<p>“That said, I don’t see much justification for the article’s claim, other than the reinstatement of a single football player. There isn’t any evidence, that I see, of admissions criteria being lowered, the incoming sports students being academically inferior, or anything of the like.”</p>
<p>Ed, you aren’t looking very hard. According to Rivals, Notre Dame’s latest verbal commit for the Class of 2012, Sheldon Day, has an ACT score of 18. Try that score on an application that doesn’t include the designation of “recruited athlete”.</p>
<p>I don’t mean to imply that someone with that ACT score can’t be successful at ND; I imagine that they can be, with appropriate guidance and mentoring. But the admission “standard” is pretty clearly different.
IMO it must be different if ND is determined to be competitive at the top level of college football. There are only a (very) limited number of top academic students who are also top caliber football players, and ND can’t get them all … Stanford, Duke, Northwestern, Vanderbilt, UNC, and others are after them too.</p>