@SAY – You are right. The Yale Club is great.
Every time I go, I’m surprised at how nice all those Elis are to us lowly state school grads. I guess they have to, though, since we help them pay the bills. : )
C’mon people, haven’t you all read Boys in the Boat, about a college team that went on to represent the nation in the 1936 Olympics while standing up to Hitler?
Don’t you think tiny Croatia is proud of its team that will play for the World Cup tomorrow? I suspect that almost every eye in the country will be tuned in for the game. And the same in mighty France.
I have seen old geezers cry here in Chicago when the Cubs won the World Series and I remember a colleague that ddn’t come to work for two days when the White Sox and then the Blackhawks also won the World Championships.
I remember how Chicago came together in ecstasy during the Michael Jordan years and how it united the city,
And I can name 10 Cinderella teams that have captured the county’s attention by making an unlikely deep run in March Madness (UMBC beat Virginia? Seriously??!!??)
This is the lighting that Ivy admissions in trying to capture in a bottle by fielding teams and prioritizing student-athletes. There are few things that can bring a community together like sports.
While lightening can occasionally strike in fiction (Harry Potter) or drama (Hamilton) or service (Ice Bucket Challenge), it is much more common in sports, probably because, as Northwesty said, there is a scoreboard and that creates drama and engagement.
If you every want to see the Ivy League come together like never before, let a team make a deposit run in March Madness. I could make the case that HYP should make. concerted effort to get to the Final Four and you would see a ROI of many multiples, similar to what Duke has experienced. Since basketball is only 12 people and only 5 can make a huge difference, I cannot understand what one of HYP has not done this already. The kids on the team that breaks through will be set for Life.
In addition to the ability of sports to create and build community, I can also tell you that students that play sports for a school develop a deep bond in a way a normal academic student will not know. Nothing like getting up for 5AM practice and/or flying back in from the West Coast while still making Monday class and acing the test to build a bond between teammates and school that will last a lifetime. Many of these student-athletes will stay more deeply involved and engaged with the college than the normal student. Admissions knows this.
With all these benefits, I think it is clear why the top academic universities make room for true student athletes…
I’d suggest it’s a bit more nuanced, @northwesty. I entirely agree that institutional imperatives dictate that HYP have to be broadly competitive with each other over a range of sports (notably football and crew). There will be some sports where one or more schools have a history of being strong, and involved alumni who care.
HYP are also happy to compete at a national level in niche sports like crew, lacrosse, fencing, etc., where fewer athletes need to be recruited, more athletes come from a high-SES profile and therefore present with a better academic profile and aren’t as focused on athletic scholarships, etc. I think it makes students and alumni feel good to see at least a few sports where Alma Mater can hold their own against the best - including Stanford.
Where HYP won’t seek to be competitive at the national level are sports where the revenue potential, and therefore the resources required to compete, are incompatible with the Ivy League’s prohibition on athletic scholarships and its requirements such as the Academic Index and restrictions on practice times and schedules.
This is why Ivy League football teams don’t play against Power 5 teams - they don’t have the ability to compete on scholarships, have their hands tied on practices and game times and, to put it bluntly, they’d have to offer spots to too many academically inferior “students”. I compared the CDSs once and concluded that every year Stanford admits at least 50 kids who would be academically unacceptable at HYP.
Harvard offers Bro Bible class to help some of the athletes out. No one has to worry about an athlete graduating from an Ivy like Harvard
Jerry Ford graduated from Yale Law School after a stand out football career at Michigan. He was hired as a football and boxing coach by Yale and then applied to Yale Law School and graduated in the top 25%. His portrait now graces the Yale Club of NYC lounge (along with all the other US presidents from Yale.) Contrary to the caricature that Chevy Chase performed on Saturday Night Live, his career is one example of the combination of athletics, ethics, leadership and academic ability that HYP traditions value. George HW Bush is another example–captain of Yale baseball, PBK, Skull and Bones, etc.
So a few things things:
• Offered, not offers; it’s not offered next year, in part, because it no longer counts toward gen ed requirements
• The class was populated by more than athletes
• An athlete would be hard pressed to build a 32 course schedule of similar courses necessary for a degree
• I am sure every college, even at the top tier, has a few courses that are known for a less-than-rigorous workload
• It was actually a very interesting class.
HYP actually are or can become very competitive at a number of non-headcount scholarship sports. For men’s the headcount sports (full ride for each recruit) are football and basketball, which are also the major revenue sports. For women, the headcount sports are basketball, tennis, gymnastics and volleyball. The other sports offer limited scholarships per NCAA limits, which means most scholarship recruits at other D1 programs are only granted partial scholarships. In most cases scholarships are awarded year by year with no guarantee that the athlete will retain his/her scholarship for all 4 years. For HYP, since financial aid is 100% grant, athletes that are not from full pay households and who play sports other than football and basketball or tennis, gymnastics and volleyball, may very well do much better aid-wise at HYP vs. a scholarship school. Further, their aid is never at risk because of injury or if they should decide to drop their sport. The major limitation of course is the AI requirement.
While HYP are nationally competitive in a minority of offered sports, the comparison was made to Stanford. Stanford is nationally competitive in a tremendously larger portion of sports. As a whole, the schools play on different levels. For example, the most recent full year NACDA Director’s Cup rankings are at http://www.nacda.com/directorscup/nacda-directorscup-previous-scoring.html and summarized below. These rankings reflect the combined performance across a variety of sports. Every year forms a similar pattern, going back for decades.
