Swimming Recruiting for Int’l Jr. Targeting Highly Selective Colleges

@Lkunk498 your analysis is dot on. our children have a slightly different stance:

D24 similarly wants to attend a selective and reputable school which is strong in her area of study. In an ideal world, she would secure the same athletic hook as your son and reach both her academic and athletic goals. Where they differ is that she won’t seek recruitment at all cost; she’s very conscious and ready to accept that she may need to apply to her second list with no hook, which includes schools with either no swimming, or walk-on/club opportunities.

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no, I was referring to the list of the 100 countries that her country (why I said Hong Kong) pays for as OP has referenced throughout this thread. If we knew the actual list, it would make finding a swim school much more of a possibility.

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There are 100 colleges in the US which are highly selective. You can drop down to 75 on any random list and find universities with acceptance rates close to 20%. What I do not understand is there MUST be colleges from 1-100 that are on the Hong Kong discount plan list that have a swim program which match her times. Again (1) very selective school (2) on the Hong Kong list AND (3) she has the times to swim.

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Excellent way to tackle this!

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I don’t think @Lkunk498 said her son was seeking recruitment “at all cost”. If I had to guess, her son’s and your daughter’s goals were/are identical.

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They did say swimming, at that point in time, was “non-negotiable”. Fortunately, he didn’t have to truly consider the trade offs.

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Not the first time someone will have said this on this thread, but selectivity is a descriptive statistic. To use it instead as a metric for a primary objective means that you/your D24 are not considering opportunities at many schools with strong programs in environmental science.

Many schools with the best opportunities for undergrad research and internships in that field of study (keys for actually getting a job in the field after graduating) are likely not even on your radar.

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Also, what I was trying to get across is without that athletic hook, she may very well be shut out of all schools on the very reachy non-swim list . As long as she is ok with that and happy with McGill, then no worries.

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You are correct. I didn’t say recruitment at all cost; I said swimming.

The recruitment part we didn’t have to chase, because my son was actively being recruited by many coaches. So it then came down to what was the best school for him with fit and athletics. I asked him many times if he wanted to consider other schools to expand the list w/o swimming and he didn’t want to consider it.

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All I found before about the discount is that that the student would be eligible to compete for that scholarship money if they chose to attend a college from the top-100 list. No word on the likelihood of them actually getting the scholarship.

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The domestic scholarship is not guaranteed, and is attributed selectively after interview to
students accepted to and planning on attending Top100 global universites. Not exactly sure which listing they use, something like the Times. There is no obligation for D24 to receive that scholarship, but it’s a nice to have indeed.

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If this potential scholarship and the top 100 list are a major impetus for the college list—as they seem to have been—it seems like having more certainty about what schools are actually on it and the likelihood of getting the award should have been investigated in a lot more detail.

I don’t think the scholarship is dispositive. There are only 5 D3 schools in the Times’ ranking (MIT, Carnegie Mellon, Emory, Wash U and NYU). Presumably the OP’s daughter reached out to the coaches at these schools months ago.

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I am going to refrain from rolling my eyes at that list.

LACs don’t make the cut - possibly because it’s a University list?

Regardless, OP expressed having the money to pay for college and it this list doesn’t greatly overlap with OPs list.

OP did imply several times that list was determinant of colleges prestige. If that is the case, why not include U Minnessota or UMD on the application list?

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Those are top 10 D3 schools and too fast. My guess is the list is heavily weighted towards graduate programs and irrelevant in terms of undergraduate education.

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So then, because a roster spot at a selective school is the goal, the scholarship is irrelevant to the OP’s strategy and decisions. In other words, it seems like they can have one – the scholarship, or swimming – but not both.

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Correct.

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Remember OP’s school limits students to 10 college apps, and the D has the option of attending school in their home country.

Also CalTech, JHU, and Chicago. I believe CalTech was ruled out for fit reasons. Not sure about Chicago and JHU.

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