@lastone03 Post #68 mentions clean water for villages in Africa and raising money for flood victims in India. I don’t get how those things are “contrived” or a “stunt”. I’m sure AO’s have the savvy to see through a project that doesn’t require a student’s time, energy, effort and growth. I don’t think community service is valued above anything else that requires commitment and hard work.
@3SailAway I don’t want to speak for @Huskymaniac but I think part of the point was that a kid can participate in a fundraising effort over one summer (or take one mission trip) and get more credit for that than an athlete can get for working hard to develop a skill (over many years) which he/she then uses to mentor, coach and fundraise for worthy causes. I also think Husky was responding to the comment about how AO’s assign a low ROI (noted by another poster) for non recruited athletes.
You get it!
Yes, many of them are contrived by the tiger parents. Yes, they require effort but no more, and often less, than what a student-athlete puts in for their sport. And, yes, certain community service activities are viewed more favorably than others. Anything involving Africa is big. Same for crisis relief. Special needs stuff has become a big one too. And the tiger parents know this and find these opportunities for their kids and force them to do them. It is no different than how most if these kids are only allowed to play piano and/or violin. By the way, do you have any idea what the time commitment is, during the school year, for kids playing a major sport like football or basketball? It is way more than tennis or cross country. Those kids need to keep their grades up while spending a ton of time on those sports. They also still do other ECs and community service and study for standardized tests at the same time. That is way harder to manage than a summer stunt and tennis.
And, yes, I am talking about what it takes to get into the first tier schools.
" Michigan, Minnesota, Washington and Syracuse, to name several recent examples, have run their own bold experiments in curricular flimflam."
Would be nice to know how so. To the UNC extent or worse??
" a kid can participate in a fundraising effort over one summer (or take one mission trip) and get more credit for that than an athlete can get for working hard to develop a skill…"
Nope.
“Anything involving Africa is big” and the rest of your declarations:
Nope.
@Huskymaniac – I think you overstate the point a bit.
Agree that HS sports are a huge time suck. Also agree that HS sports (absent being a recruited athlete) have a pretty modest ROI when it comes to top tier schools. But the top tier schools are also quite wise to (and dismissive of) the stories coming from the kids who go on a “life changing” spring break charity tourist trip too.
One of mine got a lot of admissions mojo from service oriented, non-athletic ECs. But the mojo came from the fact that those activities stretched out over the course of several years, involved a lot of leadership/time, and also were very genuine and unusual experiences. So those ECs became of big part of my kid’s story/brand in the college app/essays.
While the time spent probably wasn’t equal to playing a couple of HS varsity sports, those ECs were way beyond a perfunctory community service box check. And I think the low ROI on HS sports is more due to the fact that those experiences are just difficult to make that unique or interesting. So many thousands of kids do those things, even though the sports are very competitive and time consuming.
I’d say my athletic kid put in an average amount of time for an extra curricular activity. A couple of hours after school during the season, most Saturdays, a few late nights if they had an OOT game. Her sister did theater and put in a couple of hours after school when doing a play, and then 5-7 hours per night for the week of the play. Kids who were in MUN did the same, kids in the band did the same.
There were kids on the team who put in very little time and they got very little playing time, as I’m sure there are kids on debate and MUN who put in little time.
Whose ROI? At first, I thought you meant to the college. Yes, even non recruitable sports involvement can show teamwork, collaboration, commitment, and that a kid can conform to adult expectations. On this level, its no special boost but can still be a good thing. It’s common in the high schools, nothing wrong with that. So are the 3R’s.
But you mean that boost to the applicant, eh? And that explains some of the misery directed at kids who aren’t as involved in sports as in other efforts or good deeds? The claims a short, bought trip can outweigh genuine efforts over time is outdated (by a long stretch.) The claim about fundraisers is an equal misconception. (It can elicit eye rolls.)
Now, some kids do go off to 3rd world countries to do some good. Lots and lots (of those aiming high.) They dig wells, install sewer systems, work with solar energy, assist on volunter medical trips, work on scientific or environmental/conservation projects, and more. Again, just going isn’t the “it.” And adcoms know enough to judge.
So when you declare things like the one shot deal trumping or when you make bold claims, maybe some should admit when that’s based on assumptions.
Nor do you need to cure cancer, author a paper, design a few apps that make you a few dollars, win national awards or a host of other things some say. BUT. If you want to aim high, if you’re talking about a tippy top for yourself or your kid, you darned sure better be able to find the right info and filter out the rest of the noise. That level of college likes clear thinking on a level above assuming.
Note the comment someone made that the Academic Index is the average standard for the team. It’s possible some kids can slip below it, when others have the stats to carry the group. And yes, coaches can have a lot of pull. Dependng on the team and how it fits into the institutional priorities, adcoms may defer to a coach. Lest you think I approve of this, I don’t. I understand kids put a lot of time into sports, but do feel recruitable athletes should be reviewed same as the main pool. But that’s “perfect world” thinking.
@lookingforward Are you willing to go full disclosure as to your interest/role/function in the admissions process? Are you a consultant? An admissions official? A H.S. guidance counselor? A crazy parent that became obsessed with the process to the tune of 26,000 posts on CC?
26k posts, but many on the parent forum or parent cafe.
At this point, let’s leave it at: I’m involved on the college side, not an adcom.
There are ways to find more accurate info and we all should be capable of vetting. What anyone “heard” or read in some media article (unless it quotes an adcom or dean of admissions) shouldn’t be accepted as fact.
Ten years ago, kids thought the one week pay-to-play service trip was a boost. They got wiser soon after that. Legit trips involve committed work, often tough conditions.
