Schools that 'neglect' sports?

URM is under-represented minority (ie, from an ethnic group that historically hasn’t been well-represented in colleges). Many colleges will give preference to URM students in order to help level the playing field from historical bias.

Legacy is students whose parent(s) attended that college in the past. Some colleges will give some preference to legacy students.

SES is socio-economic status . Many colleges will give preference to students from a lower socio-economic status, especially those who are FGLI (first generation (to attend college) low income.

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The OP is an international adult who wants to attend college in the US in linguistics in order to further his understanding of the field and also to meet others who may want to collaborate with him on a large, multi-disciplinary project focused on a new Esperanto-like language. (@StefenLong - Do I have that right?)

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Yep. You really captured it. I want to add that I’m eyeing Global Affairs / International Studies as a minor, and the dry technical name for that kind of tongue is IAL - international auxiliary language.

Paging @dfbdfb , a linguistics professor.

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Not sure what ratio you are talking about, if faculty:student use the CDS for that. I merely gave this source in reply to someone who posted 2010 athlete number/proportion athlete data by school.

I had forgotten his info from other threads.

I’ll say it again here - you can’t have it your way. The most prestigious schools have sports, value sports and want the best athletes to attend, thus give preference to athletes, especially in ED. If you want to go to one of the best schools, you are going to have to deal with that system.

You need a high amount of FA. You are a non-traditional student. You want a very specialized major not offered at every college or university. Now you want a school that doesn’t give a preference to athletic recruits.

You aren’t going to find a perfect school with a perfect application process that makes it easy for you. Pick the school you like most, where you have the best chance of getting accepted and getting FA and apply ED. That’s how it works. If you start worrying about athletes and weather and legacies and professors having enough time for you, you’ll never get off the starting block. There is no perfect school for you. There are risks in applying to every school. Don’t worry about the football player taking YOUR spot.

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On the LACs, take Amherst where the above report in #14 has 32%. In reality, Amherst only has about 66 fully supported spots according to the attached (is a bit dated, but the basics will be in line)https://www.ncsasports.org/blog/2014/04/07/recruited-athletes-with-sub-average-academics-can-receive-preference-in-admissions/#:~:text=According%20to%20Parker%2C%20each%20NESCAC,currently%20subscribes%20to%20the%20process. There will be a number of other athletes who will receive “soft” support, so say 120-150 admits with an athletic boost out about 1,200 total admissions, so roughly 10%-12% vs 32%.

For Yale, the 200 figure comes from the report in #14 divided by 2,200 which is the number of Yale admits ± (2,234 this year) Yale admits 2,234 students, acceptance rate shrinks to 4.46 percent - Yale Daily News

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I don’t really have anything to add except to the stuff others have said about sports ratios and admissions and such, except to ask why in the world you care about ED admissions anyway? Yes, I realize that there’s widespread (though not universal) conventional wisdom on CC that pretty much everyone should apply ED, but remember that by doing so you could be artificially constraining your choices.

What I can offer more on, though, is your desire to obtain proficiency in an IAL: Congratulations, you’ve done it! Under the assumption that your speaking ability in English is at least close to what you’ve exhibited here in writing, you already have competence in arguably the most useful IAL in the world right now. If you want more, you could of course do well to look at the other official languages of the UN: Arabic (Modern Standard Arabic, though arguably Cairene Arabic would be more useful), Chinese (specifically Mandarin, using simplified characters, French, Russian, and Spanish.

But I’m not sure if what you’re after is linguistics proper or the study of one or more languages, and that’s going to affect your search. If it’s linguistics itself, then you should probably look at a program that allows for a strong sociolinguistics component (e.g., Penn, Georgetown, Ohio State, Stanford), since largely theoretical programs (which are most programs based in separate linguistics departments, though the proportion of them is steadily decreasing over time) won’t really give you anything to connect to your interest in international relations.

The problem, to tie it back into the wider discussion, is that this would rule out some programs that would seem to fit what you were asking for in the original post of this thread (e.g., MIT, Chicago, the UCs other than UCLA and Berkeley).

Ah, I was referring to the athlete:total student ratio. And I thought @sashwhodat was posting 2019 data, which is quite recent?

That’s what I’m doing! By knowing which schools distort their ED pool, I’m having a better look at where I have best chance of getting accepted. “No sports” is not my preference for a college at all, it’s just a way for me to access the situation more clearly.

Taking into account the hard support of 66, it’d be 18%. Still, a significant drop from 32%. I guess now I understand when someone said earlier about ‘walk-in’ athletes, who might make up the remaining 14%.

