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How are you defining excellence, and do you have even the slightest reason to believe that Harvard shares your definition?</p>
<p>@Hanna; alright, when a capella alums instead of athlete alums start donating enough to call the shots with admissions, you can get your guarantee of a bassist for every group instead of the wrestler at every class.</p>
<p>Who is the “Harvard” who gets to state Harvard’s definition? You’d be hard pressed to find two people in the administration with the same answer to your question. Harvard’s decisions reflect an ever-shifting balance of power among many individuals and groups. Since Harvard asked me to participate in an alumni focus group last month where excellence was a prominent theme, I’d say yes, there’s reason to think we have a lot of overlap in our understanding.</p>
<p>Whatever excellence means, if we are excellent today without varsity gymnastics, I’m pretty sure we can be excellent next year without varsity wrestling.</p>
<p>@IthacaKid: If music alumni wanted to substitute our judgment for that of the admissions committee, we probably could. We don’t. We just want them to have the freedom to make their own decisions.</p>
<p>Ok, now that I see IthacaKid’s post, I am in.</p>
<p>Hunt, what are you hearing about President Levin’s actions/attitude/perceived attitude about sports and recruiting athletes at Yale?
Hasn’t he announced a scale-back or something in athletics??
I do know that a lot of athlete alums of Yale are very annoyed about something, and are grumbling, and perhaps curtailing their donations. They are also po’d about the official Yale musical video created by students for admissions, which does not mention sports at all.
What is happening at Yale in this regard, Hunt?</p>
<p>P.s. I brought up this very topic on another thread earlier this year, asking why athletes get such preferential reviews/coach control vs. artists and other important seat-holders (I used the orchestra as an example). The answer from Bay here is informative, but I am not even sure if that is conclusive. It is a very interesting issue; possibly, it is just a vestige of the tradition that these schools were part of a special athletic group called the “ivy league”… and that it today does not make all that much sense to give coaches the ability to pick for and use up a good number of slots in each class.</p>
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It won’t make a lick of difference in the long run. It’s fine with me for Levin to deemphasize athletics, if that’s what the leadership of Yale wants to do. I’m not an apologist for athletic recruitment per se–I just don’t think there’s anything nefarious or unfair about it. Most Yalies would trade all the other sports for a football team that could beat Harvard.
As for “That’s Why I Chose Yale,” everybody I know loves it except for a couple of grinchy people.</p>
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<p>Part of the discussion was about the perceived unfairness of the admissions process for athletes vs. non-athletes. It is the NCAA rules that cause the disparity. There is no rule preventing colleges from accepting non-athletes early, in fact many of them do - rolling admissions.</p>
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<p>There are athletes who are engineering majors and international students; they are not mutually exclusive. 3/16 of the mens fencing team is international. There may be fewer engineering major-athletes than the general population, but that would seem to benefit the non-athlete engineering applicants - proportionately more engineering spots open in the non-athlete pool, so its a wash.</p>
<p>There is no NCAA requirement that H field more than 14 teams (either 7/7 or 6/8 mens/womens). So if H is offering 41 sports, it is for reasons other than the NCAA. A couple of their sports are not NCAA sports - squash and sailing. </p>
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<p>Are Veritone alums big donors and supporters of the group? If not, then there is your answer. If they are, then some of you need to start lobbying harder.</p>
<p>In the “real world” this is called networking, and it is highly encouraged.</p>
<p>But equally unfair.</p>
<p>The point made by Hanna in post #183 was not that the Veritone alums would like to have another EC group given special consideration for admissions (though the statement is made that the music alumni “probably could”), but rather that they would like to have all such special consideration eliminated. On principle.</p>
<p>I think that is the point of the note at the end to IthacaKid.</p>
<p>Another thought on why top schools may need a separate recruiting program for athletes as opposed to musicians, artists, etc.–athletes who can satisfy the Academic Index may be much, much rarer than creative types who can do so. As far as I know, there is no shortage of excellent instrumentalists, singers, artists, etc., at selective schools. (The schools do use arts supplements to identify them, but that’s part of the regular admissions process.) Finding athletes (1) who can play at an acceptably high level; (2) who have adequate academic ability; and (3) who are willing to give up athletic scholarships at other schools may not be that easy, especially for the “helmet sports.”</p>
<p>^Hunt, #189: I doubt that the shortage argument applies to fencers, for example. The only reason that Harvard needs to offer them special consideration is that other schools in the league do; but they could all stop.</p>
<p>Pizzagirl asked for perspective a while back: My perspective is that the special consideration of athletes by the Ivies is part of a continuum that runs all the way to the greatly relaxed academic standards for athletes at the athletic powerhouse schools. A good athlete gains “special” status by middle school, if not in elementary school. By contrast, no one has “special” status as a result of being pre-med.</p>
