How much does Athletics play a role in Penn admissions? My son is being recruited for their soccer team. He is an excellent student. Still needs to take another SAT & ACT.
Do they put more weight on the SAT? (So far he has a 1400). GPA is 4.2 Rigorous schedule (5 APs by graduation)
He is also applying NROTC, but this is a separate application process altogether. He can get the ROTC scholarship to Penn, but not be admitted to Penn - or vice versa.
Our good friend’s son is playing football at Yale. Good student, but he did not have the scores to get into Yale without the football piece - but I’m thinking that Football is different than soccer. (As for the fact that football brings $$ to the school, where soccer does not).
Anyway, your feedback is appreciated
Hey,
So I’m definitely not an expert on this area, but I was trying myself to get scouted into UPenn for soccer. Congratulations to your son! Being scouted to a D1 school of such high caliber is absolutely amazing.
From what I’ve heard, athletes do get a little bit of leniency in terms of admissions, but not more than one standard deviation in terms of grades / test scores. Of course, I’m not an admissions officer, so I’m not exactly sure what range of scores they’d accept, but your son’s GPA is definitely competitive, and with a slightly higher SAT score he’d have a very very strong chance at admissions.
Good luck!
Athletics plays a role in Penn admissions, as it does in all the Ivies (and other schools for that matter). My advice would be to google “ivy academic index” to learn more about grades and scores and how that works in the Ivy League. My completely uneducated opinion is your son’s academics would not be a barrier if he is a recruited athlete. The question then becomes - is he actually being recruited or is he just having conversations with the coach. If he is recruited, the coach generally has a certain number of admissions slots for recruited athletes. In that case, he would receive a likely letter.
I wonder though about his ability to do ROTC in addition to a Varsity sport. I don’t have any concept of the commitment for ROTC but I do know the varsity athlete time commitment is big. He might want to discuss with the coach whether or not the two commitments could co-exist. Best of luck to your son.
I would look through the threads on “Athletic Recruits”, there is a wealth of information there. You probably would get better answers there as well.
In a nutshell, if he is being recruited athletically he still needs good grades/scores, but not as good as he would otherwise. It varies by sport what is needed (football typically gets the most leeway, crew the least, the rest somewhere in-between). My S was given minimum numbers by the coach at Penn that he needed to hit. I would give you the number, but it’s pretty meaningless because it will vary by sport. I’m guessing soccer is higher than average, just because you have lots of affluent soccer players who probably are scoring well. So they don’t need to dip as low to field a competitive team.
The “one standard deviation” comment refers back to the academic index, which is an Ivy League thing. I won’t explain it all here there is plenty of information out there. But I will say that is just an average that needs to be hit by all athletes at a school. And usually each coach will have his/her own number, which may be lower/higher than the overall number for the athletic department. By definition, some of the athletes will be above average, some below. And those below will generally be your better players. There will also be some floor that a coach has to meet for admissions to accept an athlete. S right now has an ACT that the coach at a different Ivy is fine with, but he said admissions is probably 50/50 on accepting him unless he can raise it a point.
Bottom line, just ask the coach what is needed. Everyone either S or I asked gave the information. Several led with it. Because if you know you can’t get a ACT 30 (or whatever the minimum will be) then it is wasting everyone’s time to continue the conversation. I would guess if you already have scores, your S is in the ballpark or the coach would have already ended the conversation.
You’ll hear a variety of opinions on this. Best place to ask is the coach. Ask directly if your son is being supported. The coach has to balance the team AI to be within one sd of the Penn overall mean.
The higher the AI, the better. A perfect 1600 with 4.0 will have an AI of 240. The coaches have more flexibility with AI if your son is a star athlete. So generally they can take a few kids with lower AIs, but then it has to be balanced with a couple of high stat kids.
Note that most of the likely letters have already started going out for the class of 2022. So your son might be a little late to the game.
Thanks to everyone for the feedback. He is class of 2023 - so we are hopeful he’s not late in the game, but we do know of another school that he is interested in where they already have their commit for a goalie for that class.