I’m well aware that I have many obstacles on the way that lower my chance: nontraditional, FA, no GPA, international. Thus every % counts.

I beg to differ. 1st: English, by definition, cannot be IAL because if it were, then what would be the American, British, and Australian 1st tongue? Those people who are native in it would have an unfair advantage of higher fluency, and more importantly, not having to learn another lang. 2nd: it’s a natural tongue and therefore, embedded with the cultures of mentioned countries. That leads to resistance from people in other nations: “Why the hell do I have to learn English to communicate with you instead of you learning [insert name] to speak with me??”

Thank you, I’d describe my need as somewhere between intermediate and advanced level of linguistics: enough to conduct my own research and exchange ideas with other linguists without running out of breath. The final goal of pursuing linguistics is of course to successfully create a scientific, culturally-neutral and efficient, easy to learn tongue. I’ll study whatever it takes to do that, the problem is I don’t really know what it contains - I’m not on the level of being able to see that yet. BTW, could you elaborate a bit about Penn program?

If you were alluding to UCLA & UCB as good candidates, then in another thread someone has warned me against those CA public schools: I only have 107k.

120-150 includes both hard and soft support, so 10-12%.

Most of the experts on College Confidential (those posters who know a lot about admissions, FA, and the programs at different colleges) say not to use ED if you need to compare financial aid offers. Sure, if you find a program that is perfect and it looks like you’d qualify for good aid, go for it, but for the most part it sounds like you are still comparing programs to find what you want and can’t be sure of the FA.

You need more flexibility than ED would give you.

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I think that this kind of analysis of the minutiae misses the point. Let’s even assume that the vast majority of athletes have the same academic qualifications as the general student body. That doesn’t negate the basic point because they don’t go through the same admissions process as everyone else. Even if athletics is just a tie breaker, it’s still a hook that gives those students an advantage.

It’s not like admissions decided on who’s getting in and then the coaches look at this year’s freshman class to see if any of them can play ball or run the mile. The athletes are simply in a different category despite all of the talk in the article about bands. The fact is that the coaches need athletes who can fill out their rosters. As soon as that becomes a factor, it means that there are admissions spots that are set aside even if those kids have to have very high credentials. For kids who are competing against the general population of applicants, they are on different footing and. the set asides might just as well be removed from the field who are competing for spots.

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Which was my point referring back to post #14 citing a WAPO article which uses misleading sets of statistics on athletic preferences by including all varsity athletes, which includes walk-ons who received no special athletic preference in the numerator (this really distorts the % for small schools that field a lot of teams) and just matriculates for the denominator (rather than all admitted students). Couldn’t agree more that recruited athletes are in a separate bucket (both my kids were recruited), and if you are looking at admit rates/total spots available whether for RD or ED, you need to back out recruited athletes.

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You’re right. One issue that can’t be solved is that I won’t know how big the financial aid packages that various schools will offer if I’m admitted, until the notification day. To negate the risk of can’t-attend-because-can’t-afford, I choose to focus on full-need-meet schools only. So now the set of problems are simplified to whether I can get in or not. While I do have preference for this school over that school, it has to be balanced with the chance of admittance - hence threads like this. In the end, if my ED school causes me to spend all of my 107k, as opposed to another college which costs only 60k, then I’ll still be happy I managed to overcome the first big challenge on the way to my dream. In case the ED school offers a subpar FA that I can’t afford (despite their advertised meeting full need), then I still can deny their ED offer and go to the other college. Is it correct?

I get it now. So we should not focus on the general policy about sports of each college, but look at the hard number of reserved spots. But is there a ‘compilation’ on the internet for that? Even the link provided by @BKSquared only lists the total amount of athletes a college have, not the number of hard (and soft) admission spots.

Even the meets-full-need colleges meet the full need as they define the need, not necessarily as the student defines it. Many people still cannot afford to go to a meets full need school.

I don’t know if using the net price calculators on the colleges’ websites would be accurate for your unique situation, but it’s worth a try. And at the very least, you could see how the different colleges treat the same set of financial inputs that you would provide.

For a quick start, check out myintuition.org . And then you can move on to the net price calculators for individual colleges.

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Do not, and I’ll shout it for emphasis, do NOT blow your life’s savings on an undergrad degree from a second or third tier US college in order to create the 21st century’s Esperanto.

Have you studied why Esperanto never caught on? Have you studied how languages carry culture, history, emotions, personality and why people would rather deal with the frictions of interpretation and translation than give up actual languages that carry all these. And how, as soon as you want to convey nothing but information, you end up with computers doing it, not people.

