<p>“I think it’s pretty hard to deny that at the most selective colleges, the only hook that will allow the admission of a person who is really markedly weaker academically than the average student is athletics.” </p>
<p>I think a vast majority of development cases know they will be development admits and do not knock themselves out in high school. They don’t have to. Also when you consider the athletes coming out of top prep and boarding schools, they are as academically qualified as anyone else. And if you look at sports such as Fencing, Water Polo, Squash and Crew you will find some of the most academically qualified students in the applicant pool. </p>
<p>If you have a high school class of 250 or lower coming out of high school with historically accurate reporting, Naviance can be very telling.</p>
<p>“Setting aside how you know this is the reason your D was admitted, I hope you realize that being an athlete does not preclude an applicant from writing a touching essay about a simple subject that wows adcoms. Those types of essays are not the sole domain of non-athletes.”</p>
<p>I know about my the impact of D’s essay on their decision because an adcom effectively informed her of such.</p>
<p>And of course athletes can and do write such essays. Indeed, my D was an athlete. The extrapolation is yours. My point was that sports as a means of getting into college, when they involve leadership, impressive stats or levels, etc., can be trumped by such a non-sport expression of self as an essay. My D’s experience sort of spun on its ear the idea that high-intensity involvement of money and time in athletics is some sort of leg-up or guarantee during the college admissions process. </p>
<p>That’s just the opposite of what everyone is saying upthread where the consensus seems to be that being a recruited athlete gives someone a “leg-up” and a guarantee. So what’s the reality?</p>
<p>As for stereotypes of dumb jocks, I guess the only way to fight it is to keep pointing to those who don’t fit the stereotype. My kid (who wasn’t a recruited athlete because her sport wasn’t a college sport) went to a NESCAC school. Her numbers (GPA/SAT) were competitive with her peers–she wasn’t an outlier. </p>
<p>Because they might ask for assistance or not pull much weight in group work. However, that also happens with techies in fuzzy classes, and vice versa. Or with URM and international students. Few students are uber strong in all phases of the curriculum. </p>
<p>I wonder if people who talk about Div I dumb jocks at ELITE colleges ever met one IRL.</p>
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<p>Care to name a few of those schools? The Fred Hargadon era is still stinging! </p>
<p>It’s silly to deny that being a top athlete isn’t a hook in admissions. But that is not the same thing as saying the athletes are unqualified/less-qualified/don’t belong there. Think about it: you as a coach or you as a school are choosing to give college resources to a student in the form of an athletic scholarship, all the expensive resources of team participation (travel costs, coaching, medical, athletic trainers, PT, equipment and facility maintenance) and the opportunity cost of losing another student who could have been selected instead. Are you really going to choose a kid whose academic preparation is likely to predispose them to fail, flounder, or cheat such that you ultimately lose your investment and damage the reputation of your school? That may have been more the case years ago, but the NCAA has raised its academic requirements and the punishments for infractions are increasing. </p>
<p>“I think it’s pretty hard to deny that at the most selective colleges, the only hook that will allow the admission of a person who is really markedly weaker academically than the average student is athletics. Indeed, at the Ivies, there is a formula to ensure that this doesn’t go too far. So, I have to say that at my selective college while there were many very smart athletes, the academically weakest person you would encounter in your classes was invariably a recruited athlete–by a wide margin, in fact. That certainly contributes to the stereotype.”</p>
<p>Hunt there is no way any student could know the final grades for every student in a particular class so there is no factual information you can base that statement on. The formula for Ivy League admissions, the Academic Index, is based on 2/3 test scores and 1/3 unweighted GPA and insures that the admission statics are for athletic recruits are similar to those of regular students. Given the preference that Ivy League schools give to legacies I would expect that that group would have similar a similar AI to those of recruited athletes. Currently the thread “Ivy Football Recruiting 2014 - one family’s experience” in the Athletic Recruits section give a detailed description of the ivy league recruitment process including the stats of a Princeton football recruit which are similar to other Princeton students.</p>
<p>Oh, come on. Classes at elite colleges include a lot of discussion, and college students talk to each other. I know it’s polite to give all the qualifiers (and I think I did), but let’s face it: the Academic Index essentially guarantees that the weakest students (academically) at an Ivy League college will be recruited athletes, especially in the helmet sports. Heck, they’d be even weaker without the Academic Index; see: Stanford and Duke. And of course, at many colleges, some recruited athletes can barely read. I can understand that this is annoying to athletes who didn’t need any help to get in, just as it is for all hooked students. But the athletic hook drops deeper into the pond than the other hooks. </p>
