<p>Every one of the threads I have seen about athletic recruiting devolves into a war between those who think athletic recruiting is fine/justifiable and those that think it is evidence of unfairness/decline of western civilization. Is it possible for us all to try to NOT let this particular thread share that fate?</p>
<p>I was actually amazed it went peacefully on as long as it did...</p>
<p>Every coach has asked for PSAT scores, and some for an unofficial transcript from my rising junior. That was the first order of business before any discussion of their program or D's athletic prowess.</p>
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it disgusts me to see the way athletes are recruited, how much time and money institutions of scholarship and higher learning put into this distraction, this misguided endeavor.
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<p>wolrab, considering you have described your own son on other threads, as "nerdy", "unathletic", and not at all interested in sports, it is not surprising that you have no understanding of the value of college athletics. You should understand, however, that you are insulting many parents on this board when you describe their children's extracurricular activity as a "distraction" and "misguided behavior." Perhaps you should save yourself from your own "disgust" by avoiding all threads having to do with athletics.</p>
<p>Ok, one more time, Wolrab. The criteria are different--not lower. Particularly at highly selective schools, admissions for recruited athletes is based on a different mix of high achievements than for those who are not recruited athletes. Now, you may not value the achievements of recruited athletes, but I assure you, they worked for everything that they got.</p>
<p>I'm quoting cnp here: "The standard answer is ... I am really interested in your school and your program but I am not quite ready to make a decision yet. Possibly followed by: My top schools are yours, his, and that one over there, but I am not sure yet." </p>
<p>(I'm too dense to know how to get the quote with the gray background.)</p>
<p>I'm mom of an athlete who just went through Ivy recruiting last year and this is exactly the right thing to say, if you truly don't know. This statement works quite well up until about October 25th, when, if any of your top three are EA or ED, you may want to pick one. My child and another kid on the team both received likelies from their number one choice in time to apply in the early round, once they made the final choice on, or around the end of October. </p>
<p>Stringing coaches along past the end of Oct can be very risky for the athlete. Even if your kid is number one on the coach's list, let's say the number 5 kid, who is maybe 2% less fabulous than your child, says that he loves the college, will apply ED/EA with no regrets, and is ready to work his rear off to prove that the coach has made a good decision. If you are the coach, do you send this kid a likely, or wait around for your choice who is "still not sure"? I know what I'd do. </p>
<p>And, while I don't agree with much of what Wolrab has said, when your child is in the position of getting to PICK among some of the most respected schools in the world, I say, don't mess around nit-picking over which one is the perfect fit. Be grateful, act honorably, and move forward knowing that your child is one of the truly lucky ones to have some control over the process. Wolrab, you're right, we don't make the rules, but we are trying to make sense of them. Most of us will go through this once and we need all the help we can get, from the other families who have recently worked through athletic recruiting.</p>
<p>Almost every prospective applicant form I've seen for football asks for SAT/PSAT scores, how many APs exams the student has taken, and academic/non-sports awards. I looked at WashU's press guide for last year and they had more HS academic honors listed for most of the players than sports honors.</p>
<p>I have one kiddo who is the quintessential anti-athlete and one who wants to play football (and his prime criteria is the academics). I'm just trying to get a feel for the playing field!</p>
<p>^^ Riverrunner, that was exactly what I was thinking, and you said it so much better than I could have.</p>
<p>riverrunner - that was very well said. some of our kids have had the opportunity to choose to attend a fabulous school and also have turned down the opportunity to go to some other great schools. we are grateful that things have turned out well for them. the kids have worked hard in the classroom and have also worked hard to be competitive in their sport. many, many of the athletes are great students.......with good test scores too ! maybe a few are even nmf's ;)</p>
<p>recruiting .........it's a confusing process.......but somehow we families muddle through. it's great that cc'ers are here to help. we are thankful for the help we received on cc from helpful posters. lots of good info. here.</p>
<p>wolrab
Do not visit the website Ivies in China or read the New York Magazine article about it.</p>
<p>A kid knowing where they are going in July? Don't see a problem. I was formally admitted in June of my junior year. It was great to skip all those meetings about college my senior year. I didn't sign my LOI until later though. Did it help that I had high SAT scores yes. Was it important I met all the requirements to graduate from high school by the end of my junior year certainly. Was my application walked through the system yes. Anything wrong with it no.</p>
