Yale didn’t win the national championship in lacrosse because they took the best 10 guys who showed up at an open try-out. The coach can’t just hope a top goalie applies to Yale and gets in, or that the nation’s top scorer happens to have a 1600 on the SAT so doesn’t need admissions help. If that goalie and that top scorer can’t be assured of admissions at Yale with a Likely Letter, he’ll be looking at going to ND or Duke or Maryland. Of course the Yale coach could find 35 guys who played high school lax in the general student body, but they’d not be a championship team, not even an Ivy championship team.
The Ivies didn’t have athletic recruiting as we know it today until the 50’s. Really no schools did. But the Ivies starting giving admission preference to athletes who also met all the other desires of the schools - legacies, non-Jewish/Catholic, handsome, athletic. Then the NCAA started regulating recruiting, girls came into the mix, Title IX.
Oh, if only the Ivies could go back to the good old days of admitting only prep school WASP legacies with no preference for athletics!
There are some public schools (in pricey suburbs for the most part), but I see 2 non-white faces (have to make a surname guess in the case of possible Jewish players, but only one is Hispanic and only one is black, some are possibly Catholic).
I think it’s safe to say that the mens LAX team is not contributing to ethnic or racial diversity at Yale.
This isn’t quite right. Many Harvard alums care a great deal about beating Yale in football, and vice versa. Men’s basketball and ice hockey also have a following, albeit smaller. I think they recruit for these sports primarily to keep the alums happy, and alums are a very important constituency for a university, not only for the money they give, though that’s certainly a big factor.
It’s less clear why they recruit for “non-revenue” sports that almost no one follows, except perhaps alums who were varsity athletes in that sport. But maybe that’s enough for them to consider it worthwhile to give away a few admissions slots.
I’m also not convinced you need to be reasonably competitive just because you have a team. Schools like Chicago and Caltech have a long history of fielding uncompetitive teams and no one seems to mind. Some schools actually take a perverse pride in it.
When I was a post-doc at MIT, the student newspaper had a headline about the football team: 0-7 Record Deceptive…
I think that if it suddenly became the case that no one with a good voice met the academic standard at Yale, there would be an admissions boost for being a potential member of the Whiffenpoofs. That seems to me like the real test, rather than whether choral groups are scored. No boosts for areas that need no boosting. The Whiffenpoofs are pretty strongly identified with Yale. While the quality could go up and down, if it really fell off, people would care.
Seriously, the colleges at the University of Cambridge with Choral Scholars do not hold their Choral Scholars to the same academic standard as the rest of the admits (though some reach it), because they need more high-quality members of the choirs than the normal cut-offs would provide.
Football doesn’t fill the bowl either but it does seem to attract about 10x the crowd.
I have no beef with Lacrosse - my kid played and loves the sport and I certainly put in my volunteer time getting the sport going in our area, from inception to club to varsity to extremely competitive varsity team. But should LAX players jump ahead of the line at Yale and similar schools? I don’t think so.
Yale can do what it wants, of course. If it gets them more full pays and legacies and yes, championships, yay.
“I think that if it suddenly became the case that no one with a good voice met the academic standard at Yale, there would be an admissions boost for being a potential member of the Whiffenpoofs. That seems to me like the real test, rather than whether choral groups are scored.”
Few have ears discerning enough to tell if today’s Whiffs are singing only at 90% of the historical Whiff standard and, therefore, suck. Similarly, there’s really no simple way to tell if the Harvard Crimson is slipping and getting dominated by the Yale Daily News.
But if Yale football loses every game by five touchdowns, it is completely obvious to everyone (including those who know nothing about football) that they totally suck. Yale can’t have that, even if their football game attendance pales in comparison to a mid-sized HS team in Texas.
It is 100% about the scoreboard. If there wasn’t a scoreboard, athletes would get treated the same as actors, singers and student journalists.
Imagine that there was a scoreboard for glee club. Harvard Glee starts crushing Yale Glee because Harvard Glee starts recruiting singers and giving admissions tips. What does Yale do?
