<p>I was just informed that a 10th grader at my niece's school on LI received an oral commitment from harvard (and another received a commitment from yale)! And here I was thinking harvard was a center of higher academic learning not a sports academy.</p>
<p>Great at sports (soccer commit) / mediocre grades > valedictorian with perfect SAT and many academic ecs</p>
<p>Confirmed in actual experience at a single school. u can guess who was accepted and who was deferred early action.</p>
<p>When is this nonsense going to stop. I understand thsi is an accomplishment being good at a sport, but ought the student have comparable grades at least an A-, but when the child has a B? and no advanced classes? come on… This also happen this year to one of my niece’s classmates with yale they gave a boy an oral commitment.</p>
<p>I managed to get through high school while having fun and not doing much work. I had some really fun extracurriculars that took very little time. Most days, I worked for an hour, read a little, and hung out with friends. I never had to deal with stress. I never really had to worry about competition.</p>
<p>It is amazing to me that anyone could commit so much time to a single activity. Athletes have a dedication I don’t have and never was pressed to have. In some ways, it better prepares them for this college. Not my thing, but still, just because I might have gotten better test scores and coasted through some “hard” classes that might have been harder for them doesn’t mean I should get a leg up. </p>
<p>Athletes had to suffer through way more stress, way less free time. Perhaps their high school grades or test scores suffered. So what? They bring something else to the table, something just as valuable– if not more. Dedication, patience. The willingness to push past limits. These shouldn’t be neglected in your analysis of the quality of recruited athletes as applicants.</p>
<p>For whatever reason, the schools value athletic excellence more than you do. But it’s their choice. You think it’s nonsense, but they obviously don’t agree. Not really anything you can do about it, except decide you’d rather not attend one of those schools (or send your child to one).</p>
<p>I understand that some aspects of this are awfully unfair (believe me, a girl with a 3.34 W GPA and a 2000 SAT got into Harvard to play hockey from my HS–I wasn’t very pleased either.) but what people have to remember is that the Ivy League schools are also sports schools–they want high rankings in their Division I teams too–and if that means accepting a stellar athlete (Hey, my mentioned hockey girl was an AMAZING All-State Hockey Player and I won’t deny it.) who has mediocre grades, well, that’s fine for them because they DO get the intellectuals to boost their academia as well as star athletes to play for their powerhouse teams. If you look at it this way, you can see why they recruit–just my 2 cents, that’s all.</p>
<p>This situation is ridiculous and unfair, and becoming more and more prevalent in my opinion. I’m an honor roll, 4.0, AP scholar, etc. and received $2000 a year from a state school which offered a full ride to a C average student track athlete at my high school (she then lost this offer due to drinking/drugs, which furthers my point, I think). Another C student (state track athlete) at my school received a full ride offer from Cornell. I’m not saying that sports don’t require hard work and dedication, but seriously? Since when does a few seasons of a sport + C average count for more than honor roll + 4.0 + NMS + EC’s, etc?!</p>
<p>It never ceases to amaze me that people fictionalize their own criteria for merit at top schools and then complain when certain students fail to satisfy them.</p>
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<p>Fret not, parentgrad. Tales of early verbal commits to Ivy League schools carry about as much weight as a couple of middle-school kids promising each other they’ll get married someday. There is absolutely no meaningful commitment in place for an Ivy athlete until senior year of high school. (I know, I know, everyone knows ‘someone’ who got in early.)</p>
<p>Admissions has the final say - that’s not just lip service, it’s a straight up fact. There are standards that must be met as far as SAT scores and GPA so the academic profile of the athlete is within 1 standard deviation of the mean student body score.</p>
<p>I could bore you with details on calculating said index, but suffice to say Harvard (and Princeton and Yale) athletes are in the top 5 - 10% academically of all college students nationwide. No mean feat when considering they devote 20-30 hours per week on athletics.</p>
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<p>You do realize there are no athletic scholarships in the Ivy League, right?</p>
<p>Are they not Division 1? No Athletic Scholarships in Ivy League?</p>
<p>There certainly are at NU. A friend’s daughter who is a swimmer was recruited by Northwestern and given a full ride way before applications were even due. In fact she didn’t have to fill one out… just submitted some routine paperwork later on. I hope she can handle the academics there.</p>
<p>@danstearns: you’re correct, I was a bit confused as that student was offered several full ride scholarships. The point is, however, that she was admitted to Cornell, something her academic record never would have warranted. I’m not saying that sports don’t require commitment, or that every valedictorian deserves an ivy league admission, because obviously that’s not the case, but it is disappointing as a high school senior who has worked hard her entire high school career to be made to feel that athletics are often valued disproportionately.</p>
<p>Just going to add that Jeremy Lin seems to be the dream Harvard student–he’s got the athletic ability AND the intellectual brilliance–and is a worthy example of exceptions to the “either you’re an All-State athlete or a supreme uber-nerd” rule. He definitely deserved to get in, in my opinion.</p>
<p>Oh, and CollegeChica12 , as a fellow HS Senior who’s seen several cases like yours in my HS, I fully empathize with you, but I can also understand the unfortunate “Ivy Sports” ideology behind it.</p>
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<p>Is it disproportionate? Harvard doesn’t take every soccer player lying around, just like it doesn’t take every 2400/4.0. </p>
<p>If it’s disproportionate to anything, it’s to your preconceived notion of who deserves admission to Harvard. Unfortunately, that is for Harvard and not you to decide. Exceptional athletes deserve to get in, and the ones that do have also “worked hard their entire high school career.”</p>
<p>If I’m a cello player, a really really good cello player, and I apply to Harvard and don’t get in, I might say “I don’t understand, I’m an amazing cello player, why didnt Harvard take me?” You might say “Well, maybe they didn’t value your cello playing that much.” It shouldn’t undermine my self-confidence as a cello player but it should show me that I don’t get to decide that I deserve admission because I’m good at something that I think Harvard wants.</p>
<p>Oxford and Cambridge vaguely participate in athletic recruiting, but for only one sport: male crew. After that very limited number of spots is filled, everything else is by the numbers (strictly academic).</p>
<p>^ Absolutely, Desi. He’s not an isolated case, either - I could point out several top nationally ranked athletes with 2300+ SAT scores on every Harvard and Princeton team.
“Great athlete” and “great student” are not mutually exclusive, despite the stereotypes.</p>
<p>But in this thread/post the OP claims the school was Yale … <a href=“http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/14056874-post1.html[/url]”>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/14056874-post1.html</a></p>
<p>^The OP, I believe, is talking about two girls at her niece’s school–One apparently recieved an oral commitment from Harvard, and the other from Yale.</p>
<p>The OP linked an article about a male hockey player</p>
<p>@placido240: they’re fundamentally different institutions. No point comparing Oxbridge with the Ivys…</p>