I believe at schools like Harvard, the average is now A- or better (Princeton’s average may be slightly lower).
I’m terribly curious about this. Vanderbilt and ? By SEC you mean the Southeastern Conference, right? Ole Miss, Alabama, Florida, etc.? Major, major D1 sports?
There must be something I don’t understand. Maybe it’s in what you mean by “general student population” or something else.
If what you mean is that Vanderbilt doesn’t admit anybody through athletic recruiting who could not get in without recruiting, then I would struggle to believe it, even as applied to Vanderbilt, much less any other school in the SEC.
I know the degree of slack is driven materially by sport. D1 football and men’s bb will always be much more flexible for recruits than, say, crew.
2 Likes
A sibling of mine attended a HYPS school in the 80s. Would my sibling have been accepted without affirmative action? No clue, though it’s certainly possible (a multi-sport athlete in high school with top grades who played 2 varsity sports at the university as a walk-on, not a recruited athlete). My sibling went on to do great things in multiple arenas, attended top-notch programs and has received media attention and recognition for them. Obviously, no matter how my sibling got in, they were qualified and succeeded. My sibling’s daughter now attends that HYPS school. The student had applied EA/ED (can’t recall which) and was deferred, but then accepted in RD. Did legacy status play a factor? No clue, but again, it’s quite possible.
I shared this anecdote as it is the one that CC would probably care about the most because it’s about a HYPS school and may well have had beneficial impacts on my family from both affirmative action and legacy status.
In real life (particularly in finding a job) there are so many positions that come about through networking and connections. Someone knows somebody who gets their application moved to the top of the pile, or grants them an interview, or just plain old gets them the job. Generally, those people are qualified to do the job and are successful in the position. Is it possible that there were other resumes or applicants that were even “better” qualified on objective metrics? Certainly. But the people who got the position have been able to succeed in doing what needed to get done. This is how I generally think of affirmative action, legacy preferences, and belonging to social networks rich in political/economic influence (with political/economic influence even being in management at a local store…I’m not thinking big name national level).
All of these types of “preferential treatment” are dependent upon the individual in question having the necessary skills and/or aptitude to be productive in a relatively short amount of time. As @fiftyfifty1 and @Nicoley73 alluded to upthread, a lot of information about whether a student will be able to meet this threshold can be successfully predicted very early in life. Many heads of household from low-income families finished school inadequately prepared for life beyond high school and are required to work multiple, poorly paid jobs to make ends meet. This prevents them from nightly reading before bed, much less paying for music or gymnastics classes that many wealthier families start. It also prevents them from having their children in a daycare with low student:teacher ratios and a lot of individualized attention. By the time the kids start kindergarten, they are years behind their financially-privileged peers. Teachers are then asked to teach students at a wide array of levels in one classroom, often without even an assistant, with limited prep time and a whole host of other issues (such as all the mental health and social work supports that children from families in poverty often need). And thus, the cycle repeats over and over again. Some people are exceptional and able to improve which income quintile they fall in (whether through talent, luck, or an extreme degree of certain personal characteristics). But the majority of those individuals will not, and that is an indication of the quality of supports that our society offers.
As @MWolf mentioned earlier, there probably is not that big of a number of legacy students who would be affected by legacy preferences being eliminated. The number of students affected by affirmative action would be significantly larger. But those numbers combined, I suspect, would likely be swamped by the number of students who were hobbled from the get-go by the circumstances of their birth that won’t even make them a player in the college admissions game.
8 Likes
Mississippi State University and University of Mississippi automatically admit regular students (not necessarily athletes) at the NCAA minimum academic standards, although they also offer non-athletes alternative admission standards that may be lower than the NCAA minimum.
1 Like
Did I look it up correctly, the NCAA D1 minimum is a 2.3 HS GPA and an SAT score of 900? That sounds unusual to me. 
1 Like
NCAA doesn’t require a test score for eligibility, but yes the 2.3 is required to be eligible to play in their first year of college. That GPA is calculated on core courses only and only needs 32 semester credits (which gives flexibility to pick and choose highest grades, at least for the recruits with more than 32 semesters of core courses). Of course D1 recruits are admitted with lower GPAs, but they would have to take an academic redshirt their first year of college. D2 only requires a 2.2 GPA to be eligible, so that is an option for some as well.