Yale starts recruiting and giving admission tips. Obviously. Because they can no longer rely on unrecruited/untipped kids to show up and meet the acceptable measure-able standard.
There’s a reason why the Ivy League and the AI system were created for athletics. And why there’s nothing like that for poets, singers, actors and journalists.
Debate teams have scoreboards and championships also.
Yale’s debate team seems to think it is currently ranked first in the US and third in the world, and is pretty darn proud of it: http://www.yaledebate.org/
But the process appears to be quite different from the current athletic recruiting process:
Maybe the difference isn’t “having a score” but more that lots of academically Yale-ready students are also capable of being great debaters, and that’s not the case with many skilled athletes.
Those are HUGE numbers for watching lacrosse. The 0’s for the last few games (Loyola and Albany) were not played at Yale but at tournament sites. Notice that the game played at UMass had only 437 watching but at the UMass game played at Yale 1411. The Albany game was at Gillette stadium, so probably had the close to 30,000 that the final had (Duke), and didn’t include those of us watching on TV (me). Huge numbers.
My point was that recruiting wasn’t started at Ivies to increase diversity but to prevent it. Ivies started giving admission preference to athletic in part to keep those they didn’t want (mostly non-prep school kids, Catholics, Jews, and minorities) OUT of Ivies. Then the NCAA rules started, and women were admitted to Ivies, and Title IX required sports to be added. Diversity became desirable, including minorities, and the Ivies had affirmative action spots. They didn’t combine URM spots with sports spots.
[quote @twoinanddone My point was that recruiting wasn’t started at Ivies to increase diversity but to prevent it.
[/quote]
My point also. Didn’t read your post that way, apologies.
At least one NESCAC (the one that released a very detailed athletic report publicly, ahem) says that, more or less. URM athletic recruit? Doesn’t count against coach’s slots, moved to URM bucket and coach keeps the # of team slots s/he had. Athletes far less diverse than the college, academic standards lower (though not a ton, in that case).
“I’m not sure I understand the point you’re trying to make”
My point is that some non-athletic activities have a far greater positive impact on the wider community than a victorious water polo team, yet the water polo team gets dedicated spots in the class, whereas we just assume somebody good enough will show up to every other meaningful activity. Privileging sports over other activities runs counter to my values.
I don’t understand the logic that because many people can’t tell the difference between good singing and superb singing, the difference between good and superb doesn’t matter. That’s not how Harvard thinks about anything else. There may be 10 people in the world who can tell the difference between a good thesis and a superb thesis in Hittite linguistics, but Harvard cares a LOT about that distinction and will spare no expense to find one of those 10 people to judge it.
No, the Whiffenpoofs are not superb every year. Ask a Whiffenpoof.
Isn’t ‘caring about the difference between good and superb’ exactly what Harvard is doing by trying to recruit the best (academically qualified) athletes? My understanding has always been that a Harvard views athletics as part of the academic mission of the university, hence the endowed coaching positions, involvement of faculty advisors, etc. Maybe they don’t view singing clubs the same way.
I’m not sure why folks care so much about attendance at sporting events as a measure of importance. Just an example…I’ve had the chance to watch Gabby Thomas race a few times this year, as well as being around her in the warmup area. Delightful woman and would be an asset to any college community. I’d be shocked if she wasn’t receiving full ride offers as a HS senior. What did Harvard get by offering her a pre read and a likely letter? Well, aside from an NCAA champ and new collegiate record holder in the indoor 200, they got a great role model for thousands of young women in this country and throughout the world (last week she won a Diamond League race in Lausanne). Sure, perhaps not many Harvard students attend her meets. But is that really the issue? Would Harvard be a better place if instead they added yet another student who took the SAT four times and hired a private counselor to help with packaging?
