I don’t know what distinction you are making. In the Ivy, the final admissions decision on each athletic recruit is made by the admissions committee based on whatever criteria, both subjective and objective, that school and the conference decide to use. In the non Ivy high academic D1 world, the admissions committee is not making that decision on each applicant, but rather providing objective standards for the athletic department to apply.
The exceptions to this are Stanford, which has a type of hybrid pre read/early admissions process, the academies which address athletic recruits in the pool of non competitive admits, and the Patriot which uses a system similar to the Ivy, although the Patriot system is reportedly more objectively based than the Ivy system.
@BrianBoiler Maybe the “Higher” education system in the US (i.e. Ivies and the like) are the strongest in the world, but overall, American education lags behind the education in many other developed countries. Growing up in Canada, it was common for US students moving in to be held back a grade. Canadian students moving to Luxembourg, Denmark, etc. often had to be moved back a grade when they moved there. They tended to be far ahead in Maths and languages, among other things…maybe not so good at playing Left Tackle and Point Guard.
The ratings systems by US entities seem to favor US institutions…go figger… Non US rankings often tell a different story
@57special Financial Times University rankings is a global ranking done OUS. 16 out of top 25 and aound 50% of top 100 are US institutions. That includes non-Ivies obviously. The Shanghai ranking show similar numbers. Also, ranking is only one of my three givens. I don’t think those who are in the higher education would argue with my premise anymore then astronomers would argue against a spherical earth.
I don’t argue that pre higher education may be stronger OUS. But that is a diversion to the point of this thread.
Ya, they favor non-US institutions. Go figure. 
@waitingmomla, sorry, I do not have a link. But it is how the system works based on my own personal and observed experience. I know from personal experience how the system works at the academies, in the Ivy and the Patriot and at Duke and Northwestern. I know from observed experience how the system works at Stanford, Michigan, Notre Dame and Vandy. I have also been around sports pretty much my whole life, and still remember when Notre Dame taking Tony Rice as the first prop 48 athlete in the school’s history was a big deal.
Note also that I am not saying that admissions standards are too low at some of the high academics because the admissions committee cedes this control. Manifestly, they are not. You can see that in the example from Northwestern a few pages up the thread, where they lost out on a recruit to another big ten school because the kid’s core gpa wasn’t high enough. This has hit Wisconsin in the recent past because of rules on transfers from jucos imposed by admissions, and in every cycle there are kids who Stanford and Notre Dame don’t recruit because while they may be academically fine with the NCAA or at Ohio State or Alabama, they won’t cut it under that particular school’s standards.
The only point I am making is that when Pat Fitzgerald (the Northwestern football coach) offers a kid, he already knows (or should know) the kid will be admitted, because that decision is made entirely on certain objective bench marks (certain thresholds for GPA, standardized tests, curriculum). No further decision needs to be made. So that kid can say he is “committing to play football at Northwestern”.
In the Ivy, on the other hand, a kid needs to hit those same type of objective benchmarks before an offer can be extended. However, just hitting those benchmarks is not enough, the admissions committee reserves to itself the final decision on whether to admit everyone. Therefore, the kid committing to Tim Murphy is “committing to the admissions process at Harvard” until the likely letter is issued.
It is really just a difference in how the process works.
Close family friend story.
Kid is an absolute star athlete in a featured Ivy sport. One of the HYP schools tells the kid that, at kid’s level of athletic skill, a 26 ACT will be good enough for admission. Full pay for the family.
Ohiodad. I’m saying a highly wanted athlete who meets a minimum standard won’t be rejected in favor of other kids in the pool who may be all around better (but without that sports draw.) Who says admissions has a final say? Maybe you mean an up front hand in it, in any pre-read.
If schools wanted to change the way they do admissions, they would. Not a single Ivy has dropped athletics or even hinted at doing it the MIT/CalTech way. Northwestern isn’t dropping out of the B1G even though it is much different type of school than the others in the league. Stanford has pretty much said athletics is important and is going to continue to admit top athletes who wouldn’t stand a chance of being admitted without that Olympic medal or state championship or the ability to pitch 90 mph strikes.
If people want to claim Canada has a better college system, have at it and go to school in Canada. There seem to be a lot of hockey players who want to go to school in the US and lately lacrosse players too.
I say admissions has the final say, as does the Ivy Common Agreement. Certainly the admissions liaison can decide not to pass a kid on the pre read. But even after that stage kids who are supported by a coach for a likely letter can and do get dinged when a likely letter is requested. Certainly it doesn’t happen a lot, and everything I know about the system leads me to conclude that the percentage of kids who pass the likely letter committee or review (different schools handle it differently) is very high. But it is still a hurdle that has to get crossed, and one that does not exist at Notre Dame or Vandy.
And let me ask you a question. Who says the kids without the sports hook are “all around” better? What happens if you erase a significant portion of that kid’s application in the way you want to erase the sports hook? Does the equation change then? Certainly the schools seem to be saying that the kids with the sports hook is a better applicant for that particular school in that particular cycle, wouldn’t you agree?
“Who says the kids without the sports hook are “all around” better?”
No one. It was an example of how the sports hook can displace another kid. And no, URM or legacy doesn’t pull the same way.
We’ve been talking Ivies. The rest of the pool is held to high holistic expectations. You don’t get to be unilateral, with very few exceptions, such as Harvard’s 300 or so taken purely on academic might (usually very high stem awards and rsnkings.)