3 Likes
I see. I suspected it was something like that.
It depends on whether you are compare legacy applicant vs non-legacy applicant, or legacy admit vs non-legacy admit. It also depends if you are comparing legacy average vs unhooked average, or legacy average vs overall average.
Using LDC as a proxy for legacy (legacy is by far the largest component of LDC), the lawsuit sample suggests legacy White applicants are stronger than non-legacy White applicants in all evaluated criteria. However legacy White admits are weaker than non-legacy White admits in all evaluated criteria except athletic. If you do not control for race, in addition to athletic, legacy admits also have higher average test scores than non-legacy.
2 Likes
http://fs.ncaa.org/Docs/eligibility_center/Student_Resources/DI_ReqsFactSheet.pdf has a table with a sliding scale of GPA and SAT. With 2.300 GPA, 980 SAT is needed to be a full qualifier. To be a full qualifier with a 900 SAT, a 2.500 GPA is needed.
2 Likes
@Mwfan1921 @ucbalumnus Thank you. “We” always talk about the recruited athlete at the other end of the academic admissions scale around here on CC, but I wasn’t aware of the minimum requirements.
Gosh, that’s a really low standard for eligibility to play in college.
Although it is a higher standard than regular admission to some colleges, such as Mississippi State University, where meeting either the NCAA minimum or having a 2.0 high school GPA means admission: https://www.admissions.msstate.edu/prospective-students/freshman-students
And yet some (pre covid) couldn’t meet it. They can also have trouble getting original transcripts from EVERY high school they attended if, for example, the high school has closed or is a private school with staff that doesn’t know how to get the transcript down.
if you’ve watch/read The Blind Side, Michael Oher couldn’t meet the requirement without tutoring. In the book, he had to attend BYU online/summer classes that are designed to get the athlete to the NCAA minimums. If you’ve watch Last Chance U on Netflix, there are a lot of players who aren’t meeting the minimums and can’t transfer out of jr college.
But many of the Ivy league recruits far surpass the requirements for admissions and the athletic (or legacy, as many athletes are also legacies) bump is just picking the qualified athlete over the qualified general applicant. The athletes went to the same prep schools as the other applicants and have high gpa/scores too.
3 Likes
Yeah, but aside from the notable exception of Stanford, the athletic teams for football and basketball at the HYPSM colleges are usually pretty mediocre. A recent Harvard-Yale football game had plays that would have been embarrassing at some high schools.
2 Likes
It’s been a good long minute since I watched The Blind Side and I’ve never seen Last Chance U, but these athletes are probably coming out of the milieu that I described a few posts ago about many students from low income families.
The (public student) average ACT score for one of our state’s biggest cities is 17.7 and the average ACT score for our state is 18.2 (so the city average is a little lower than the state’s average, but not hugely lower). 54% of the city’s high schools have an average ACT score below 16 (i.e., the school average would be ineligible for the NCAA). 38% have a score between 16-19. 8% (the remainder) have an average ACT of 26+. When I say that the number of students who are probably out of the higher education game before kindergarten even starts is vastly bigger than the number of students who are impacted (positively or negatively) by legacy preferences or affirmative action, I am not using hyperbole.
This also goes to show how tiny a sliver of the real world that many of the CC posters represent (i.e. 3.9+/4.0 unweighted GPAs with standardized test scores in the 95th percentile or above).
