success. Yet, the kid that spends part of ONE summer raising money for flood victims in India will get the nod. Sure, that takes initiative and some communications skills but it is nothing like the initiative it takes to make a varsity team and start on one. The problem here is that tiger parents ruined it by “gaming the system.” In the old days, being a starter on a varsity team meant something. But then every tiger parent pushed their kid into tennis or track or some other non-team non-contact sport so schools needed to find something else to distinguish kids. I will take the kid who demonstrated team work, dedication and leadership in a contact team sport over the kid that did some “unique” but contrived EC or community service activity any day.
By the way, the same holds for non-sport “leadership” ECs. The elite schools don’t give a damn anymore if a kid is class president or even student council president. Why? Tiger parents caught onto that too and pushed their kids to get “leadership” positions in the math club or national honor society. Eventually, every applicant had some “leadership” example on their application. But do they really compare to the student council president? The latter needs to be liked and respected by students across all four years, not just a group of 10 or 20 of their peers.
The system is broken. It is a nightmare for admissions folks and is a study in game theory. Every time the admissions people try to come up with a way to distinguish future leaders, the tiger parents game the system and break it again. And it is almost always contrived. And, on top of that, social engineering has pushed admissions people away from valuing the things that lead to success in favor of things that result in virtue signaling.
https://cs.stanford.edu/degrees/ug/Declare.shtml indicates that Stanford CS does not have any special requirements in terms of college grades/GPA or high school credentials (high school GPA, SAT/ACT scores) to declare the CS major.
No but if your a recruited athlete you will go through a special process. Their was an article on a recruited athlete that was rejected by Stanford as he stated he wanted to major in engineering. I believe he had a 3.8/28 ACT. The coach wanted him but that wasn’t going to cut it for engineering. They want there grad rate to be high and aren’t going to set up athletes for failure.
I think a significant number of people that criticize athletes have never played sports or have never had kids that played sports. I don’t think they have any idea how much grit, determination, and dedication it takes to physically and mentally challenge yourself (for years) to be a starter at a large public high school. And they certainly don’t have any idea how cerebral the game of baseball is. It seems in their minds that if you are athletically gifted you are nothing more than a dumb jock. I’d love for them to tell that to my son’s basketball teammates who will be attending MIT, Northwestern, and Hopkins next year. None will be playing basketball other than at the intramural level, but the MIT kid will be playing another sport for them, baseball.
The Ivies (to their credit) have a quantitative system in place that measures the extent to which the qualifications Ivy athletes (as a group) are allowed to vary (on the downside) as compared to the overall student population.
No such system exists for dancers, singers or debaters.
It has been studied and documented. Recruited athlete is a powerful hook in the Ivy/NESCAC world. Not as quite as powerful a hook as being African American, but close. The athlete hooks can be stronger in certain marquee sports at the particular school – football, hoops, ice hockey, maybe lacrosse.
Ivy/NESCAC athletes (as a group) tend to graduate in the lower third of their classes, which is consistent with the lower (as a group) academic stats they bring at enrollment. But they graduate at rates that are only a little bit below the overall grad rates.
“Yet, the kid that spends part of ONE summer raising money for flood victims in India will get the nod.”
Absolutely correct. Unless you are playing at a recruited athlete level, the admissions ROI on HS sports is low. For admissions into a high end college, the time is much better spent on some other kind of interesting activity.
There’s 18,000 boys varsity basketball teams in the U.S. 16k baseball teams, 14k football teams. And every single one of those teams has a captain.
if you’re a top recruit in your sport and Stanford wants you… you get a break on academics.
that’s the price Stanford will pay for:
being the top athletic program in the country.
being in a FBS div 1 power conference (USC, UCLA, Berkeley, Texas, Michigan..)
just look at it as an extremely powerful hook. while there may be no system for dancer etc… there is the same system for URM although that’s not publicized for obvious reasons.
I understand your point @northwesty. Fortunately for us, community service and playing varsity sports are not mutually exclusive. Many of our athletes have hundreds of community service hours in addition to other (non-athletic) EC’s and leadership positions. Having said that, I am not sure why certain community service projects are dubbed more worthy than certain athletic events. We have baseball players that play a charity baseball game every year to raise money for various charities. And they coach underprivileged kids in the summer. If nothing else, by exposing kids to sports you can keep a lot of kids out of trouble, physically active, and not tied up on screens all day.
2 of the 4 most common majors among Stanford athletes are engineering majors. All of the 4 most common majors relate to STEM. On my team (crew), the majority of declared athletes were engineering majors, as discussed in the article at https://me.stanford.edu/news/engineering-rowing-team . I am not aware of any kind of limitation on major selection, although I was a walk on and not recruited. I would not be surprised if a particular coach preferred that his team to choose more flexible and less time consuming majors than engineering, but I would be very surprised if a coach (or the school) required this for any student.
Recruited athletes no doubt get a boost for admissions, which leads to athletes having lower average SATs than the overall class, but there are also plenty of recruited athletes with excellent stats. This is particularly true in sports where there is little chance of going pro after graduation, so students plan to a pursue a career related to their academic classes, rather than athletics.
Ideally, all college athletes would realize that the chance of going pro successfully* is very low, even for athletes who in the top division (NCAA D1) of college sports.
*I.e. in the top leagues, as opposed to minor leagues or developmental leagues.