Yes, there may not be that much more work, but as Wisteria100 posted, it may be more difficult to do well on a relative basis. At some of these schools, you are among students who were all at the very top of their HS class. So, for the same amount of work, mastery of the material, and test results, someone may get an A at Conn College vs. a B at Amherst. It doesn’t mean that one is better than the other, and for some being able to get higher grades may be a more desirable vs. a sense of struggling.
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I am not an athlete by any measure of the word, but it seems the students, while extremely busy with sports and academics, are able to balance the work quite well. I would expect professors, for the most part, to be understanding of athletic commitments if they occasionally interfere with deadlines.
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No, for sure, I get it and agree. As a general matter, a kid might have to work harder for Bs at one or the other. Or, the kid might find his/her passion and light it up even at that harder school. That’s what happened with one of mine, whose LD was discovered in college. Somewhat of a bumpy freshman year, but then she took off with only modest accommodations. The key ingredient in my view is grit.
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I think most athletic admits are not ‘marginal.’ Someone who gets a nod or a slot may not be the tippy top of the application group, but is certainly capable of doing the work. Harvard, Williams, Amherst admit that they turn down 90% of applicants and most of those, the vast majority, are capable of doing the work at the top schools but there just isn’t room to admit all the qualified candidates. They take the athlete over a similar student, but they aren’t taking students who cannot do the work. The Ivies probably get more ‘I’ll just apply to see if I can sneak through’ applications than the NESCAC does because everyone’s heard of Harvard but not as many have heard of Bates or Conn College. The kid from Montana who applies to Bates really wants to go there and is not just shotgunning applications all through the league just to play.
My daughter suffered from imposter’s syndrome. She doesn’t do well on standardized test but did just fine in the classroom. She was very scared of going to a school and being the dumbest. If she had had interest in the NESCAC schools (she didn’t) she could have done the work even though her ACT score was below the average at these schools. You might have considered her a marginal admit, but I don’t think her college performance would have been lower. In fact, I think her grades would have been better at an NESCAC school because they don’t use as many standardized tests once in the classroom. Alas, she didn’t like that type of school (all that English and History? not for her!).
The school she picked has a high acceptance rate but also a high rate of self selection. They aren’t getting a lot of applications from students who didn’t take algebra II or chemistry in high school who want to be engineers. We had one athletic recruit who didn’t get admitted for academic reasons. She went to another school in our conference so was NCAA eligible, but just didn’t have the math and science required for a tech school.
We’re probably not aligned on what I mean by the marginal admit. The marginal admit is the kid who pretty clearly would have had no chance w/o recruiting. See, e.g., the 3.3 GPA kid admitted to Stanford as a D1 football recruit (that was the line for football at Stanford about 6 or 7 years ago). In NESCAC, it would be the C Band recruit, or lower end B Band. These are kids who are highly valued athletes to the coach, so the adults in charge are looking for reasons to admit. Attrition in the pre-read/likely letter process is high, but for this cohort, which exists, nobody is kidding anybody that the kid would have a snowball’s chance of getting in w/o the coach. In all cases, nobody ever admits anybody who admissions doesn’t think can do the work. That’s a given in my travels.
Also, as alluded to elsewhere, while not at the Ivy level, NESCAC has become a “thing” in the last 5 to 10 years and a real target of academically ambitious HS athletes.
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So is the NESCAC admitting a lot of 3.3 gpa kids?
Stanford can hide a Christian McCaffrey (who I believe was a 3.5/ 24 ACT but a double legacy and from a very good academic high school), They also have plenty of very good students who are also good athletes, but even the Olympic swimmers are getting in with with perfect stats because the can swim, and not just part of the general group of applicants. Stanford sees the advantage to building a class with all types of talent, academic and athletic, but I don’t think they admit anyone who can’t do the work. Could others shine a more academic light on Stanford than Christian? Sure, but Stanford still looks good for having had him at the school.
I’m not saying the athletes aren’t getting a boost from the coaches or that they don’t admitted over other qualified students, but just that they are qualified to go to the schools. If admissions has to choose between the 3.7 athlete that the coach wants and the 3.8 student who played in the band and has a really good essay, yes, they’ll probably take the athlete. The coach helped the athlete get in, but that doesn’t mean the athlete can’t do the work or is marginal.
I have a friend who is a top athlete but not a top student. Went to a great college prep high school with many going to Ivy League, Stanford, MIT, etc. He was recruited very widely (was named Mr. Lax for the state, on 3 state championship teams, lots of exposure) but wasn’t recruited by Yale or other top Ivy teams, the service academies (said he’d have to go to the prep school for a post grad year) because his academics were there (probably a 3.2), Duke, JHU etc. That was fine. He was a top recruit at other schools which were a better academic fit. He wasn’t a fit for NESCAC and they didn’t come after him (even though he would have dominated the league).
