Do we know if Harvard is even calculating AI since they went test optional? I don’t know for sure about Harvard (and there can be variability within a school by coach/team) but other Ivies are allowing athletes to apply TO. And, as test scores are 2/3 of the AI formula, it would not be able to be calculated for TO athletes.
Have you heard of two interviews before? I have not seen anyone mention it before.
They did last year. I have no idea how they did the calculation, and they are not publicly saying.
Yes. Rare, but it happens.
Did they allow recruited athletes to apply TO? If not, then no problem calculating an AI.
I understand about recruited and walk-ons. But I thought there was also referral. Let’s say a kid was not recruited for rowing but an application for a kid great in rowing comes across. Admits are wondering if they should choose A or B and ask the rowing coach, are you interested? If the coach says yes, is that a recruited or walk on? I heard this story related when they recruited for ballet and tried to build up the ballet dancers. But they stopped recruiting ballet, so not sure if it was specific but I think it was for other sports. Does that kid become a recruited?
I meant with the discontinuation of Subjects Tests. Although that would not have applied last year. But yes, recruited athletes could not apply test optional.
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Using your example, I am not sure how admissions would identify a good rower unless that kid was internationally ranked and in their application. The application wouldn’t have all the stats coaches are looking for like ERG times, height, weight and race results and not sure why admissions would be trying to identify an athlete - they have enough to do.
If you are a recruitable athlete, you should have been having interactions with coaches for at least a year or more depending on the sport. I have never heard (doesn’t mean it hasn’t happened) of admissions “discovering” an athlete overlooked by a coach and other schools in the recruiting process.
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Yes, that explains why they are able to still calculate an AI….SAT/ACT just counts for 2/3 of the AI if there are no subject tests (where previously each of those factors was 1/3 of the calculation).
And going forward, unless the AI formula is changed, which would be done at the league level, ACT/SAT will count for 2/3 of the formula since subject tests are no more.
Separately, many Ivies are allowing recruited athletes to apply TO, so no possibility of calculating an AI.
what is TO?
Test optional
A very simple way to think of the Harvard admissions phrase “Recruited Athlete,” capital R and capital A, which is the category that has the very favorable admissions statistics that fascinate journalists, is to picture a candidate that a Harvard coach in one of the specific Ivy League sports listed here…
…is actively soliciting and for whom the coach is helping to assemble the case for admission, like coordinating the information required for the Academic Index described earlier in this thread. No one else is a “Recruited Athlete.” If a Harvard coach in an Ivy League sport is not actively soliciting the candidate or if the candidate is an athlete in any other sport, that candidate is not a Recruited Athlete. The definition is this specific because of the agreement among Ivy League schools on how they will conduct athletic recruitment process.
It is more useful to lump non-Ivy League sports (eg sailing) with other extracurricular activities (eg orchestra) where there is possibly small “r” recruiting taking place in which the interested party at Harvard communicates with the admissions committee about candidates they would love to see admitted. There are no rules governing this other than the de facto practices within each college or university. Some activities exert more pull than others, and their relative input into admissions waxes and wanes over time. It is rather unlikely that the this results of this informal recruiting are even tracked.
These days, because of the information made public by the recent court case, it’s widely known that Harvard assigns ratings of 1 to 4 (best to worst) and 5 and 6 (special circumstances) for Academics, Extracurriculars, Athletics, Personal, and then an overall score. All Recruited Athletes receive a 1 for the athletics rating pro forma. Un-recruited athletes of truly extraordinary ability, like a Olympic gold medalist in figure skating, might also receive a 1, but that is done rarely because such world-class athletes are uncommon and often do not choose to overlap their prime athletic years with a academically rigorous school. By and large, Recruited Athletes in an Ivy League sport are the athletic 1s.
So, what if you are an excellent high school athlete, on various strong varsity teams, with a regionally great record of individual or team accomplishment? You might get a 2 for the athletic rating, or even a 2+, and that would be a tiny bump. It is the one category, however, where a low rating is not detrimental, so the great majority admitted are athletic 3s and 4s.
The athletic 2s and 2+s tend to overlap significantly with matriculated students who walk on successfully to a varsity team. A large number change sports from high school to college to try something new.
I hope this makes things more clear.
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Article, for some anecdotes: Walk This Way: Harvard Crew's Walk-ons | Sports | The Harvard Crimson
Very true with crew - but Covid and the impacts on the recruiting timeline and gap years of athletes caused most walk ons this year to be cut across Ivys and top public programs. It was a rough year to try crew at a top program. Your article is a few years old and a lot has changed. D3 more success with walk ons this year - to date.
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Absolutely, the pandemic has upended many things. Athletics programs have had to go into self-preservation mode, with an eye to retaining their top talent, encouraging a positive mindset among their athletes, and doing the best they can to emerge strongly in the hopes of returning to normalcy.
By the same token, it wouldn’t make sense to extrapolate the current situation arising from the pandemic as typical or representative, although some things undoubtedly will change long term.
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What Ivies are allowing recruited athletes to apply test optional?
Top Tier Admissions just posted on their blog how even lower tier schools are becoming dream schools. If you don’t have hooks, like legacy, athlete, or first gen college, the rate of getting in early round Harvard is not good, now that applications topped 10K last year. So statistically, if you were an amazing student, applied Georgetown, had a safety net, then you apply to HYPS in the RD and because you are astounding, you look better in the mileu. I know someone, no hooks, rejected by Stanford, no SAT, then applied everywhere and got into Princeton, Caltech, UCLA etc. I am at the end of this process, but thinking that stats would be great for others going through the system in the future.
Does anyone know what is included in “children of faculty or staff”? Suppose a grandparent is a professor at one of the Harvard schools. Some help in an application? No help?
Children should be self-explanatory; grandparents don’t count.
Being a faculty child is most assuredly a hook.
Acceptance percentages at the most selective institutions do seem quite daunting today, and there is an alarmist feedback loop between the media and college counseling companies fixating on the percentages. One might say that there is a lot of financial incentive for college counseling companies to promote an alarmist view.
One reason we see this could be that a larger number of qualified applicants are applying for these seats that remain generally unchanging in number, increasing competition. I think it is a factor but I speculate it is not the primary reason.
Application numbers began to explode when applications moved online and it became much easer for candidates to submit multiple applications. There was a proliferation of applications, not applicants. Before online applications took over all colleges, it was a PITA to fill out an application or send in a recommendation letter, so a measure of self-selection was practiced by candidates before applying that has now shifted over as additional triage workload to the college admissions offices.
In addition, most recently, the move to test-optional admissions because of the pandemic, along with the elimination of tests like the SAT Subject Tests, have given a wider selection of candidates the confidence that they might have a shot, however implausible. Some will be true diamonds in the rough, but I suspect most know that their qualifications are not particularly commanding but they send in an application with a lottery mentality. It’s easy to do with the Common App.
The number of available seats at selective schools hasn’t changed much. I rather doubt that the number of strongly qualified candidates has changed much either. But, these candidates are now applying to many more schools, and there will be a more randomized distribution of these candidates among these schools than, say, ten or twenty years ago. As long as a candidate doesn’t fixate on a certain school or have a rigid pecking order, I think most qualified applicants will find themselves at a wonderful school.
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