I agree that these colleges should get rid of such preferences regardless but I’m not sure that’s necessarily they will do if AA is prohibited or restricted. UMich can’t practice AA now because of a Michigan law, but it still gives preferences to ALDC.
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MIT does recruit athletes and give preference over non-athletes with similar stats. The acceptance rate in general is about 7%, and the acceptance rate for athletes who have the support of the varsity coach is anywhere from 25-40%. From our public high school, it’s very rare for anyone to get into MIT, but those who do are athletes (crew, field hockey, sailing). They have excellent academic credentials, but so do the non-athletes who do not get in.
As far as legacy, if it is banned, won’t the elite schools simply start accepting each other’s legacies?
Some schools don’t give preference to the LDCs, but still give preference to athletes. That isn’t going away. Duke is not going to take any 15 basketball players and Alabama might not care if the governor’s son is admitted but they are going to get the football players they want.
Cal isn’t supposed to consider race in admissions (some claim they still do) but they are going to admit athletes who they want. It doesn’t mean some of them aren’t qualified academically. I know some of the swimmers are way above average. Aaron Rodgers seems to have done okay academically too.
Johns Hopkins did away with legacy preference, but I can’t imagine that they would dare to stop giving preference to athletes–competitive lacrosse is almost as much a part of their identity as rigorous academics.
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Oh, I’m quite sure they won’t.
I can assure you they NEVER will give up D1 lax, the scholarships they are allowed to give, the lax field they’ve built on campus…
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I feel like one of these things is not like the other.
I’m 100% fine with colleges who give a slight bump to elite athletes. We know they contribute to the community, and if they can keep grades in the same ballpark as the other students while also maintaining the rigorous training schedule that brought them to the elite status, then they are certainly capable. Seeing what some of my kids’ peers do to maintain good grades in honors/AP classes while still being an elite athlete…I find those kids to be the cream of the crop in terms of achievement, work ethic, etc.
I’m 100% fine with schools recognizing the value of diversity and the context of one’s achievements.
But giving kids who are likely coming from an already privileged background an extra bump in life based solely on who they are related to (no accomplishment, achievement, character of their own)…that feels completely different.
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Ivy League schools do not provide athletic scholarships- only need based financial aid.
In court filings in Harvard’s case against the SFFA, recruited athletes to Harvard had an 83% acceptance rate. Athletes had the biggest boost compared to donor, legacy, or children of faculty status.
IMO, it is easier for a recruited athlete to get accepted by the admissions office to an Ivy League school than to MIT, Swarthmore, or a NESCAC school. My guess is that being test optional improves the odds even more.
For any college that does not consider race in admissions, there will be people (on this forum and elsewhere) who continue to believe and insist that they do. This is not unique to California publics.
True, although recruited athletes personally did more to earn their hooks than the LDC hooked applicants whose hooks were “inherited” from their parents.
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Harvard or any school has the right to give as much preferential treatment as it wants to its special populations such as recruited athletes, donors, legacies, and children of faculty.
But the notion that (at least for Harvard University) recruited athletes only receive a small boost for admissions is debatable.
Research paper by Arcidiacono examined the admission statistics for the Harvard Class 2014-2019
Overall admission rate: < 5.5%
Overall recruited athlete admission rate: 86%
Of the 4 hooks they looked at: Athlete, Legacy, Donor, and Children of faculty, being a recruited athlete was by far the strongest hook.
According to their analysis, if a hypothetical student has a 10% chance for admission at Harvard, being a legacy increases the chance to 50%,
being a donor or double legacy increases the chance to 70%,
being a recruited athlete increases the chance to a “near certainty.”
Their conclusion.
“This paper has focused on the substantial preferences ALDC applicants to Harvard receive. The advantages for athletes are especially large, with an average admit rate for recruited athletes of 86%. This high admit rate occurs despite admitted athletes often being worse on Harvard’s ratings than the (entire) applicant pool itself.”
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Keep in mind the 83% number only reflects recruits who have already been pre-screened by admissions and then specifically offered one of a coach’s very few slots. Prior to applications, there were an awful lot of athletes who were rejected by some combination of admissions (for grades, scores, etc) and the coaching staff (passed over for better recruits). When the coach tells you that you they dont have a slot for you, it is a de facto rejection.
