<p>What is proven is that athletes are given a boost in job recruitment by high paying organizations like investment banks. They strongly believe that success is athletics and the teamwork required makes a superior employee. So if we’re going to pursue the payoff to the college hypothesis, recruiting athletes makes sense.</p>
<p>Personally, I accept the impact sports recruitment. What I’ve never understood is the boost that goes to swimmers and fencers.</p>
<p>Then why not go all the way – why hasn’t any elite u gone all the way to requiring all students to have significant athletic prowess for admissions, and actively encourage only lucrative careers like I-banking in the hopes of getting mega donations?</p>
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<p>I would agree with that if we were talking about intramurals and other forms of physical exercise meant for participation by the majority of students (and I mean real students). Sound mind in a sound body and all that. But if we are talking about big-time Div. I NCAA sports, that relates to the mission of a university about as much as NASCAR does.</p>
<p>Agree 100% with coureur. And since cobrat brought up the British, I think that coureur has stated the Oxbridge view.</p>
<p>Hunt (#259), I hinted at that in my posts. Athletics event are not well-attended at Ivies, really. Nor at LAC’s. School spirit a not big factor. Hey, SING-Off may turn out to be just as important a rivalry among colleges now- I see a some swelling of school pride there!
Perhaps, at Ivies and D3 colleges,sports are subconsciously more of a “socialization” method (and Yes, I agree that they are, but so are the arts and other EC activities) than a technical feat to be perfected, answering PG, and addressing the subtlety of the cultural differences, and in evolution from the divinity then WASP origins of the cultures of most of these schools. </p>
<p>I would say that, ironically, NOW, many lower and middle class parents DO chase the college money by putting their kids in competitive sports at a young age— I have been part of it for years. But these families generally do not aspire to D3 LAC’s and Ivies (former bastions of WASP-dom and currently the centers of “liberal arts”-non pre-professional super-academic) educations because these schools do not offer athletic scholarships.
So, maybe the sports culture at Ivies and D3 colleges is a bit conflicted: Is it a clubby group of talented kids? or an important extension of excellence? is it dangerous to value athleticism above academics? isn’t the very old “brand” there, even if there is not a lot of school spirit?</p>
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<p>Proven how? Can you cite a study?</p>
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<p>In reality, Swarthmore has an endowment that is substantially larger than Williams’ on a per-student basis.</p>
<p>Coureur in 263 is spot-on. Don’t give me crap that fielding a football team is related to a university mission. Intramural sports, sure.</p>
<p>Don’t give me crap about funding jazz bands being related to a university mission. Music history, sure.</p>
<p>Anybody coming here to argue about legacies is going to be sorely disappointed.</p>
<p>a couple random thoughts …</p>
<p>MIT, for example, has 30+ varsity sports and it also recently had the higher intramural sports participation rate of any college in the US.</p>
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There are stats, stats, and info that can be interpreted different ways. In absolute numbers the attendence at IVY/NESCAC games is very low … however these schools are quite small especially compared to a lot of large state schools. Being an analytical geek I actually figured out average game attendence as a % of undergraduate population and while the IVYies and NESCAC schools are certainly not a the top they beat many BSC conference schools in both football and basketball attendence %. (Info is on my dead laptop so I so not have it handy but it’s pretty east to recreate … and actually is more logical than initially obvious … if Bowdoin only has 1500 students and Arizona St has 50,000 then Arizona St would need 30x as many attendees to have the same interest level among it’s students.)</p>
<p>Not sure about Ivies but if you take a school like Florida or Texas, their football and basketball programs raise the money to support a lot of athletic scholarships for sports with no viewership.</p>
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<p>When I referred to the British upper-crust, I was mainly referring to those who are part of the aristocracy or bought into their values in the 19th and early 20th centuries. </p>
<p>In that period, children of the upper-crust were actually strongly discouraged from attending universities…including Oxbridge because they were viewed as “dens of iniquity” and places for “middle-class strivers” whose families aren’t at their social ranks yet. Instead, they preferred to educate their children with home tutors, send them to boarding schools like Harrow and Eton, send them off on a “Grand Tour” of Continental Europe, and then have them join the army as commissioned Army officers* or obtain some well-connected government positions dominated by fellow aristocrats. </p>
<p>The British upper-crust of this period tended to emphasize the educational value of team sports and disdain/look suspiciously on intellectualism and intellectuals. This naturally took hold among upper/upper-middle class WASPs from the founding of the American Republic onwards as they’ve had a desire to emulate and view themselves as the American equivalent of the British upper-crust…no matter how much they’d strenuously deny it if it was pointed out to them. </p>
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<li>Before 1871, army commissions had to be bought. The expenses of their purchase, extreme low pay by contemporary European standards, and the expenses required for maintaining oneself acceptably as a British Army officer even after the system of purchased army commissions was abolished meant only those with independent wealth could afford to serve as Army officers. The disdain for professionalism and merit was such that the British Army Officer Corps up to 1871 and according to some historians…up till WWI was more like an aristocratic social club than a group of serious military professionals.</li>
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<p>Bovertine- i think the regulars on CC are sort of past the issue of legacies. It has been argued, analyzed, discussed and criticized, and sort of left in a comfortable enough place. Everyone basically agrees that it is quote unquote unfair, but that there are definite institutional reasons and explanations that we can agree on. I think that is why we move on.</p>
<p>Athletic recruiting vs other types of admissions for other talents/skills…
Now that has us stumped!
