Hi everyone.
If a recruited athlete decides to apply to Wharton, will he or she have virtually guaranteed admission? Or does the “slot” system & likely letters only apply to the College of Arts & Sciences? If Wharton admission is separate and not guaranteed, how much of an impact would a coach have on the admissions decision?
I’m a prospective swim recruit, too, so I’m not sure if niche sport athletes have it different in Wharton admissions, compared to football & basketball recruits.
Thanks.
Penn admits by school. You will only be considered for the school you applied. No application is guaranteed. However, Sport recruitment is a big hook. You need to apply ED to take full advantage of it. Wharton does have a lot of sports recruits. The likely letters are issued by admission offices and apply to the whole university.
@CCThunderfin you should talk to Penn’s coach. If they are recruiting you; they want you to get in and will be able to tell you if applying to Wharton is realistic and if they can walk your application in there. There are, as @f2000sa notes, plenty of recruited athletes in Wharton, but the admission standards are more selective than CAS or SAS or whatever they call it these days so you should make sure that’s a reasonable plan.
I can share how it works in Softball. The coach has two Wharton admits to use each year. Those offers go to players that they want to attract. . The rest apply to the College. I think baseball has a couple of more slots, tho I know their coach doesn’t like his players to be in Wharton. Told a friend the demands are too great, and he has too many wharton students quit baseball, thus he doesn’t like offering it…These are two anecdotal stories direct from two recruited penn athletes that we know…
Thanks for the info, @f2000sa , @CaliDad2020 and @BigPapiofthree . If I decided I would apply to Wharton, I’d definitely apply ED.
@BigPapiofthree - I’m not sure where you got the Penn Baseball story, but my observation of Penn Baseball from very close proximity does not bring that conclusion.
In terms of the OP, if you are applying to any Penn school as a recruited athlete with coach support, it will be ED.
@nhparent9,
Close friend was being recruited by multiple ivy’s. When he met on campus with Penn coach, said he would like to attend Penn over offers from Harvard, Dartmouth, Princeton and Cornell. Said he was willing to commit and apply ED if they would give him admission to Wharton.He was academically more than Ivy Qualified, and would help any IVY with their team average numbers. Academic stats were not issue at any of the schools. Coach said he does not like doing that. Said his players have hard time doing both, and he lost kids in the past. They either dropped baseball, or had academic problems doing both. Said no to the request. He ended up committing to Northwestern, and decided he would play Big 10 baseball and take some athletic scholarship money. So clearly, it was not about ability. Big 10 is tougher than IVY. Just sharing a story…As told to me, and I was a close confidant thru the whole thing. But i was not present, so it is heresay. But i dont think it is an alternative fact.
I have met many athletes at Penn who in Wharton and also Engineering (which is even more rigorous).
My story was for baseball. I am not saying all coaches feel this way.
@CCThunderfin No this thread is a mess…
First of all, the admissions standards for Wharton are not more “more selective” than for the other undergrad programs. Though if literally anyone has evidence of that, I’d love to see it. And no, the stories about how recruiting works that have been shared here are not accurate at all. First of all, no coach would ever tell a recruit how many slots they have per school, and if they do then they’re playing you, because they don’t know how many slots they have per school! Admissions doesn’t say to baseball, “well you can have 2 Whartonites this year but you can have 13 SEAS slots.” The schools to which athletes matriculate within Penn are largely decided by their own interests. And no, the Wharton recruits are decidedly not more qualified than the recruits to Penn’s other undergrad programs. But again, if anyone has evidence to the contrary, I’d love to see it.
Basically, talk to the recruiting coach and let them know you’re interested. He’ll probably say, “which school,” and you’ll answer “wharton,” and then if you are a good fit for Penn and his team, he’ll make it work. Athletes are nearly guaranteed their spot in their chosen undergrad program once they’ve confirmed with Athletics that their being officially recruited and they apply ED (at that point, your academic credentials don’t matter beyond the fact that you were generally qualified to attend Penn without messing up their Academic Index- it’s not about being qualified for a specific program so much as it is being qualified to be an Ivy Athlete- a highly regulated status). Hiccups do happen, of course, but it’s not terribly common. I can imagine it happening if you really mess up senior year and no longer meet the qualifications set out by the Academic Index or you make a terrible impression in another way. But otherwise, yes, if you say you want Wharton, you’ll get Wharton.
And finally, coaches don’t prefer kids from the College. Granted, engineers and pre-med kids in the college tend to have more time-intensive class schedules and that can be a pain to coordinate so they don’t love it from an administrative standpoint-- but Whartonites have ABSOLUTELY no trouble being on sports teams and coaches know they don’t have schedules that differ in any way from the vast majority of students in the other undergrad programs in a meaningful way.
@PennCAS2014 My understanding is that you’re actually incorrect. Not because Wharton is necessarily more selective (different debate), but because it’s smaller. Same for engineering. There are more seats for CAS because it’s the biggest program.
@NashSaddle we’re both correct-- what you’re saying is not inconsistent with what I’m saying. Wharton does have fewer total undergrads than the College and so there tend to be fewer athletes as an absolute number in Wharton than in the College. That being said, seats are not apportioned for athletes from admissions by each undergrad school and there aren’t differing standards for each undergrad program. Furthermore, Penn, like the other ivies, is composed of about 13% recruited athletes and the choices about which program they choose are almost always (I won’t say always because I cannot say that with certainty- but it could be always) the products of the athlete’s academic interest alone. Penn admissions and Penn athletics are not, at least at an institutional level, telling kids “well you meet the criteria for the academic index but you should apply to the College because we have more room there than in Wharton.” That’s just not how the process works. Finally, the difference between the acceptance rates of the College and Wharton are about 1 to 2 percentage points- not enough of a disparity for a coach to advise someone to apply through the College if their interests reside in Wharton anyway. In essence, there isn’t ‘more room’ in the College, despite being larger, because competition for those seats is equally as fierce.
@BigPapiofthree - a quick count of the current Penn baseball roster shows 11 kids of the roster of 31 enrolled in Wharton and two of the freshman don’t have a school listed for some reason, so 11 of 29 listed. I personally know one of next year’s incoming freshman is Wharton. Doesn’t seem like an issue to me.
And just for good measure, I checked current RPI. Northwestern is currently below all 8 Ivy schools in baseball RPI. The Big 10 is a fine baseball conference, but that doesn’t mean every team is a power baseball school, and it also doesn’t mean they are fully funded for the total available 11.7 NCAA allowed scholarships that can divided only among 27 players on the max 35 player roster.