The Harvard Crimson: Filings Show Athletes With High Academic Scores Have 83% Acceptance Rate

Parents Forum
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The elite private colleges are built around the need to bring in a majority of students who are full-pay or close to full pay. As college COA has skyrocketed, the cutoff for “full pay” means that the student body as a whole grows ever-more affluent, and that close-to-full pay group becomes comprised of many students whose families would have been full pay in the recent past.

Harvard is known to have among the most generous need-based financial aid practices of all colleges, but the Common Data Set for 2017-2018 shows a COA of $68,580. Roughly 55% of enrolling freshman received need-based aid, with average grant aid of $53,120-- which is $15,460 below the COA. Given that Harvard also advertises that " if your family earns less than $65,000 per year, your parents pay nothing for you to attend Harvard." --there must be a considerable number of families who earn considerably more than that to counter-balance the students receiving full-ride level grants. I can’t tell from the numbers how many that would be, but I think that it would be fair to assume that a significant fraction of financial aid recipients are receiving grant aid of less than $18K/year – or an expected family contribution of $50K or more-- which would still be cost-prohibitive for most middle-class families.

So yes, the system advantages the advantaged. It is built that way. Harvard may very well be more generous than most, but part of that generosity lies in financial aid policies that direct a significant portion of need-based funds to families who would be considered advantaged in any other setting. And that is one way that holistic admission works – all of those fuzzy factors that are assigned numbers are also a way to assure that Harvard continues to weight its class with the requisite number of the offspring of wealthy parents to assure that the bills get paid in the way the people who manage the finances want.

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Less of that happening recently :)>-

https://www.bostonglobe.com/sports/colleges/2018/06/09/yale-crew-tops-harvard-for-third-straight-year/xXQnugEoKD7WDhydLT6qyM/story.html
https://www.sbnation.com/college-football/2017/11/18/16673552/yale-harvard-final-score-results-2017

To be fair, the dominance is a relatively recent phenomenon, following long dry spells…

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@ccprofandmomof2 says

Part of the difference is simply supply and demand. A much smaller number of the nation’s (and the world’s) top athletes want to go to Ivies and have grades and scores good enough to get in than the number of top debaters. If you’re really good at basketball or football–so good you have a “shot” at the pros–you’re unlikely to want to play for an Ivy. You’re not going to face the same level of competition, you are less likely to have a top coach, you’ll have fewer privileges, and little chance to play in post-season playoff games. Add to this that the Ivies don’t give athletic scholarships and most of the very top athletes are going to pick other schools. Despite this, the Ivies field a lot of teams. At most Ivies, athletes make up about 15% of the class. So, given the restrictions on recruiting, post-season play, etc. in some sports the Ivies recruit players that major conference schools wouldn’t even look at.

All of the Ivies have debate teams, although some only have “parli”(-amentary) debate and only a few have both parliamentary and policy debate. Usually only a limited number of people can be on the debate team. (Again, some have bigger teams than others and, as noted above, some have both parli and policy.) “Extemp” ((-oraneous speaking) doesn’t really exist as a formal activity in college, so kids who do that often gravitate to “parli” in college. Plus, debate is a much bigger deal overseas, so in addition to American kids, you’ll also get a fair number of kids from Singapore, India, Australia, Hong Kong, etc. who are outstanding debaters. And there are usually a couple of kids each year who make the team as the equivalent of “walk ons.” They have no debate experience, but do well in try outs because they are good speakers and think quickly. (Improv performers sometimes make it.)

VERY few top colleges give debate scholarships. Most of those that do tend to be in policy, as far as I know. So fewer of the very best debaters than top athletes are siphoned off to other colleges for financial reasons. There’s no professional debate circuit–though one heck of a lot of college debaters go to law school–so the considerations a top football or basketball player take into account re post-graduation simply don’t apply to debaters.