My son fits in to your “marginal admit” category. There was one NESCAC in particular that was willing to go all in on him. He’s a strong, but not exceptional student with an SAT score the coach said he’d never submit to admissions(even though one Ivy was fine with it). My son decided he wanted a different type of school experience, but I’m sure he’d have done just fine at the NESCAC had he chosen to go that route.
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I don’t think D3 will let in a student that can’t do the work, but I think strong D1 programs will. An N of 1, but I was talking with a man whose daughter was recruited to play basketball at Stanford. He said she was a C student and both he and his daughter were very concerned about the work load, but the coach said “I have to have her” so she got in. Coach said they have tutors that will help, but no way would she have gotten in whithout the coach’s support. Apparently the daughter was nearly 7 feet tall or something, and a huge star in high school. I often wonder what happened to her.
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No, and I didn’t intend to suggest they do. Competing in Pac 12 football is different than virtually everything else. But it was the football cut-off at Stanford recently. That is a fact.
I feel like we’re talking over each other. Yes, as I said, nobody admits anybody admissions thinks won’t make it. That almost goes without saying. In your response, you seem focused on the NESCAC B Band kid. This thread, and my post to which you originally replied, is about the C Band kid. I’m not clear from your responses that you believe they exist, in the NESCAC or in analog form in the Ivy League. And what I’m saying is, I know that they do exist. For me, the most helpful way to think about the C Band kid is that he/she would almost assuredly not have been admitted w/o recruiting help. But even in that cohort there is always evidence they can do the work. The issue is in the number of those recruits allowable, and having them taking a spot from a non-athlete applicant who is a much better academic prospect. That’s why they are so limited, and it’s why NESCAC coaches say publicly that they’re reserved for the compelling athlete and the coaches tend to have to “go to bat” for the kid.
I personally think that a lot of the B Band kids are also kids who probably don’t get in through regular admissions just because it’s so damn tough. Particularly in the Ivy League, which combines single digit admit rates and D1 sports. Brown men’s soccer cannot compete with the University of Washington men’s soccer (and they successfully do) without making some compromise in admissions.
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To be clear about the Stanford example, we’re talking about a school that routinely rejects valedictorians with strong scores and ECs. Routinely.
The cut-offs are different for different sports, but I would say that a good % of the Stanford athlete population falls into “would not have been admitted” because pretty much everybody is in that category when you stop and think about it.
I have to admit that your example caught be by surprise, but then again, I know of a very low stats women’s bb player (my daughter was one of her tutors) who got into the University of Washington through the W bb team. I used to think that the low, low stats admits were almost entirely used for men’s FB and BB. But apparently that’s not the case.
I agree that nobody is guaranteed admittance, but should a college a reject a valedictorian with great scores for a poor student who has great athletic skills? Not someone who would be on the lower end of average, but who would NEVER get in without being way up on a coaches list. I don’t know…says a sour grapes mom whose brilliant 4.0 son, full IB, 1590 SAT was not even wait listed for Stanford. I suspect this student was an exception though, most athletes are probably more in range academically. At least I hope so!
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Among P5 and most other FBS (very distinct from, e.g., Ivy and Patriot League and the like), I think that’s safe to assume at Stanford, Duke, Vandy and Rice. I may be missing one or a few others. There was a time I would have included the Service Academies, that is until my D’s HS boyfriend was recruited/admitted to Navy, where he really didn’t belong because: (1) there was virtually zero chance he gets in w/o football (avg. grades, zero course rigor, and woefully unprepared for the math at the academies; and (2) there was no indication he would do what he had to do (again, grit) to handle the academics and his shortcomings. His mother would tell you the same thing and had concerns. He went to play football, and two really bad concussions later, he left. I think he was struggling before the head shots.
But for the vast majority of P5 athletics, your assumption would be quite optimistic. 
So, I thought it would be helpful to refer to a study, rather than use impressions about athletic academic achievement at NESCAC schools. Luckily, Amherst studied this issue a few years ago.
Of course, the question is how do we define success? If it is simply graduation within 6 years, athletes do much better than their non-athlete counterparts. Athletes graduate at a higher rate (97.9%) than do non-athletes (93.8%). Amherst Study at 11. If you gauge success based on GPA, the slotted (athletic factor) athletes do have slightly lower GPAs than tipped (coded) athletes, but the tipped athletes actually have slightly higher GPAs than the non-athletes. Id. at 16.
Athletics does impact class and major selection, and fewer completed an undergrad thesis. Id. at 13-15.
The report also discusses admissions, which has been a frequent topic on these boards.
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I haven’t read every word, but I will and thank you for posting this. It should be pinned somewhere.
Two points from glancing worth calling out.