4 Likes
According to http://fs.ncaa.org/Docs/eligibility_center/Student_Resources/DI_ReqsFactSheet.pdf , the following ACT sums (adding all of the subscores, but not dividing by 4) require the following GPAs to meet the NCAA minimums:
| ACT average | ACT sum | GPA | Note |
|---|---|---|---|
| 16 | 64 | 2.600 | |
| 17.7 | 71 | 2.400 | |
| 18.2 | 73 | 2.350 | |
| 19 | 76 | 2.300 | 2.275 requires academic redshirt |
| 26 | 104 | 2.300 | 2.000 requires academic redshirt |
Due to covid policy changes the GPA/test score Sliding scale isn’t being used, only the 2.3 GPA for D1 and 16/32 semester credits are necessary for eligibility. This is the current policy:http://fs.ncaa.org/Docs/eligibility_center/COVID19_Fall2022_Public.pdf
1 Like
In their motion for a summary judgement in the SFFA suite, Harvard’s attorneys stated the following, which presumably encapsulates Harvard’s institutional thinking. So, in Harvard’s own words essentially (specifics are bound to differ by institution):
*Practices That Foster Connection to Harvard.* The [Admissions] Committee also considered a group of practices that foster connections between Harvard and its alumni, staff, and others, but are alleged (by SFFA or others) to detract from racial diversity—such as the consideration of whether an applicant’s parent attended Harvard College or Radcliffe, the consideration of whether an applicant’s parent is employed by Harvard, and the practice of deferred admission. The Committee noted that if Harvard eliminated those practices, and also eliminated race-conscious admissions, then (according to Dr. Card’s analysis) the number of African American, Hispanic, and Other students would decrease by half from current levelsThe Committee also explained that the practices in question serve valuable institutional interests. For example, considering whether an applicant’s parent attended Harvard College or Radcliffe as an undergraduate “helps to cement strong bonds between the university and its alumni.” Harvard depends on its alumni’s willingness to volunteer for a variety of activities, such as interviewing applicants, and also depends on its alumni for financial support, which is “essential to Harvard’s position as an institution of higher learning and “helps make [possible] the financial aid policies” that do much to ensure a diverse student body. As Dr. Ruth Simmons, Harvard’s higher-education expert—who has served as president of three universities—explained, “[t]here would be substantial costs if Harvard were to stop considering whether applicants are the children of alumni.” Similarly, Harvard has good reason to consider whether an applicant’s parent is a member of the faculty or an employee. “Eliminating that consideration would place Harvard at a significant competitive disadvantage in recruiting personnel.”
2 Likes
I am only really familiar with the situation at Harvard.
If SFFA is successful in appealing the judgement made against them because of the center of SCOTUS has moved right, it’s worth noting that 27.8% Harvard’s Class of 2026 are self-identified as Asian-American. This already exceeds the marginal deficit that the plaintiffs had attributed to Harvard’s alleged bias on the personal rating. Moreover, it is perhaps useful to apply a sense of scale: the plaintiff’s own claim was that the average number of students denied because of bias amounted to a grand total of 47 per year not offered admission, a number of Asian American candidates that Harvard has at this point already far exceeded in adding. Maybe that is because of a change in Harvard’s attention to this issue after the lawsuit, maybe not.
Long story short: I wouldn’t expect much change, since the case had nothing to do with legacy preference and the school has already started pivoting to alternative ways of diversifying the student population that even the most ardent anti-elitists will have a difficult time challenging, like substantially expanding the admitted ranks of first generation college applicants while also making need-based financial aid far more generous.
4 Likes
The SCOTUS is bigger than just Harvard though, if race can’t be used in college admissions for undergrad or grad across across the US, then it will a much larger impact on private colleges and on public colleges that use race now. UC’s where they can’t use race, the Black percentage is 4% and Latino at 26%. UM in another state that doesn’t use race has 5% Black and 6% Latino.
Yes, it is very concerning. Predictive estimates estimates like the ones you note, however, are typically sourced from universities that are actively fighting a reversal on this issue and may exploit a bit of catastrophism in their premises. For example, the estimates might assume all other factors being equal when racial considerations are eliminated when, instead, there might be alternative selection factors introduced or emphasized more aggressively (e.g., first generation preference, or low family income preference, or geographical shifts in admissions targeting, which I believe is what is happening at Harvard) that could practically offset some or most of the effect
All this is shifting terrain. In addition, it is not clear whether this topic is a high priority item for the current revanchist majority on the court. They might chose to punt (for now, at least) in favor of pursuing more urgent items on their culture war checklist.