<p>Quant: While fencers tend to, on the whole, be more intelligent than say football players, there actually are not that many that have top notch academics and top notch fencing. For one thing, there just are not that many fencers to start with. By the time you lose the Olympic caliber ones with the academics to Stanford/ND (where they can get money and are likely more accommodating wih academic schedules) and the ones with academics notch below that to the national D1 powerhouses (Penn State, Ohio State), there really are not that many qualified athletes to spread around the Ivy League, esp in Sabre. And there are 3 weapons that do not really cross over. Part of the reason there is a significant international contingent is not for sake of diversity but for sake of filling the roster.</p>
<p>Caltech, for example, has not been able to fill its roster for the past year or two. </p>
<p>If H did not issue likely letters, it would be losing the few they do get to the other schools faster than you can say PDQ. I know this is pretty much what you said, but it is a game of musical chairs where there are more chairs than players.</p>
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But people are majoring in those areas at selective schools. People are not majoring in football, even though it is a valid career. In a sense, some of the recruited players obviously are majoring in football (probably not making career out of fencing OTH).</p>
<p>“it is a game of musical chairs where there are more chairs than players.”</p>
<p>That’s particularly tough to understand; what are the universities gaining by having all those chairs? It sounds like student demand just isn’t there.</p>
<p>“People are not majoring in football, even though it is a valid career.”</p>
<p>I’ve always thought that Div. I-A schools should offer a degree in football if that’s what the students really are studying. You can get a degree in all kinds of professional areas. There is certainly a theoretical and analytical component to football that you could put into formal classes.</p>
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<p>In many big-time sports schools, from the players’ point of view a lot of the top players are in fact majoring in football. They are enrolled in the school primarily to play football with the hope of a pro career, and the academic classes are an unwelcome distraction imposed by the rules. </p>
<p>But from the schools’ point of view they are all majoring in something else, or at least pretending to. I suppose, in theory, a Football major could be developed. Heaven knows there are plenty of other goofy majors around with similarly poor career prospects. But Football certainly is not one of the traditional Liberal Arts. It’s more of a trade skill. I don’t know of any college that offers an actual major in one of the ball sports, or any sport for that matter.</p>
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<p>If they are filling their rosters then there must be an appropriate demand. We don’t know how many on the roster are recruited vs. walk-ons. If the Brown article cited earlier is accurate, then Brown fencing is allotted 4 spots (mens and womens total) per year. The rest must be walk-ons. Brown lists 36 fencers on its roster. I believe the Ivies (unlike other colleges) encourage walk-ons for all of their sports, so it is possible to find world champions and beginners on the same team.</p>
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At at least some of those schools, they’re not majoring in instrumental music performance or voice performance, either. For example, at Yale, there’s a music major, but no performance track. But Yale still gets some great performers–enough to fill up its ensembles. If it couldn’t, it might be more aggressive in trying to find players.</p>
<p>Walk-ons also are not always beginners…! There are plenty of examples of kids who walk-on and become stars- the recruiting system is political, budget-contrained, and so forth.</p>
<p>Some kids are not sure whether they really do want to play in college at the time they are applying. Others do not get recruited or cannot try to be due to injuries at the wrong time (D1, who has walked on in college. may end up captain). Some get recruited by colleges they do not choose to attend, and go to a college where they were not recruited, but get on the team.</p>
<p>Hunt,
Likely letters, presumably based on professor input or the like outside of Admissions, do get sent out to great artists from the Ivies, etc.
The difference is technical: the athletes’ spots are delineated from the outset, and the coaches really select their favorites early on, and screen their AI’s. Admissions then stamps “yes” or “no” for those slots.
Even though the Music Dept can probably see during the Fall whether they need a another bassoon, they do not get budgets to search for bassoon players, do not run summer sessions for musicians, do not solicit them in a network (although they may casually be in the know about the summer festivals and national awards), and are not allocated a slot by Admissions for the bassoon player of THEIR choice. All they can do is hope that a few great CD’s come through which they can flag as excellent and deserving of a Likely Letter to Admissions. It is possible that there may be some letters out to great bassoon players, asking them to apply, but I have no exact info about that.</p>
<p>Anyway, the earliness of the national competition, incl scholarships, for athletes is probably a big reason for the unusual aspects of athletic recruiting at Ivies and D 3 schools, which cannot offer scholarships…</p>
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<p>Pardon my ignorance of fencing competition (maybe only the top two fencers actually compete??). But if the other Ivy League schools mirror Brown’s percentages, isn’t success determined almost completely by competition between non-recuited fencers? What is the point of recruiting?</p>
<p>4 per year means that 16 are recruited, presuming that they stay on the team for four years.</p>
<p>I’m assuming “4 per year” means they can recuit 4 each year. Or does it mean they can only have 4 recruited at any one time? I dn’t think so. Remember, at Brown this is not about athletic scholarships, because there aren’t any. It has to do with how many can be admitted through the recruiting/academic index/likely letter pipeline in any one year.</p>