I don’t find it objectionable that many elite private schools (e.g., Ivies, NESCAC, Stanford, Duke) give an admissions preference to recruited athletes. It’s part of their institutional DNA. I just think unhooked applicants and their parents need to suck it up and acknowledge it just means that many fewer slots that they’re realistically competing for. Exactly how many is not transparent, but Harvard boasts that it has 42 varsity teams, more than any other Division I school. I don’t know whether all those coaches get an admissions bump for their top recruits but if so, the numbers could be substantial. And at smaller LACs the impact could be even greater, as some report as many as 40% of students participate in varsity sports. Not all are recruited and not all need a special break in admission standards to get there, of course, but it’s got to be enough to take a real bite out of the slots available to the unhooked.
I am somewhat more troubled that the sports the Ivies participate in skew so heavily white. Football and basketball, fine, but crew, sailing, skiing, squash, golf, even ice hockey and lacrosse in the Northeast—these are sports where you don’t get a lot of participation by lower SES and URM kids. So it tends to be affirmative action for mostly white, mostly affluent Northeastern prep school kids. That, too, is part of their DNA, but it’s a part that has real socioeconomic consequences, and something they claim to be moving away from.
Some elite privates—Caltech, MIT, Chicago, Swarthmore, Haverford—don’t give a bump to recruited athletes. And their results on the playing field show it…
^Actually Catech, MIT and Swarthmore do provide bumps based on personal experience since S was recruited by all 3. For Caltech and MIT, the way the coaches (and the Caltech AD) explained to us, the coach’s support had the effect of a supercharged EC. However, the best they could predict was that with support and based on S’s grades/transcript and test scores (all within the 50% median or higher) his chances were 50/50. Swarthmore was a 99%+ after the preread.
I also have to agree with @Northwesty in post 105 and @lookingforward above that high level athletic participation, even for a non-recruited athlete, can be a strong EC even for the tippy tops, and certainly would carry much more weight than an obvious contrived service EC. I do think when you go the athletic route, it may be less memorable or attention grabbing for an AO reader unless the applicant can somehow present his/her participation/achievements in a way in an essay that makes it memorable. S declined a number of athletic offers that required an ED commitment and got into a number of tippy tops as a non-recruited 2 sport athlete. He was as “round” of an ORM candidate as you can find, so it can be done.
The Ivies have the same sports as other schools, but also have the ‘country club’ sports. Minorities are starting to have a bigger presence in some of these sports like golf, tennis, lacrosse, soccer.
Maybe in some places, but when I look at Harvard’s varsity rosters I see an overwhelming sea of white faces, punctuated by the occasional Asian-American but precious few blacks or Hispanics.
New here in Minnesota many of the best lacrosse players are Native Americans. I’ve heard that’s also true in upstate New York. I don’t think many of them make it to elite private schools in the Northeast, however. Hockey is also largely a white upper crust sport in the Northeast. In Minnesota it’s also pretty white, but many of the best players are tough working class kids from industrial towns and the Iron Range.
http://gostanford.com/roster.aspx?path=wswim womens swimming 2018 NCAA champs
basically all white except for Simone Manuel and Janet Hu
http://gostanford.com/roster.aspx?path=wgolf women’s golf
half Asian
http://gostanford.com/roster.aspx?path=wsoc women’s soccer 2017 NCAA champs
mixed
http://gostanford.com/roster.aspx?path=wlax women’s lacrosse
mostly white
http://gostanford.com/roster.aspx?path=wten women’s tennis
asian and white
I don’t know that hockey here is upper crust. I know an awful lot of players whose patents were blue collar. But that’s anecdotal.
You can get specific numbers at http://web1.ncaa.org/rgdSearch/exec/saSearch . In the Ivy League, the sports with the largest portion of White students on the roster in 2016-17 were as follows. I am excluding the “other” (international) race category from percentages, which was a large portion of the team in some cases.
- Skiing -- 93%
- Lacrosse -- 88%
- Baseball -- 85%
- Field Hockey -- 83%
- Sailing -- 82%
The sports with the smallest portion of White students were
- Golf – 42%
- Tennis – 47%
- Rugby – 48%
- Fencing – 52%
- Basketball – 58%
^ I think we also need to look at absolute numbers to see how this skews overall admissions. I have taken the 2016-2017 data and set forth the number of white athletes to match with @Data10 's percentages above and then just did a very simplified calculation (divide by 32) to get a rough yearly figure by school. Note some sports likely have a number of “walk-on” members, so the actual recruited athletes with the admissions bump will be lower in those sports. On the other hand, some recruited athletes drop out of their sports after freshmen year. Some sports also may not be offered at all 8 Ivies, and some sports may get different preferential slots by school, but I think the rough numbers are instructive for our purposes.
- Skiing -- 70; 2.2
- Lacrosse -- 404; 12.6
- Baseball -- 183; 5.7
- Field Hockey -- 123; 3.8
- Sailing -- 28; 0.9
- Golf -- 50; 1.6
- Tennis -- 77; 2.4
- Rugby -- 42; 1.3
- Fencing -- 88; 2.8
- Basketball -- 133; 4.2
Total White Athletes 4,879
Total All Athletes 8,405
Percentage White Athletes 58%
I was able to pull the numbers off the website onto an excel spreadsheet. If anyone wants to pm me with their email address, I’ll be happy to send it to them for them to play around with the numbers.
These sports are essentially AA for rich white students, as someone astutely noted.
“Nobody gets “guaranteed admission”…just doesn’t work like that at the Ivies.”
lol, good one, you don’t think Malia Obama was guaranteed admission at Harvard, and just to be balanced, Audrey Pence guaranteed admission at Yale law? And most athletes are guaranteed admission, esp in the revenue generating sports. If you have a commitable offer from any of the ivies or Stanford, Northwestern, Duke,etc you’re in. 100% in. In fact, you have the power to decline them.