Nobody has to apply an “academic index” to make sure the high school debaters admitted are equal to other students in terms of test scores and GPAs. Without doing any formal recruiting and despite the lack of adequate funding at some of them, no Ivy has any trouble fielding a debate team. In fact, there are usually try-outs of some sort and at some Ivies, fewer than half those who try out make the team.( Most of those trying out excelled in debate, speech or a similar activity in high school and they can be really stunned if they don’t make it.)

So while I do think sports are overemphasized, at least part of it is supply and demand. There’s no lack of debaters at the Ivies. This year, a team from Harvard won the WUDC–World Universities Debate Championship-- which involves competitors fro 90 different countries debating in British parli format. All 5 Yale teams made it through the elimination rounds. H and Y don’t have to recruit to get the best debaters. They DO have to recruit to get competitive athletes.

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Lacrosse is THE sport at Yale this year. And they do care. Winning a national championships doesn’t happen by fielding the first 10 guys who show up for try-outs.

http://www.espn.com/college-sports/story/_/id/23633366/yale-beats-duke-school-first-lacrosse-championship

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Hanna is right that few people besides swimming or squash alums care whether Harvard beats Yale in swimming or squash. But I doubt that the swimming and squash coaches have a lot of “recruit” chips they can use (and in the case of swimming, I would bet meaningfully more recruiting slots are reserved for women as part of the Title IX effort to balance out football recruiting). One of the reasons so many “2” athletes get accepted is that the coaches rely on “2” athletes with “2” academics to fill their teams.

If there are only 200 or so “1” academics per class, and a “1” rating requires faculty review . . . how many “1” academic athletic recruits can there be? And how can Harvard possibly reject 17% of them? (Oh, because the 83% acceptance rate includes academic “2s” as well.)

I too am shocked that the 83% acceptance rate for recruited athletes with good academics is so low. Those kids generally are “pre-read,” and the way things work they often don’t get to apply to lots of colleges. They have to make decisions very early where they are going. In many cases, Harvard recruited athletes are turning down full ride athletic scholarships at other D-1 schools to apply to Harvard.

I do know kids get rejected, though, because that happened to a friend’s child. The student was a late bloomer who was nonetheless highly ranked nationally in a sport Ivies care a lot about, and was recruited everywhere. Probably a “3” or “4” academically – perfectly good B+/A- honors track student at a decent suburban public high school, ~1400 SATs. Not likely to win a Nobel Prize or Fields Medal, but not likely to flunk out anywhere either. After a lot of agonizing, the student decided to apply SCEA to one of the SCEA colleges, which (like all of them) had given a positive pre-read to the application. A week before Thanksgiving, the student got a call from the coach at the college to which the student had applied: So sorry, but the student was not going to be accepted. The student’s alternatives at that point were far reduced from what they had been a month or two before. The story had a more-than-happy ending, but not without some dark days with a lot of tears.

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“Part of the difference is simply supply and demand. A much smaller number of the nation’s (and the world’s) top athletes want to go to Ivies and have grades and scores good enough to get in than the number of top debaters”

A much smaller PROPORTION of the world’s top athletes are interested and qualified to go to Ivies. But in the USA, we create a ton more kids with athletic excellence than any other kind of activity, so the absolute number of top athletes across 20+ sports is way higher than the number of debaters, artists, church leaders, etc. In the USA, we put more resources and push more kids into participation in sports than into all other activities put together. We reap what we sow.

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So these aren’t the high achieving student athletes. Just athletes, really. And many in sports no one watches but are predominantly white and wealthy and coincidentally popular at private prep schools.

What purpose could this athletic admission advantage possibly serve for Harvard?

Hmm.

