Athletics and AA are vastly different things with one based on merit and open to equally to all. The biggest problem with AA is that the vast majority of hispanics living in the US came here in the past 30 years and have suffered no meaningful discrimination and certainly far less than the Chinese or Japanese. But none of this matters because the schools don’t really care about the priorities of a group of obsessed parents. As for sports it’s completely unrealistic to believe that teams could be created with walk ons and besides at many schools sports is a big business.
There’s a definite genetic component to sports that precludes a short kid from being a basketball star, alittle kid from football, whatever.
But beyond that, rowing, tennis, hockey, water polo, fencing, swimming, equestrian sports…those are open to only those who have the money to invest in the gear, pool/ice/stable/court/river time, or are lucky enough to get a scholarship to a prep school that will fund it. Even soccer and lacrosse require significant (and costly) club team participation to get good enough to be recruited in college, baseball/softball too.
As @whatisyourquest suggests, returning college sports teams to walk-on status makes them purely recreational, like club or intramural sports. I’m not certain that’s a bad thing at all. Unless that’s how your kid got in, of course. Then you probably like that system.
This is patently false. We debate legacies and dev admits ad nauseam on this forum.
This is illogical, and a classic example of the red herring fallacy. Why should your position on AA have anything at all to do with your position on athletic preferences, legacies, and development admits? For the record, I think athletics, except for basketball and football, which can function as quasi-pro teams at the Div 1 level, are a waste of university resources and should be abolished.
Merit means they are the best player available. What you are proposing is a sort of handicap system for all of life administered by some bureaucrat which is impossible. Surely you have noted the huge minority representation in full scholarship male sports as well as the NBA and NFL. Are you proposing AA for Asians and Hispanics in these leagues? The schools overall are doing a reasonably good job and no system is perfect and all would have faults. Good active parenting is a huge expensive responsibility and nothing the schools can do will ever be able to make up for poor parenting. Western civilization is based on this culture and has produced the greatest countries in the history of the world.
Yeah, it’s interesting that AA is considered acceptable (by lots of folks) for college admissions and corporate employment. But these same AA advocates don’t seem perturbed about “underrepresentation” in professional sports, Olympic teams, etc. Why isn’t this fervor applied equitably and universally? Why shouldn’t professional sports, Olympic teams, etc. also reflect the demographics of America?
The argument against money and privilege in high school sports is equally valid for the sports predominated by minorities (football, basketball, etc.) These kids also get lots of support in high school to pursue their craft. Money isn’t simply concentrated in (the relatively unpopular) rowing, tennis, hockey, water polo, fencing, swimming, and equestrian sports. If it’s wrong for kids in these sports to get an admission advantage (and I believe that it is indeed wrong), why is it ok for kids that play in sports like football, basketball, etc. to get an admission advantage?
Totally logical if it is your position that they all "take elite college seats away from the most academically deserving students ".
I called out expensive sports because they’re not “open equally to all” as was claimed by @say
…though no sport is really open to all for various reasons. And I don’t favor an admission advantage for athletes of any kind, I think a for-fun walk on sports scene in college would be great. But a lot of other people disagree @whatisyourquest .
No one seems to want to describe a stats only admit college. I wonder why.
I gave some examples in reply #857 ( http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/discussion/comment/20838218/#Comment_20838218 ). I guess no one seems to want to discuss them.
@OHMomof2 I really don’t see how you can say that swimming, water polo, and tennis are “expensive.” Very little equipment is required; public and high school facilities (pools, tennis courts) are commonly available for training and competitions; high school teams frequently exist for these sports; coaching and travel are free for families, where there are high school teams.
Perhaps your list pertains more to public access in America; swimming, water polo, and tennis teams rarely exist in poorer areas. But, if the focus is on public expense, not just on the cost to families, then your premise is refuted by football, which is quite expensive (big field with high maintenance cost, lots of expensive equipment, …) and exists even in the poorest areas of America.
I think that your list is too expansive and was assembled more because lots of white people participate in these sports, rather than because all of them are “expensive,” that is, require a lot of money from high schools or families.
I agree with you though about rowing, fencing, and equestrian sports. High schools rarely have teams for these sports, so families have to foot the entire bill for equipment, coaching, competitions, and travel. You would have been on firmer ground had you limited your list to just those three sports.
@ucbalumnus none of those are stats-only admit colleges. All have sports recruiting (with scholarships), and at least one admits by major as well. I already listed in #861 all the ways that Berkeley isn’t stats-only admissions, more than the others.
Here was my question, again:
You’re asking a lot of broad questions in a thread on race and admissions. Each of your questions could be a thread in itself and digress the discussions on race. In trying to keep on-topic, the data ucbalumnus posts indicates that blacks would be less than 5% of the student population in a gpa/test score system.
If the school is big enough, the recruited athletes will be small enough in number so that campus demographics will not be affected much.