@BKSquared
Just FYI the Ivies do not offer athletic scholarships…at all. FA is solely need based aid and determined by family income etc…
@Data10: Stanford is stronger in a far greater range of sports than HYP (although HYP are often better at a few) - no one claimed otherwise. That said, this is because: Stanford is the only tippy-top school in the Western US, so has much less regional competition for athletes than the Ivies (which are eight schools within a few hundred miles of each other); benefits from a climate that permits year-round outdoor practices; as noted, isn’t bound by Ivy League restrictions, including Academic Index; and, as such, offers athletic scholarships and admits 50+ kids a year who would never be admitted to HYP, primarily athletes. If the same kind of data that’s been made available regarding Harvard admissions were made public for Stanford admissions, I would guess the benefits to Stanford recruited athletes relative to the rest of the applicant pool would be far more glaring than at Harvard. It’s just a sportier place, by design.
and this is why athletic recruiting in headcount sports is challenging for Ivies. Prospects are offered full rides or even full CoA scholarships by non-Ivy D1 schools. This is more aid parity in non-headcount sports.
“This is more aid parity in non-headcount sports.”
The type of sport doesn’t matter. Ivies do not give more aid to say a football player vs squash player. The only leverage a “headcount” sportmay have are more recruiting spots but that’s it.
I disagree, tonymom. An athlete in a headcount sport, say gymnastics, can get a 100% scholarship at Stanford, but the same student may get nothing at all at Harvard. The Harvard award would depend on need, and very few students are getting 100% of COA.
Say it is a family with a $180k income. The swimmer (non-headcount) may get $20k at Stanford as an athletic scholarship and $10k from Harvard as a need award. A really good swimmer, an Olympic level swimmer, with a family income of $200k may get $40k from Stanford and $0 from Harvard.
I was referring to within an Ivy school not between Stanford and an Ivy. Sorry for the confusion.
@tonymom , I know Ivies don’t offer athletic. My point was for equivalent (non-headcount) sports that HYP may be financially a better deal than schools which offer athletic scholarships by virtue of the fact that at the athletic school the kid may only get a quarter or a half scholarship which may be only guaranteed for 1 year. A low to middle income athlete going to HYP may get far more generous financial aid in grant form than they would at a college that gives them a half or a quarter athletic scholarship only. They are also set for all 4 years regardless of injury, performance or if they decide to quit.
So @twoinanddone, conversely a middle income swimmer may get $20k at Stanford, but $40k from Harvard, and he/she would not have to worry about losing his/her aid (unless the family’s income soared significantly, which is itself a good thing).
If you using a definition of “tippy top” that includes all 8 ivies, then the range of colleges that meet that criteria should be wide enough to include far more colleges in the western US than just Stanford. Furthermore, Div I recruited athletes often have different priorities when choosing colleges than typical posters on the site. It’s not primarily about which top prestige college is a “tippy top” or what college has the lowest admit rate. The sport is critical – how the college can assist in meeting their goals for the sport, as well as how the college does in the sport. Scholarships is a part of this, but far from the only part. For example, one of my relatives is really big on women’s basketball and closely follows the recruiting for different colleges. When Stanford makes offers and players reject them and choose to attend elsewhere, the college it loses these potential recruits to tend to be colleges that are top ranked in women’s basketball, like Baylor and UConn, rather than colleges that are top ranked academically, like Harvard or Yale.
Actually, Stanford does lose some recruits to HYP. This year’s top football QB recruit Brevin White chose Princeton over Bama, USC etc (presumably Stanford too). And I know this year’s top women’s golf recruit turned down Stanford for Harvard. Both of them gave up large amount of scholarships and will be full pay at Princeton and Harvard. The reasons: academics and career prospect in case their sports careers don’t work out. At a PAC10 school like Stanford athletes focus in college is their recruited sport and training schedules usually don’t allow much academics.
Actually, Stanford and USC did not make an offer to Brevin White. Only one top 10 ranked team made an offer — Alabama. It is quite rare for a football recruit to choose Princeton over Alabama… so rare that his decision made a lot of news stories, which is probably how you heard about it. It doesn’t make news when the overwhelming portion of other football recruits who received offers from both Alabama and an Ivy choose Alabama.
In any case, I did not say that Stanford loses zero recruits to HYP. I said, that Div I recruited athletes often have different priorities than typical posters on this site – emphasizing their sport and related goals, rather than focusing on the prestige of the college name or the admit rate. “Often” does not mean 100% of athletes. Different individual athletes have different relative priorities. There is also a wide general variation among specific sports.
I was a varsity athlete at Stanford, and in my experience, this simply isn’t true. NCAA regulations permit a max of 20 hours of practice per week. Teams may exceed that somewhat for a variety of reasons including travel, but it still offers time for academics, just as some students have a part time job or time consuming EC while also pursuing academics. Practices are often coordinated in such a way to avoid conflicting with classes. For example, the bus left for crew practice at 6AM, and we’d usually get back just in time for 9AM classes. This is reflected in the high athlete graduation rate. Stanford’s GSR graduation rate for athletes is 98% in most years (search is offline, so I cannot check current), which is as high or higher than most Ivies.
looking MIT appears to be slightly different but still is a culture fart far different from H or Y. Academically gifted D1 athletes account for something like 20% of the student body and that creates a culture vastly different from MIT, Cal Tech, or U of C. There is a reason why the top engineering schools do not appeal to many top female students and hence are given some amount of preference.
Say what?
Katie Ledecki (Olympic Champ and leader of Stanford’s back-to-back National Champ swim team) reportedly has a 3.8+ GPA.
In addition to being a top team across many sports, Stanford is also a leader in APR, including football and men’s b’ball.
https://gostanford.com/news/2018/5/16/athletics-apr-awards-announced.aspx
btw: Harvard had 6 teams.