<p>Big breaking story here in the Twin Cities. Ohio University has just rescinded a verbal offer to a player who verballed last January. There was a change in coaching staff in May, parents asked if offer was still good, coach said yes. Just pulled it this week after AAU season and recruiting is basically over. OU getting slammed for being unprofessional and timing of the whole thing. Guess they told another recruit that they were pulling the offer before they told the player. What a mess!!!</p>
<p>It's in the news here in Ohio, too:</p>
<p>The</a> Post: Ohio University new coaching staff and verbal commitment to Breck student</p>
<p>Reminds me of what they say about verbal commitments being as binding as the paper they are written on.</p>
<p>This was so unfair.</p>
<p>from the August 7 article
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According to the National Letter of Intent office, verbal commitments have no leverage and a school is not bound to an athlete until he or she signs a National Letter of Intent.</p>
<p>“That’s where you have to understand that it’s a verbal commitment,” said Susan Peal, a member of the NLI program. “There’s nothing binding. That’s why you have signing dates.”</p>
<p>But Elofson’s high school coach, Brian Cosgriff, said in 25 years of coaching he has never seen a school revoke a scholarship offer at this time in the recruiting process.
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<p>Once again, I'd like to start by saying that my comments are not aimed at you and your children. Not at all. In fact, I see all of you as victims of a good thing gone bad. My frustration and disgust are aimed at the system, the institutions themselves (and, of course, the larger societal forces at play here). It is THEIR behaviors that I see as misguided in their concern with matters of lesser importance (given that they are institutions of higher learning) than education and scholarship. Not yours or your children's. On the contrary, I admire your children and their accomplishments, that much more if they've been able to keep their athletic activities in healthy perspective, in terms of their identity and in terms of their lives and their futures. Not so easy, it seems to me, in this sports-crazy, fame-crazy culture we live in.</p>
<p>Our resident detective is correct when s/he says that I've described my son -- the one who just graduated from high school -- as a self-processed and proud "nerd." He most definitely is. But if you look beyond my oldest son, you'll see that I, myself, was a high school athlete, as were all three of my siblings, as was my high school boyfriend of three years. One of my brothers was offered a full ride to play basketball at Carnegie Mellon, but opted to go to MIT instead. And my first true love was scouted by two or three major baseball teams, received an offer from one, but opted to play college ball instead, so that he could get a real education. But of course, that was the 1970's and things were different.</p>
<p>Someone asked where I come off saying admissions criteria are often lower? Well, lots of places.</p>
<p>1) My reading. I am in a professional field somewhat related to education, have been very involved as an educational advocate in my school district for over a decade, and try to read widely about educational matters (especially those related to minority achievement and underachievement). One example of a good read in the area highlighted in this thread is Daniel Golden's book, "The Price of Admission." I encourage you to take a look. Don't worry. He exposes MANY questionable admissions practices as he argues that the relationship between the admissions office and the development office has gotten too cozy, not just those having to do with (mostly white, middle and upper-middle class) athletes. For all I care, you can skip the chapter on athletes.</p>
<p>2) My experiences over the past 20 years as a volunteer alumni admissions interviewer for my Ivy League alma mater. ... My best story, for present purposes, is about the young woman I interviewed in the fall of 2001, a couple of months after the events of September 11th. This young woman happened to be taking a current events type course from a renowned member of her school's history department (and a personal friend of ours, so I knew a lot about his course). She also claimed that her probable major in college would be government or political science because she "loved that stuff" and was considering a career in politics. And yet, despite all of that, she was unable to say anything very thoughtful or meaningful about what was going on in the world at that time. Her superficiality was really quite striking, for ANY high school senior applying to college at the time, but especially one applying to an elite school and with an interest in politics. Fortunately for her, she was a rower and the Ivy League coach wanted her. So she got in. Oh, did I say that her grades and test scores were not particularly impressive (especially given the fact that she attended a low-achieving high school)?</p>