If you do not want to see any different admissions bucketing (due to “full” majors, or in-state versus out-of-state at public schools), then the universe of schools that you can search to find stats-only admission schools gets much smaller. Even private schools may have differences with respect to domestic versus international students.
Or perhaps open admission community colleges are trivial examples. Minimum prior GPA for admission is 0.0.
i’m not sure you know as much about financial access to those sports as you think.
First of all, swimming and tennis are rare in high school. The facilities often cost too much. And many schools, for budget reasons, have gone to “pay to play” for any team sports they do offer. In our area that means at least $350 a season, aside from equipment.
I live in a firmly upper middle class town with only one high school and the HS does NOT have a pool. It does have a swim team which borrows time from a local Y, college, whatever it can get. It’s the only one of 9 high schools in the county that does have regular pool access, though 3 of the others banded together to make a small team (again, begging for pool time from local orgs). Kids at the others, including the largest, simply have no swim team.
Our best swimmers have to also swim in the off-season on club teams that cost thousands of dollars, with coaches whose time costs thousands of dollars a season. And our pretty well off kids did have access to pools as kids and parents with time to get them to them, pay the fees to use them, pay for swim team as kids, etc. The VAST majority of kids can’t just walk into high school and decide to be a competitive swimmer and get to collegiate skill level in 4 years.
A single racing suit, used only once, can cost hundreds of dollars. (tho these were partially banned in HS/college only this year)
Tennis is somewhat more common but again, (good) equipment and coaching cost more money than most kids have, and you can’t just waltz in to high school tennis from nothing…you need to have played before, and tennis court time costs money, sometimes a lot.
I have never, ever had our family travel to high school meets or games paid for by the school. I don’t know anyone who does have that.
Football is an exception to this as rec programs exist from young ages in many areas, and for basketball too, as the AAU covers the club need (for $400-4000 a season though) and in many cities and towns basketball courts are readily accessible and free in public parks.
So I grouped tennis and swimming in with the much rarer sports of rowing, water polo, equestrian sports, and fencing on purpose. I didn’t even list golf and sailing, which are also recruited sports. I hope the costs are obvious there too. There are degrees of cost and accessibility of course, but none have very many poor kids participating.
Private prep and boarding schools offer these sports for a reason - they know they help significantly with college admissions.
Agree. This is a thought experiment. What if not only race was taken out but EVERYTHING except GPA and test scores - PURE MERIT - as has been advocated on this thread.
I am simply wondering what that kind of college would be like, if it existed.
And if that kind of college admissions system is not actually the goal, then why do people in this thread mostly want to just take away AA but not the preferences that deny academically talented students far more spaces in elite schools? AA is a tiny sliver of the spaces NOT available to high scores/gpas.
Still, some schools may be pretty close, since the number of students in any special buckets (recruited athletes, out-of-state students at public schools) may be quite small. CSU Dominguez Hills has no impacted or selective majors, is large (so the athletes are small in number compared to the total), and has only 1% out-of-state students. Demographics are 60% Latino, 13% black, 10% Asian, 7% white.
https://nces.ed.gov/collegenavigator/?id=110547#enrolmt
I read this article’s author’s book over the summer. Very interesting for anyone who thinks Asians are being kept out of elite colleges and who is actually taking their spots. I didn’t agree with all of it, but it would certainly of interest to many who regularly post in this thread.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/17/books/review/Wolff2.t.html?mcubz=1
http://www.economist.com/node/7945858
A Harvard response - http://harvardmagazine.com/2006/11/admissions-equity-html
That’s what it might look like if the elite colleges dropped all preferences other than GPA/test scores? I somehow think it’s a long way from a Harvard to a CSU-DH. But maybe that IS what it would be like.
Again, I’m not asking about the racial makeup of the college when I say “what would it look like”.
I’m asking what going to a college with no preferences might be like in terms of sports, funding of research and financial aid and such, popular and unpopular majors, musical groups, all that stuff that those preferences are supposedly “for”. Though yes, there would almost certainly be fewer black and Hispanic students, so that’s one part of what that imaginary college might be like.
I am assuming, since this is CC/Race thread, that we’re talking about the colleges that are hard to get into, and that some feel are made harder to get into for deserving students by AA specifically. That doesn’t appear to be the case at CSU-DH.
Isn’t that air of “privilege” a significant reason for its desirability? Does everyone assume that the quality of the education is far superior?
That the professors are the most brilliant and gifted at teaching?
I think not.
Just a thought.
@dragonmom - " You don’t want to be in a club that would have you as a member — which is the entire marketing credo of America’s top schools."
We live in a very competitive area where Asian immigration has made many public and private high schools extremely competitive and stressful.
My kids’ Asian friends have declined to apply to many colleges based on the fact that they are “too Asian”.
Also something to think about.