The rest of the pool doesn’t get to have one dominant element, that one EC that trumps.
I have nothing against sports kids. The involvement is so good for so many reasons. And I’ve been there to see the impact of sports on the U identity, student satisfaction, alum pride/engagement. But is “recruit level” sports skill enough to hook in a kid who otherwise may not have reached the final admissions committee, holistically?
@Ohiodad51 I’ll admit I don’t know a lot about this subject, and from your posts it seems like you do. I’m certainly learning a lot on this thread. But just checking Notre Dame’s website, it looks like the letter of intent is not an “in” until the admissions office says so. Maybe I’m just naïve but I want to believe that there are more elite schools beyond the ivy league/Stanford that have higher standards.
https://www3.nd.edu/~ncaacomp/nli.shtml
“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.”
Also, an interesting article from the Bleacher Report (albeit 5 years old) that talks about those D1 football schools (non-ivy) like Stanford, Notre Dame, Vandy, Rice, etc that seem to have a higher standard than others
https://bleacherreport.com/articles/1609758-notre-dame-stanford-and-schools-who-recruit-with-special-standards
Sure they do. Math or chemistry might be enough. Music might be the only EC that a student has.
But it doesn’t matter. The schools have decided that just having sports is enough. Julliard has decided music is enough.
No. Not ime. For an Ivy, if your only EC is music or your only draw is you’re a physics wiz, there’s no bye, except that H group. And Juilliard is a sort of magnet speciality program. Of course music can trump there.
@waitingmomla, again saying that certain non Ivy schools set objective criteria for admission rather than the more subjective Ivy model of every student must pass admissions does not mean that standards are low. It just means they are solely objective, outside of the athletic dept’s subjective determination that the individual kid is a desired athlete in the first instance.
As far as whether an athletic recruit at ND needs to go through an Ivy like admissions review in addition to meeting the objective criteria, I can only say that I personally know a kid at ND now and know a couple very well who were offered either scholarships or preferred walk on spots. All were told they were guaranteed admission. I can not recall ever hearing if a kid who signed at ND who was later denied admission excepting a few prop 48 kids back in the day. That said, all of my direct experience is with revenue sports, and it may very well be that things work differently in smaller sports.
But just thinking about it rationally, it is really hard to conceive of a system where the swimming team, for example, is going to put some of their very few scholarships at risk in a given cycle when they don’t know which of their athletes will be admitted to the school. How in the world can you recruit that way?
One last point, but the entire premise of the likely letter system, at least as it has been publicly reported, was to allow the Ivys to provide a level
of certainty as to admissibility similar to what exists in the rest of D1. So the Ivys at least believe that the system works as I have laid out.
MODERATOR’S NOTE:
Once again, off topic for this thread. There have been many. many threads about what schools consider hooks. The focus of this thread is athletics. Let’s keep to topic, please.
Yeah, that is certainly the question. And admitting my bias as a former scholarship athlete with a son playing in the Ivy, I find great value in the habits developed and the lessons learned by successful competitive athletes. I would certainly be inclined to favor such applicants over random straight academic kid with a few designer ECs. I have tended to hire that way too over the last many years and have been generally happy with the results. But it is not the only way of looking at it certainly. And their are schools that set the value of those skills differently all along the spectrum.
@Ohiodad51 I see what you’re saying re the difference between a school having “high standards” vs having the “ivy-level” admissions process. Yes, certainly a school can have one and not the other. I probably should not have added the article link at the end of my comment because I think that clouded my main point. Which is that, per Notre Dame’s website, they basically say a student may pass muster with the coach and get a letter of intent, but they are not “in” until they pass admissions. That seems to me like admissions has not ceded control to the athletic department.
With respect, I understand that you know 2-3 kids that had a positive recruiting experience at ND. But I’m sure you’ll agree that’s a small sample and doesn’t mean that it doesn’t happen that kids get weeded out later in the process towards admission. And you yourself said, in an earlier comment, that there are kids that schools like ND and Stanford don’t even recruit to begin with because they know they won’t meet academic standards. So that again would lead me to believe that the AO has the final say, not the coaches.
And I don’t mean to make this specific to Notre Dame. I’m just using that as one example. My pondering relates, in general, to the group of D1 schools that are elite academically (ND, Stanford, Northwestern, Duke, Vandy, Rice, etc.).
@lookingforward I saved my daughter’s likely letter. It said something to the effect of we know you have many choices and significant time pressure concerning your college choices next year and we appreciate the difficulty you may have in making this important decision “without a clear sense of the opportunities available to you.” It went on to say the admissions committee has decided to confer on her “likely status” and that she may assume she’s been accepted to Brown if she maintains her academic and social record she presented in her application.
https://www.amazon.com/Playing-Game-Inside-Athletic-Recruiting/dp/0972202668
Well researched, contains both anecdotes and data, covers ivies and nescac (and touches on other leagues). Answers all of the questions in this thread, and my short summary is that it is consistent with @Ohiodad51 's experiences and supports his positions.
The anecdotes I have heard locally from recruited athlete students not getting in always resulted from the coaches pulling support and not telling the kid/family, hoping they would get in without using a band. Really heartbreaking stuff. I don’t have a recruited athlete in my family but I believe they should be objects of sympathy rather than envy in most cases.