Almost every legacy thread has a post that says, “Well, you think legacies are bad, but how about athletic recruiting vs other EC’s”, and well, we are off!!!</p>
<p>The race box threads do persist, as well.</p>
<p>cobrat,
You also have to look at the original “divinity-based” purpose of the New England schools, as well, if you are going through the history and evolution of their educational philosophy.
Prep schools like Andover would be included in this survey.
My Q, since you seem to be well-informed, is when the Colonial population became interested in striving to seem Aglo at all, and then to seem British upper class. I realize that there were always Royalists and such, but the first Americans, who presumably founded these first academies, were escaping the Brits, especially their landed rigid class structure, and were seeking religious freedom and tolerance, as well as social/wealth mobility. Yes, some became a bit hypocritically intolerant religiously once they were here. But how do these academies like Harvard and Andover fit in?</p>
<p>My recollection is that the first football games and such came rather recently in their 300 year histories. When and why and how were athletics introduced to these schools?</p>
<p>Down south, the early colleges were not so much founded for religious purposes, originally, unless I am mistaken… I would love to understand all this better!</p>
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Sure, fine by me. I’m actually bored by most of these arguments (discussions?) about the assorted hooks, and wouldn’t shed a tear if they were all relegated to special sections.</p>
<p>I only mention it because that is the title of the thread. So someone new might actually come here expecting to see that subject. Even past the halfway point in the thread. :)</p>
<p>Yale and Princeton claim to have invented college football and Harvard built the first football stadium, so football must be related to elite college education somehow.</p>
<p>But wait, HYP was a bastion of WASPdom back then, and WASP = bad, so the football idea must be wrong. We love the British university system, because it doesn’t recruit athletes.</p>
<p>But wait, Brits = WASP = bad. Plus, why did the Pilgrims come to America, again? That’s right, they wanted to get away from the Brits and how they did things. Pilgrims and their progeny wanted to be Americans. America = hotdogs, baseball, apple pie and Chevrolet.</p>
<p>But wait, baseball = bad. It promotes too much focus on sports for kids, which leads to wanting to play in college and maybe make it to the Big Leagues. Terrible, unrealistic, unhealthy goal.</p>
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<p>But the Ivy League schools, who used to rule college sports, eventually realized how far from the mission of college education big-time college sports had evolved and decided to step back. They asked themselves, as institutions, were they really about sports or were they really about education. So about 60 years ago they abolished athletic scholarships, banned post-season bowl games by their football teams, and basically stopped feeding at the big-money sports trough. </p>
<p>They re-evaluated it all and decided that big-time sports are really NOT related to college education.</p>
<p>I don’t think people disdain intellectuals, in general I think people disdain one dimensional people which can apply to anyone with a special interest and an inability to enjoy any other dimension. We’ve all known the athlete who only can talk about athletics and I know there are “friends” I won’t go to a movie with because all they can do is dissect and pontificate. Intellectual elitists can be as boring as a one dimensional athletes. I’m sure colleges are a smattering of all types and probably one of the rare places that one can actually spend an inordinate amount of time focused on one thing.</p>
<p>Private colleges get to say what their “mission” is. You might not like what they include within that, but it is what they say it is.</p>