<p>3) My husband's experience teaching a large introductory course (in a department many erroneously assume to be a "gut" major) at a large and highly respected university. It is unbelievable what goes on behind the scenes with and for athletes, especially those in the money sports, and especially those who are team stars. Many of those students are in way over their heads here, academically. And it's not that they're failing because of the huge time commitment their sport requires. No, I'm talking about the students who clearly never would have been admitted if it weren't for their athletic accomplishments. And there are many of them. The sad fact is, very few sports stars from our university have been able to make a career out of their sport, so when most of these guys graduate, having learned very little, they struggle to make a life for themselves. We occasionally read about them in the newspaper. It's very sad.</p>
<p>4) My experience this past year, watching and listening as my son and his classmates (and their parents) went through the admissions process. Here, the relevant story is the classmate who was recruited by an Ivy League coach (not a money sport -- unless you're referring to how much it costs to participate), but was told (way back in the summer or early fall) by the coach that he had already "used up" his admissions slot, so he couldn't guarantee this kid anything firm. (We heard this straight from the guy's bragadocious father -- who was pretty angry, thinking his son deserved much better -- so we believe it.) This young man -- the son of professors -- was not an impressive student himself. For example, he wasn't even a National Merit SEMI-Finalist, much less Finalist, or anything else like that. And he'd never been in a class with our son -- admittedly a crude measure of the rigor of the courses he'd taken, but a reasonable measure, none the less, given our high school. Anyway, the good news there is that he was waitlisted at the Ivy League school and will be attending his parents' LAC alma mater. (Can you say "double legacy"? Frankly, I've always imagined that it would feel pretty yukky to think that I might have been admitted to a college or university for some other reason than my academic promise.)</p>
<p>Having seen the way a lot of this plays out for rich kids, poor kids, black kids, and white kids, I say we'd all be better off if we recalibrated ourselves and our systems a bit. It saddens me to see elementary school age African American kids in our community gets their heads filled with dreams of being either rap stars or professional athletes, with no meaningful academically-oriented correction offered by either our schools or our African American community. And though I wouldn't take away the GPA requirement for our high school athletes, I wish we'd put more thought and energy into making school and learning -- in and of themselves -- something these kids could come to enjoy and feel passionate about, not just something they have to endure in order to play their sport.</p>
<p>The bottom line is that I'd love to see some of the time and money and other institutional resources that go into the recruitment of athletes instead go into finding and supporting kids of color and poverty with academic potential and promise who love to learn. I think it would take an enormous amount of pressure off of you and your kids, and I think it would ultimately do a lot to reverse many of the uglier disparities in our country.</p>
<p>So I know this is the parent forum, but I invaded because I'm a current senior going through the whole Ivy recruiting deal right now.</p>
<p>Wolrab- I completely agree with some of your points. Sometimes I don't think it's fair that the "academic standards" or some great institutions are lowered to bring in student athletes. However, I think that in the same way kids of color and in poverty are also given an up in the admissions game. Sure, they're not going to get likely letters, but it is a lot "easier" for someone from a poor Hispanic family to get into an Ivy than a suburban middle class white kid.</p>
<p>When people bring up the argument that athletes get unfair treatment in the admissions office, I just want to bring up this point. I have given up a lot to do what I do. I wake up at 5 to workout in the morning, I go to school at 7. I come home at 3, do as much homework as I can, go to practice at 4, get home at 7:30. After that, I eat, try to finish up homework, and I am asleep by 9. I don't have time to put forth the effort that so many of my classmates do outside of school. My schedule wouldn't permit me to do so. I can't be the class president or work on student government because I'm gone every weekend.
So am I going to be able to get a 100 on a test? Maybe. But it won't be because I've had time to study for hours. Am I going to be at the top of my class? Probably not. Do I try to challenge my mind and do what I can with my time? You betcha. Did I study for the SAT? Not a bit. But I still ended up with a 2250. Did I study for the SAT II's? No. But I ended up with a 800 on Math II and 780's on both Physics and Literature.
The first thing coaches from top schools ask you for is your grades and your test scores. I've had a lot of friends who are very competitive in my sport on the national and international level who have simply been told that they have no chance. Some general guidelines from recruiting from Ivy's which I've heard is over 2150 and above a 3.8. We're not stupid.</p>
<p>As far as likely letters go: I've only heard good things about them. And I'm hoping they work out for me, too! :)</p>
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Some general guidelines from recruiting from Ivy's which I've heard is over 2150 and above a 3.8.