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The Arcidiacono report mentions an 70.5% of recruited athletes are admitted with a 4 in academics (~1 out of 7 admitted athletes) and a 86% admit rate overall. The previously linked Harvard OIR reported mentioned a 83% admit rate for recruited athletes with a 1-2 in academics. This suggest the following admit rates for recruited athlete by academic rating:

Academic = 1 – Only ~0.5% of applicants receive this. The number of recruited athletes in this category is almost certainly negligible. I’d expect a ~100% admit rate, in the rare cases that this does occur.
Academic = 2: ~83% admit rate
Academic = 3: ~90% admit rate
Academic = 4: ~70% admit rate

I expect that Harvard gives a greater admissions boost to some recruited athletes than others. For example, the star football recruit probably receives a bigger boost than a typical women’s rugby recruit. Perhaps the apparent higher admit rate for Academic = 3 than Academic = 2 reflects that the recruits receiving the biggest boost are more likely to have weaker academics than typical Harvard applicants, while the recruits playing in less popular sports where there is little hope of going pro tend to have more solid academics and are more likely to be in the Academic = 2 group than typical among recruited athletes.

The percentage of applicants receiving different ratings are below. Note that there are also +/- ratings (for example, 3+ or 2-), which are not separated. I also listed the regression coefficient associated with the different ratings for admissions decision. I realize this is imprecise without listing standard errors and controls, but it gives some idea how much different ratings influence decisions.

1’s are extremely rare and only make up an extremely small portion of applicants and a minority of admits. The bulk are what the dean of admissions at Harvard has called “all arounders.” These are likely applicants who receive no 1’s, and instead received 2’s in several different categories. I’d guess the most common mix among unhooked admits is straight 2’s in academic, ECs, and personal. Card implies that most of this group is rejected, so there are plenty of other important factors, including things like essays, LORs, and interview (beyond just how they influence academic and personal rating), applying SCEA, etc. I’d expect admissions are more forgiving among hooks, including legacy. The bigger the hook, the more opportunity there is to have 3’s in other areas or 4’s in EC’s/athletic. 4’s in Academic or Personal seem to almost force rejection unless a recruited athlete.

Black: +3.674
Legacy: +2.329
Hispanic: +1.959
Early Action: +1.531

In 2016:
Academic = 1: 0.5%, +4.573
Academic = 2: 40%, +1.512
Academic = 3: 40%, Nominal
Academic = 4: 14%, -2.328
Academic = 5: 6% (special meaning)

Combining Card and Arciadano’s ~6-year sample:
Athletic = 1: 0.8%, +Very high
Athletic = 2: 9%, +1.357
Athletic = 3: 51%, Nominal
Athletic = 4+: 40%, -0.041

ECs = 1: 0.3%, +3.672
ECs = 2: 24%, +1.417
ECs = 3: 72%, Nominal
ECs = 4+: 4%, -0.739

Personal = 1: 0.02%, +3.276
Personal = 2: 20%, +2.075
Personal = 3: 79%, Nominal
Personal = 4+: 0.5%, -3.346

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@Hanna re:#85 pretty sure the absolute number of top athletes in a given sport is a constant. The top 50 HS swimmers in the US might be better on average than 30 yrs ago, but last I checked there were still only 50 of them. And, as was pointed out, only a smallish percentage will have the academic qualifications to attend an Ivy.

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Since many of recruited athletes sign their LOI in November of their junior year, I wonder whether some senioritis might be one of the reasons of the “only” 83% acceptance rate. One of the RAs at my son’s school was accepted to a good school on condition of keeping the GPAs, the person didn’t and the offer was off the table in April.

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In the context of the Ivy league athletic admission process these numbers do not make any sense. If Harvard coaches can only guarantee 83% or 70% success rate the word will get out and they will not be able to recruit going forward :-*
The vast majority of non-admissable recruits are weeded out before they submit their application. Sometimes the Likely Letter is promised conditionally based on re-tests in the fall of senior year that may fail to improve the scores but this should be rare. Recruit can also self-sabotage their application by doing really shoddy job but this should be rare too. I am not sure if these researchers had information about who was definitely promised athletic admission and who was not.
In my limited experience out of roughly 30 Ivy recruits I only knew one who was promised a LL at Princeton, did not get it and ended up at Brown.