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http://public.econ.duke.edu/~psarcidi/legacyathlete.pdf
page 13.
“Using the results in Table D4, a similar calculation can be made for athletes. A typical
applicant with only a 1% chance of admission would see his admission likelihood increase to
98% if he were a recruited athlete. Being a recruited athlete essentially guarantees admission
even for the least-qualified applicants. A similar calculation, but in reverse, emphasizes the
advantage athletes receive. An athlete who has an 86% probability of admission—the average
rate among athletes—would have only a 0.1% chance of admission absent the athlete tip.”
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This is a really important point. To be a “recruited athlete,” you have to be within a certain range of their usual admission standards. We know a few kids who are gifted both intellectually and athletically. Around 9th grade, they made the choice to use athletics as the way in to Ivy League schools because all things considered, they felt that would increase their odds. So they spend an extra 20 hours a week on sports, and to compensate, they take 3 AP classes instead of 4, have only 2-3 academic extracurriculars instead of 5-6, and devote a little less time to maximizing their SAT/ACT scores. If you now took away their sport and just looked at what was left, they probably would have .1% chance of admission. But if you told them in 8th grade that the only way in was academics, they would’ve taken a different approach, and at least with the kids we know on this path, they would’ve been right up there with the kids who get admitted purely on academics.
I think it’s easy to interpret those statistics as demonstrating that they are admitting athletes who are incapable of meeting the academic standards. And what we have observed from friends on that path is the opposite. Truly gifted athletes who are only average or slightly above average students are going for Big Ten, ACC, PAC schools. The only kids ending up as recruited athletes at Ivy Leagues are the ones we all marvel at for their ability to accomplish so much academically while still training as hard as they do.
(My kids are not on the recruited athlete path. They work their butts off for both school and sport and are still not as elite in either as kids we know on the way to recruited athlete at Ivy League schools)
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Thousands (really) of potential recruits reached out to the coach or were seen at games/events by the coach, and the vetting begins there, as early as freshman year of HS.
Recruited athletes with full coach support should have a high rate of acceptance because they are pre-screened by the coach as well as admissions, and offered a slot instead of the other 10 or 30 (or whatever) athletes who made it to the last round of cuts the summer before senior year. Athletes experience their college rejections earlier than non-athletes, through the recruiting process and competition for fully supported slots, rather than the traditional admission process.
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If what you said was true, then the academic ability of athletes would be similar across all sports. After all, it can take just as much time commitment to become an elite athlete in fencing as it does to become one in say, football.
But the following article indicates that Ivy League schools require higher scores in sports like fencing to offset lower scores in sports like football.
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I don’t think the Ivy League Academic Index has been used for the past 2 recruiting cycles because it’s no longer possible to construct an index.
- All Ivy League schools are now test optional and recruited athletes are no longer required to supply test results for their pre-read or their actual application.
- SAT subject tests were eliminated in January 2021.
- Many high schools no longer supply a class rank.
I think the pre-reads only consist of evaluating the student’s HS transcript (first 2-3 years depending on the sport).
The few athletes that go Ivy from our school are usually football players - our Naviance outliers for Ivy League admissions show SAT scores as low as 1180 combined with a weighted gpa of 3.5. These kids are fine students who will graduate but their stats are way, way , way lower than kids that are routinely rejected from the same school.
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Some Ivy coaches are still requiring test scores for recruited athletes (as are some some non-Ivy coaches at TO schools).
SAT subject tests were on the decline for years their ultimate demise and before TO….AI was still calculated for recruits without subject test scores, with ACT/SAT test score as 2/3 of the equation. That formula’s still being used some of the schools/teams which require scores from athletic recruits. Not sure class rank was ever part of AI index calculation. If so, it was more than 20 years ago.
Our experience was that no Ivy League schools or NESCAC schools were requesting scores for recruited lacrosse players.
Before that, they were requesting SAT scores in the low 1400 range, but it sounded like a soft request as long as you were close.