<p>How much of a difference does being a recruited athlete make at Harvard?</p>
<p>it makes a huge difference, my friend got in SCEA with a 1350 Old SAT and a class rank of 40/449 as a recruited lax player, however he was one of their top 3 recruits for the class so it had a very big influence</p>
<p>Being an athletic recruit makes a huge difference ONLY IF you show competency in your academics. 40/449 is still within the top 10% of the high school class. You probably won't be accepted if you're basically failing school, etc.</p>
<p>It's a HUGE difference. I have a friend who's well below first decile and got a 1300 on the old SATs get in as a recruit. He'll probably be one of the best on the team as a freshman though.</p>
<p>It should be pointed out that the boost is still nothing like what you would get if you were recruited at a major Division 1-A program. For example, just consider the kind of boost that Jason Kidd received to get into Berkeley, Chris Webber to Michigan, Allen Iverson to Georgetown, Stephon Marbury to Georgia Tech, Rasheed Wallace of North Carolina. These are great players, but not exactly the greatest of high school students, yet they were able to get into highly respectable schools through a MAJOR athletic boost.</p>
<p>Well, yeah sakky, but those schools you just mentioned (esp. Michigan and UNC) are big sports schools, while Harvard isn't. Being a top athlete is much less impactful at Harvard than Michigan because you can get by with sub-par grades for Michigan, but not Harvard. I mean, a 1300 is STILL a good SAT score (although well below average for Harvard).</p>
<p>I think that was implicit in my point - Harvard is not a big sports school and is therefore less distorted by athletic recruitment. </p>
<p>My point is to put the entire athletic recruitment game into perspective. One might say that Harvard might be letting in subpar students who happen to be great athletes... but not as much as the bigtime sports schools are doing. For example, I would say that Stanford is the academic equal of Harvard, and I strongly suspect that Stanford's athletes are probably more academically subpar (relative to other Stanford students) than Harvard's athletes are.</p>
<p>My bad....I only scanned your post before I responded to it.</p>
<p>Apologies.</p>
<p>"I strongly suspect that Stanford's athletes are probably more academically subpar (relative to other Stanford students) than Harvard's athletes are."</p>
<p>It makes you wonder how selective Stanford really is for non-athletes...</p>
<p>"One might say that Harvard might be letting in subpar students who happen to be great athletes... but not as much as the bigtime sports schools are doing."</p>
<p>Whether or not it's right for Harvard to give such a boost to athletes has nothing to do with what other schools do. I fail to see how this is relevant to the discussion.</p>
<p>Personally, I've never really understood why a recruited athlete is given so much weight. Colleges are, at least in my opinion (maybe admissions boards disagree with me :p), first and foremost academic institutions, and sports teams should be secondary. Culling sub-par academic students in order to build good sports teams implicitly suggests that the college views a successful basketball team as as important as a successful class.</p>
<p>Plus, building a good football team isn't exactly going to help achieve a good school's goal of cultivating the leaders of tomorrow, is it?</p>
<p>And I bet you don't play sports, GuitarMan...</p>
<p>Sports are important. They make money, and lots of it. They give students something to do that shows school spirit. Have you forgotten that the Ivy League was and is a sports division?</p>
<p>Intelligent athletes can usually bring a lot of personality with them. Someone who can practice 25 hours a week, and still maintain great grades and test scores... will obviously contribute something to Harvard, or any school.</p>
<p>This is coming from a hopefull Harvard Lacrosse recruit though... :)</p>
<p>Right. You don't want 4.0, 2400, 3/800 dominating the campus. Harvard wants a balanced class, and athletes provide another dimension. They don't really sacrifice integrity for sports because the admitted athletes are usually qualified. Would you rather have a boring class with the 5'10", 150 LB "mathletes" (not that there is anything wrong with that-just not conducive to football) getting creamed every game?</p>
<p>The only problem I had with Harvard athletics (namely football) is that they're halfway with it. The program doesn't really exist for the students, as most of the athletes are brought in as recruits and the students don't really attend the games (save one game a year). They aren't big time D-1, so it's not a revenue generator (like Michigan). It seems like they just want to beat the other ivies. That, to me at least, is not a great goal. If you're going to recruit, with all the money Harvard has and the reputation, recruit the best talent in the country and hammer people.</p>
<p>
[quote]
Whether or not it's right for Harvard to give such a boost to athletes has nothing to do with what other schools do. I fail to see how this is relevant to the discussion.</p>
<p>Personally, I've never really understood why a recruited athlete is given so much weight. Colleges are, at least in my opinion (maybe admissions boards disagree with me ), first and foremost academic institutions, and sports teams should be secondary. Culling sub-par academic students in order to build good sports teams implicitly suggests that the college views a successful basketball team as as important as a successful class.</p>
<p>Plus, building a good football team isn't exactly going to help achieve a good school's goal of cultivating the leaders of tomorrow, is it?