<p>Well, maybe there are some dumb development cases. I never (knowingly) encountered any. Maybe being rich makes you seem smarter.</p>
<p>Also, everything is relative. The “dumb jock” at Harvard is Einstein compared to the legions of recruited athletes elsewhere who can’t perform simple arithmetic.</p>
<p>It is surprising to me that students and especially, profs at elite colleges still cling to the “dumb jock” stereotype, considering that type of athlete is unusual at those colleges. </p>
<p>My daughter is a recruited athlete. At the orientation meeting for her major, a few parents were talking to the adviser and he said in his experience, the athletes are more organized than the other students because they have to be. They have to schedule group work, they have to be at study tables, they have to be at class and at practice. This describes my daughter very well. I can’t tell you how many Sunday mornings I came downstairs to find her doing chemistry or math homework at 8 am because she had practice or a game later in the day. Did she want to get up early and study? No, but she did it.</p>
<p>The elite colleges do not have to offer sports but the colleges must find some value in offering them, just like they find value in offering arts and literature at tech schools, in offering study abroad programs, in ‘blow off’ courses that might just be fun but not really get the students to Wall Street or Washington. The Ivy league, after all, is just a sports conference. It is possible to find 20 hockey players who also have 2400 on the SAT, but unlikely the team would be competitive, and that is no fun for anyone so the schools look for students who may not be the highest scoring on the SAT but are on the ice, students who can add some excitement to college experience.</p>
<p>I was a honor student in high school, but my friends weren’t. I didn’t like hanging out with all the brainiacs for my social time, but did enjoy (most) of them in classes. My daughter had an option of going to a very academically competitive high school but didn’t want to because its lacrosse team sucked. She also looked for a more rounded student body in a college. She wants interesting people, not just people who think they are interesting because they have the top scores.</p>
<p>A friend’s daughter was #2 in her class. She was admitted to some top schools and attends one. I find her to be the most boring 18 year old there is to talk to. No sports, no hobbies, no leadership positions, not many friends. An entire university of students like her? No thanks.</p>
<p>Hey, I support athletic recruitment at the Ivies. Indeed, sometimes I wish the Academic Index would have a little more give when it comes to football players, in particular. But I also just can’t help telling it like I see it.</p>
<p>In those 20+ year Prof cases, one can also add advancing some of the most mind-bogglingly dumbest arguments in such an incoherent manner or demonstrating such cluelessness when tackling an Econ or basic stats problem set which only requires some elementary algebra that they wondered how such students were allowed to even graduate high school.</p>
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<p>Some of those Profs were from HYPS though I won’t get more specific to avoid having athlete or worse, legacy/developmental families attempt to go after them. </p>
<p>Also, it’s not like I’m for their complete exclusion or that there shouldn’t be a bit of special consideration. </p>
<p>After all, campus life must have some such characters to remain interesting and to be good rich sources of free food from which true Nerds and those of us who sympathize with them could plunder…err I mean “share”. </p>
<p>Hunt makes valid points and his observations apply to a number of athletes. Not every player on Stanford Football is a great scholar. Some students need the easier classes that created some havoc in the press. But, again, there are non-athletes that flock to such courses also. </p>
<p>Highly competitive athletes get a boost in admissions. And they do in the job market as well as employers recognize their work ethics, discipline, and often team spirit. </p>
<p>The key here is to recognize that, just as it is with arts, academics, and other fields, the success is due to more than talent. It takes hard work and perseverance to make it to the top. And few actually do.</p>
<p>I can’t refrain from expressing that I think you just make this crap up.</p>
<p>Giving you the benefit of the doubt, please note that, for at least Harvard admission (and probably other elites), no high school diploma nor any particular high school classes are required for admission.</p>
<p>At my college, anyway, athletes were notorious gut seekers, and we joked that you could judge whether a class was a gut or not by checking the size of the necks of the other students. But in fairness, athletes didn’t just seek out guts because of academic weakness–it was probably just as much because playing a varsity sport is incredibly time-consuming, and they needed to have some classes that didn’t make heavy demands. Whether this is good or bad is debatable, of course.</p>
<p>But again, everything is relative. A gut at an Ivy League school is still a real class, with requirements and actual work–as opposed to entire no-show majors at some other colleges.</p>
<p>Note: when looking for a STEM gut, there is an alternative neck test–the more hipster scarves on necks, the more likely it is to be a gut.</p>
:D</p>