You might also study how the more “neutral” something is purported to be the more pushback it gets from vested interests (governments, businesses) and how it happened that the world runs on English and Microsoft. Maybe you think that Esperanto was a good idea, it just wasn’t done well enough. Kinda what people say about communism.

You might want to study how AI platforms such as DeepL are revolutionising online translation services. I need to use the worlds languages in my work, and can manage to convey any information I want using DeepL or Google translate in any language, by composing my texts in very simple language, provided they use the Latin Alphabet, and short letters in languages that use the Cyrillic or Greek alphabet. My child is learning Chinese, and I am beginning to think that scripts are the biggest obstacles, enter ASCII.

I think what you want is an undergrad degree in computer science or information science, probably a combination, then find a funded grad program in the US
to help you develop your project which I guarantee you will look entirely different from what you are envisaging now. You should be able to do that at fairly low cost in your own country, while working at whatever you’ve been working at in order to fund yourself and your savings until now.

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The 5-8 colleges that meet full need for international students all give an advantage to athletes in ED (or other limited early admittance) - Ivies, Amherst, etc. Even BYU, which has been suggested to you, gives an advantage to athletes (they don’t have to be Mormon!)

You are trying to narrow your list in the wrong ways. Concentrate on your major and the finances. If others get a preference, so be it.

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Yep, someone warned me about this before. I’ve tried quite some colleges’ calculators, the majority of them state that they can’t calculate for intl students. I’ve also followed your link just now, and the result was that my supposed contribution is way smaller than I thought. Which means either I don’t have to worry about the financial situation, or it doesn’t reflect a true CSS profile.

Sure. I can quickly cite a few important ones: it was created single-handedly (which screams Biased!!), when Linguistics as a field barely existed and there was no internet; and it overlooked the importance of marketing. Almost a romanticism’s attempt at something over its head.

1 of the common mistakes that people I met usually commit is that when they hear ‘culturally-neutral’, they assume an emotionless tongue. In opposite, the new IAL will incorporate the best phrases there are of languages over the world - in other words, it’ll be more lively than any. It will carry emotions, personality and history most efficiently, but no culture in particular. Or, if viewed with another lens, all cultures.

This will be quite some problem. Yet, as per my current knowledge of the world, I’m willing to bet that there are some significant governments which will be interested in a neutral tongue. The same can be said about businesses, but will need another type of approach.

This I actually studies a little bit. The fact is, before English, French was the lingua franca. The fact that English was able to supplant F is the very proof that it can be replaced by a superior tongue, once people realize how many cons E has. I have to admit that without an extended empire with enormous economic and firepower backing, the new IAL will have to be creative.

You nailed the 1st part. Yet the 2nd comparison only seems to be true superficially. Many things can be substituted there and said to be ‘good idea, bad execution’. And among the biggest differences between communism & IAL is 1 that communism separates people, define a particular enemy and wants this group of people to eliminate that group of human beings. Since 1 of the goals of IAL is to unite humanity, these 2 ideals can’t be farther away from each other.

I haven’t tried DeepL, but my experience with Gtrans - product of the largest AI giant - is that it’s dumb af. And your words also described other shortcomings when you rely on computers: it robs your ability to use more complex & nuanced language, it limits you to your keyboard’s performance, etc.

Yeah, I do have visions of taking some CS course, but just to cooperate effectively with CS experts, because the new IAL will take a hell lot of advantage out of big data & processing power. But the core will always be linguistics because I must learn it to get a sense of how everything will evolve around in the project. And personally, I don’t like coding. All the current programming langs are built upon English, which, unsurprisingly, is not optimized for coding. That alone will be a big advantage of the new IAL: it will promise coders around the world a better platform, a better tool to build upon.

IIRC, the full-meet number is at least 50. Most of them are need-aware regarding intl, but they all ‘guarantee’ full FA for admitted students. About the case of BYU, its population is so large the athletes spots won’t move the needle, as somebody has pointed out earlier.

Agree. I’m leaning toward that, quite literally indeed. My list is more stable now, and I think I won’t sweat the more technical data like this thread.

Carnegie Mellon’s undergrad philosophy department may tick most of your boxes. They have both linguistics and logic & computation majors, offer ED, and don’t seem to over-emphasize athletes in admission. I can’t predict the financial piece for an independent, international adult.

I stumbled upon their FAQ page and this is like a backhand: “Carnegie Mellon offers need-based financial aid to applicants who are U.S. citizens, permanent residents or have DACA status. International students aren’t eligible for financial aid at Carnegie Mellon.” What a pity.