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@Tanbiko yes, I think for the numbers to be meaningful, ‘recruited athlete’ would need to be defined as one who has passed a pre read and been given or offered a likely letter. Hard to imagine only 70 or 80 % admit rate in that category

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LOIs cannot be signed until Nov 15th-ish of senior year, and Ivies aren’t NLI schools because one of the requirements of an NLI is that there is athletic money awarded.

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Afaik, H is the only one that admits there’s room for those “brightest minds,” who get a special bye. With all the openness Fitzsimons has shown over time, (granted, you have to find it and then piece it together,) this presence of the “brightest minds,” I think, confuses many.

Interviews are “eyes on.” If you can accept that high performing kids don’t necessarily present the rest of the traits H or another tippy top looks for, you can imagine how kids can leave an impression in an interview that doesn’t advance their applications.

Also, getting to a faculty look-see can’t be based solely on an adcom (or set of reviewers) designating a kid a “1.” In many cases, kids get to faculty review because admission needs the depth of knowledge faculty offers, to confirm. (It’s not as simple as winning some prestigious competition, eg. And not all the “brightest minds” admits are in fields where their extraordinariness is easily quantifiable.)

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In the Harvard lawsuit documentation, the definition of the group being called “recruited athletes” is as follows. Perhaps this grouping includes some additional situations besides those offered a likely letter. The Harvard website implies such cases exist for some recruited athletes.

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I would like to know what % of athletes that have spoken to a coach can meet the criteria for Ivies. Is it 10%, 5% more. Of course once they are in the funnel it’s different. One assumes the coach has already told the rest they won’t likely pass muster.

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@Data10 thanks, that’s useful. That sounds like a broad definition of recruited, likely including athletes not receiving coach support through admissions.

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@lookingforward I totally agree with your assessment of faculty review. A lot of people just don’t understand it.

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The specific quotes from Dean Fitzsommons NYT article is below:

Note that the 3 categories mentioned are the same 3 non-athletic rating categories Harvard uses, hinting about my earlier comment about bulk of unhooked admits being “all-arounders” who received straight 2’s in these 3 categories.

I expect this first “caveat” group is signaled by receiving a “1” in academics. Both the Dean of Admissions quote and the lawsuit “1” academic rating quote imply many of this group have academic work reviewed by Harvard faculty. However, I agree that is not the only situation in which a faculty may review an application. The plantiff’s model found that being among this “1” in academics group gave a huge boost in chance of admission, bigger than all hooks except for recruited athlete — a large enough boost that many in this group can be admitted without being an “all-arounder” or having hooks, like implied by Dean Fitzsommons’s quote.

Similarly I expect this second caveat group is signaled by receiving a “1” in the other categories – ECs Personal, or Athletic. The ~1% of applicants who receive “1” in ECs or Athletic “pursued some activity to an unusual degree.” Less than a dozen applicants receive a “1” in Personal most years, but among the few that do, I expect this statement would still apply. Many in this group also receive a large enough boost to not need to be “all-arounders.”

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I don’t disagree. But while the Brightest Minds may have their own huge boost at H, they aren’t the bulk of the class, and the average excellent (or very excellent) kid is not on that level. And the 2nd caveat includes that “because of their personal qualities,” which is a huge opening to exclude those kids who think “unilateral” rules. I think it refers to, eg, kids deeply involved in particular commitments in addition to a nice individual rounding. The nice, broadly engaged kids who also have a particular drive they’ve met with exceptional awareness and devotion.

I don’t mean lots of writing apps or finding a cure for cancer. Maybe one example is kids who have a cause they’re devoted to, who take on adult level work to have some impact- and blend in on an adult level. It’s more than just claiming a passion. It’s about how they activate and the quality of that. (That’s standing out. It’s on top of the ready record.)

Yes, few of those.