“The benefit at the time of admissions that athletic factor athletes receive is substantial. In contrast, the coded athletes look much like the rest of the student body in terms of academic performance before matriculation.”
and
“… our athletic teams are less racially and socioeconomically diverse than the student body as a whole.”
Kudos to Amherst for laying it out there like it is without trying to put a spin on it. I want to read the whole thing because the “athletic factor” vs. “coded” vs. “walk-on” doesn’t translate exactly to the Band system that Amherst, Williams and Wesleyan cooked up. What it does confirm is that, even at Amherst, the NESCAC school I would guess has the toughest recruiting portal to get through, there are kids there who but for athletic recruitment almost surely don’t make it in. I’m guessing where the range is to be found is in the Coded category. The walk on is the “Love to have you if you get in; good luck” crew.
As for the diversity issue, it reinforces the notion that playing sports at a high level, particularly those involving club structures, is a privilege which is reflected here.
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@cquin85, actually the band system does relate to the athletic factor vs coded coach support given to admissions. There is no secret that there are two levels of coach support in the NESCAC. I prefer the older nomenclature (tips vs. slots), but typically NESCAC teams are allowed 2 slots (athletic factors) per team. There are more for football and there may be other reasons for variation. The rest of the recruits are tips (coded). The recruit may have no idea whether he/she is a slot or a tip.
Bands simply refer to how you are presented to admissions. By way of example, if you have a 95 average and 1500 board scores, in all likelihood, you will fall into the “A Band.” If you fall into the A Band, you probably will be presented to admissions as a tip. While which band a recruit falls into depends on the particular NESCAC school, if you have a 90 average and a 30 ACT, you probably will be in the B band. Whether you need to be slotted or tipped depends on the school.
I do need to dispute that the band system was cooked up by Amherst, Williams and Wesleyan. The band system is NESCAC-wide. The coach simply may not share with you where you fall.
Finally, the day is long gone when D3 athletics was based on pure athletic ability (i.e., whatever you learned in high school varsity sports). Athletic skill is essential. In any sport - and I would venture to say any EC - where skill development is critical, families with greater means will seek out and obtain more skill development opportunities than families with lesser means.
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Actually, both things can be true.
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The reason I thought it didn’t translate across the board was because I didn’t perceive “C” Band as equal to “athletic factor” for whatever reason. I guess then Coded is B Band and Athletic Factor is C Band. And A Band is, what? High end Coded? I just need to read it.
My understanding was that Wes, Amherst and Williams were the ones who originally got together to think about an agreed overhaul to conference recruiting. And then I vaguely remember reading that Bowdoin was then invited into the discussion. Maybe they didn’t exclusively come up with it but I’ve read in a few places that at the least the conversation started with those three schools. Or, maybe, I’m confusing this point with the history of how the conference itself came to be.
Really well put. And that doesn’t even factor in the proverbial “barrier to entry” issue. I think communities are doing a better job of introducing wealthy sports to disadvantaged groups (LX, Tennis, Golf, Skiing, etc.); but by and large, a poor kid is a world away from developing those skills at a very early age in those kinds of sports. And for some of those sports, an early start is essential. It’s really hard to become a great tennis player or golfer in time for college recruiting if you didn’t start a pretty early age. I play tennis, and I see the families all the time at the court. Mom is sitting on the side at the net, coach is instructing the kids and brothers and sisters at age 5, 6 and 7 are already whacking the ball better that I can. Even if you have great DNA, it’s going to be really hard to catch those kids in that sport if you figure it out at age 13, 14 or 15. Less of an issue with most positions in football, but with most other sports, an early start in a sophisticated and competitive club setting is a huge leg up.
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I don’t think the Nescacs are taking a 3.7 athlete over a 3.8 non athlete. I think it’s likely to be that they are taking a 3.9 athlete over a 3.9 non athlete. There’s just not that many spots to go around at these schools and plenty of very well qualified athletes.
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I think both happen. Of course, I can’t prove it, but football alone makes it pretty likely.
There was an article in the NYT or WSJ, or somewhere, years ago covering a kid who I think had a 3.4 GPA and was a highly valued football recruit for Bowdoin. I’ve not idea how that information leaked, but it turned into a piece covering this very issue and going over HSLAC athletic recruiting. I think that piece and the situation happened a while back, so there’s that. If I’m remembering it correctly, then at a place like Bowdoin that recruit was for sure leapfrogging much more qualified applicants. It may be as you say that it’s so much more competitive now that there’s no need to dip that low for the elite QB or whatever.
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I am not sure that I agree with this, at least for the sports like football and perhaps other “helmet” sports that have a # of slots, or Likely Letters in an Ivy. Some of the slots/LLs are allocated or available to the not as strong academic candidates.
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