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<p>Don't know about GPA but don't agree on SAT. Basically, for an Ivy, the minimum requirements are a 600+ on each part of the SAT and 600+ on SAT IIs. I am even aware of some recruited athletes at the Ivies that were below these numbers.</p>
<p>thejock, thanks for posting. Best to hear this from a real kid, rather than their mom. You speak for many. My D also had no time to study for SAT's or SAT IIs due to 3 season sport, but met the Ivy standard, nevertheless, as have many of the children represented by their parents on this thread. You have my utmost respect, and I expect to hear good news from you when admissions results are posted. Also, agree with karp about the SAT standard. You are just fine.</p>
<p>The majority of recruited athletes are not in the revenue sports, and the majority of those athletes graduate at the same rate as non-athletes. ALL of the athletes in the Ivy League have graduation rates in the 90th+ percentile.</p>
<p>Sometimes it seems that folks forget the vast majority of college athletes will not make a living at their sport, so it is important to do well in college and get that degree!</p>
<p>My son was an Ivy recruit, is at an Ivy and is doing very well academically. I know of may recruits who had SATs below 2200, but still well within the middle range of the schools. GPAs are considered in the context of the school from which the recruit is coming. He did not prepare for SAT or SAT II- he simply didn't have the time or the inclination. He put a lot of time into training for his sport- non-revenue, by the way. Long, lonely hours. He exhibited character traits (a few positive ones....:) ) that appealed to Admissions folks besides appealing to the coaches. </p>
<p>We have this discussion about every two months on CC- "It's unfair to let the dumb jocks into the Ivys!" Gets old.</p>
<p>This thread is too long to post all that I would like to say, but why all the picking on athletes? They make up a VERY small minority of the campus population. The athletic recruiting budget makes no sense unless you compare it to the recruiting budget of the admissions department for all of the rest of the kids they wish would commit to their school. Do you know how much money they spend on consultants who advise them how to increase their yield, what type of mailings to send out, how many paid campus visits to offer, etc? How much do they pay College Board to send them the names of high scoring tests takers? Who else are they paying for mailing lists of prospects? Those numbers might be pretty big too, but we never see them spelled out like the athletic budget is. Kids who go on to play college sports make up something like 1.5% of all graduating high school seniors. Their admission is not taking your kid's spot away. Really. Blame it on some other kid who had higher SAT's and a better GPA or fabulous EC's. That tiny number of college bound athletes is not compromising the academic integrity of the university. They simply do not matter. They are kids who are used by the system to work their way through school, much like a kid on financial aid may have to work at the campus bookstore to earn his stipend or the graduate student who has to teach a beginning English course to earn their stipend. The only difference is that the NCAA will verify that every single semester that the athlete better have a certain GPA, better have taken enough units to conceivably graduate within four years, and be on track within his/her major. So if there is an advantage to being an athlete, it is that your scholarship is a do or die situation... you HAVE to be on track to graduate at the end of each semester. You can screw up exactly once before most coaches will pull your scholarship. These stereotypes about athletes who cannot succeed do not describe the majority of college athletes, even within the revenue sports. Also, it has been years since the NCAA enacted academic reforms that have changed the old scenario of kids spending four years at a school twiddling their thumbs and leaving without a degree. The people who have artists or nerds think athletes have an unfair edge, the kids with high GPA/low SAT think that the high SAT kids have an unfair edge, the lower GPA/High SAT think that kids who have high GPA's get an edge, and those with few EC's think that those with many EC's are getting in in part because of non-academic activities. Colleges are manufacturing a campus community and it should include all types of people so it can mirror the outside world and society in general. If it costs a few dollars to do that, then fine. Who cares... Nike and Reebok are paying for most of that anyways. If you don't like it, boycott those companies who lend financial support to athletic departments, boycott all sporting events, or boycott any universities that offer sports. Personally, I like to see a school that has arts, sports, business, and other offerings and I understand that in order to excel in any area, money must be spent. My guess is that at most schools, more money is offered in the form of financial aid and merit scholarships than is offered for athletes.</p>