@QuantMech wrote: „Seriously, the colleges at the University of Cambridge with Choral Scholars do not hold their Choral Scholars to the same academic standard as the rest of the admits (though some reach it), because they need more high-quality members of the choirs than the normal cut-offs would provide.“
But most choral and organ scholars (at least those I knew) read music, in which case the colleges wouldn’t care about other academics anyway. And they do have to sit the same central exams at the and of the day.
The most mind boggling aspect about the athletic admission preference (among the many that are mind boggling to the non US person) appears to me to be the process.
In comparison to the holistic black box every other applicant has to deal with, the process appears structured, transparent, almost fully predictable (come on, 87% as opposed to, what, 2% for the non hooked RD candidate?), and merit based (achievement and potential wise) in ways that no other admission route is. These kids get academic prereads, probably financial prereads, likely letters…everyone else, even the academic superstars, let alone the musical or artistic or leadership or resilience superstars, get the black box, and must make their choices about EA, ED and RD without all this information.
If anything speaks to preference, even above academics, it’s that. And there’s nothing holistic about it at all.
Totally agree with @hanna: why wouldn’t the best universities in the world (according to most measures) strive for excellence in everything that is part of your mission, academic, physical, aesthetic and cultural education, and show it not just in the quantitative preference, but also in the way the is structured?
This was just posted on the Harvard forum by Dave Berry.
"As part of the sprawling admissions debacle, the Harvard Crimson last week broke the story that the smartest athlete applicants have an 83 percent admission rate, as opposed to 16 percent for regular applicants.
It seems fair to conclude from this information that Harvard really wants athletes. Its reason for wanting them, however, is not apparent." …
First of all, I wish we smart folks could quit quoting the plaintiff side as fact. I wish we could discern that slant, not call their study, the conclusions they present (that they aimed for,) anything definitive. It has its own measure of spin. Both sides do, sure. But the rational process is to sort through both, apply critical thinking and realism.
Second, more of this common ‘black box’ thinking is defeatist and incomplete and a rather good example of what pulls down the apps of many top performers. I’d wager most kids/families don’t try hard enough to understand that “excellence in everything” is not just about the obvious quantitative or hierarchical that smacks you in the face. That thinking isnt even “excellence.” So you end up with a faulty basis.
On top of that, the chances start at about 5% (for Harvard) and go down from there. But, Nooo, if you or your kid is in the 95%, it’s got to be rigged?
Of course I don’t like athletic recruiting. Sorry. But too often people use “if only” thinking. If only they didn’t want sorts of diversity, if only they’d just use hs rank or go top down on stats, if only they excluded this or that category. Meanwhile 40k apply for 2k spots. Not every applicant is a special snowflake. The game is tougher. You can at least try to decipher it.
Re Cambridge and tigerle’s post #215. There are no central exams in Cambridge or Oxford. Students take only rather specialized exams for their subject areas. The exams may have a bit broader coverage in the first year, but the degree classification hinges on the outcome of the exams at the end of the third year, which are exclusively in the major area.
British students are already quite specialized in the final pre-college years. Most of the offers of Oxbridge admission to British students are based on the results of just three A-levels, and in a few cases, four. So a STEM student might qualify with A levels in Physics, Maths, and Chemistry, for example.
You might have thought that the Choral Scholars would typically be pursuing degrees in Music. But in many years, they are not, because Music tends to be extremely demanding, and it is different from the music practice/performance courses in American colleges. There was an era in which a large number of Choral Scholars were reading for degrees in English literature.
How this is related to the topic and the current discussion: I agree with Hanna that it actually is strange that the “top” colleges offer a sports boost for admissions–considerable, to the extent that it can overcome an academic rating of 4–but they do not offer any comparable boost for applicants who are outstanding in other areas that add as much to the vitality of the college experience, for all of the students. Then, I have been pointing out that this practice is not universal. Oxbridge colleges with serious choirs offer an admissions edge to their Choral Scholars, because they need them. There is no inter-college competition with score keeping, as far as I am aware, and one certainly cannot get a “blue” in choral performance.