[/quote]
</p>
<p>At least an athlete has to put in effort to accomplish something before the can get in because of athletic recruitment at Harvard. I personally find the admission of old legacies and the children of rich and famous people to be far less defensible. For example, I think most of us who look at the issue will concede that Al Gore got into Harvard just not because he had that impressive of a high school record, but because he was the scion of a powerful political family. Gore was a pretty mediocre student, graduating 25th out of 51 from St. Albans, or barely in the top 50% of his class. </p>
<p>Or how about the Kennedy's? Seriously, I think we can agree that the 3 brothers, JFK, RFK, and Ted Kennedy all got into Harvard because of the machinations of their father, Joe Kennedy. In fact, Joe Kennedy himself got into Harvard despite having quite poor grades. Didn't matter - he was the son of a highly prominent family also.</p>
<p>"[Joseph Kennedy] was not a scholar. It made no difference to Joseph as scholastics was not the markings of a true man. Playing sports, knowing politics and business, dressing well, and schmoozing with money was what it took....[Joseph Kennedy] petitioned to leave Harvard mid his senior year and was denied due to his grades. His grades lacked any stellar quality having several C's, D's a few F's and barely any B's. One of his D's was in social ethics. Joseph did graduate, with a degree in music appreciation, the only major he could get through Harvard with."</p>
<p>"[Ted] Kennedy earned C grades at the private Milton Academy, but was admitted to Harvard as a "legacy" -- his father and older brothers had attended there, so the younger and dimmer Kennedy's admission was virtually assured. While attending, he was expelled twice, once for cheating on a test, and once for paying a classmate to cheat for him. "</p>
<p><a href="http://www.nndb.com/people/623/000023554/%5B/url%5D">http://www.nndb.com/people/623/000023554/</a></p>
<p>The point is, at least the recruited athletes had to do something to get recruited. Those guys who get in just because they are the children of royalty of some foreign country or because Daddy is willing to donate a hundred million dollars basically did nothing at all to earn their admission. They got their admission basically just by being lucky enough to be born in the right family.</p>
<p>how do they get away with that shiuff!? This is what's wrong with the American government: "Playing sports, knowing politics and business, dressing well, and schmoozing with money". Does that not typify the state of our government? China's government is run by scientists and the like, not by conniving ex lawyers.</p>
<p>Visirale--What gave it away? :p Well, I run track and the like, I'm just not particularly...you know...good ;) Sports make money and lots of it, sure, but only for a select few. How many of the sports recruits at Harvard or Yale or Stanford actually go on to play in the major leagues or the Olympics or what have you and make a living off sports? There are a lot of great athletes and a lot of colleges and very very few of them can make a living playing sports (and most of the ones who do, especially in sports where college is important, like football and basketball, are from those huge D1 programs). The Ivy League is a sports division, but that's just a name used to describe the top few schools, so I fail to see your logic in mentioning that...</p>
<p>Mystic Merlin--With interviews and essays, Harvard has no problem ensuring a balanced class of people who are both able to get into the school on their own academic merit and interesting people from diverse backgrounds. Maybe I'm wrong but I highly doubt that if you took away all of the recruited athletes currently at Harvard today, you would be left with four classes filled with a bunch of boring "mathletes" (:p).</p>
<p>Sakky--Yeah, I don't think anyone here will disagree with you on that :p</p>
<p>All in all, I think it's absolutely great if you are an athlete, recruited even, and make it into a school like H or the like, but I don't think that it's right for an athlete not to be held up to the same admissions standards as anyone else.</p>
<p>sakky...although i agree with you, you have to understand that they were admitted because of the point of legacy...that legacies have been shown to donate more to the university.</p>
<p>i wonder how much $$ the kennedys gave to Harvard?</p>
<p>Some of you might find this article about Harvard/Ivy athletic recruiting interesting, if you haven't seen it:</p>
<p>GuitarMan, I meant that athletes bring another dimension to the school from Harvard's viewpoint.</p>
<p>I dislike it as well; I was merely trying to justify the actions of the school.</p>
<p>
[quote]
you have to understand that they were admitted because of the point of legacy...that legacies have been shown to donate more to the university
[/quote]
</p>
<p>Oh, I understand it perfectly well. However, I think this sort of thing should be brought out into the open. Everybody "knows" that what's really going on is that Harvard (and every other elite school) is basically trading admissions spots for lots of money. That's the whole point of the legacy game - to get more money for the school. So why not just make it explicit? Just publicly say that anybody can be handed an admissions spot for a million dollars (or however much it costs). Heck, why not even auction off spots on Ebay - admission to the highest bidder? We all know that there is some price at which Harvard will admit even a complete idiot. </p>
<p>Everybody knows that this is what is happening at these private schools. So why not just come right out and admit that that is happening. I think the most corrupting part of the process is not that it is happening (although that's bad enough) but all of the tapdancing and double-speak that school administrators do when they're confronted with it.</p>