harvardsummaryjudgment.pdf
As I understand it, the plaintiffs in the Harvard case have also filed for summary judgment. I doubt that either side will prevail with that request.
I wish I could flag @Hannaâs post #28 as required reading. I canât for the life of me understand why Harvard would reserve approximately 200 of each 1,700 person class for athletes, a good portion of whom would appear to have absolutely no chance of admission outside of recruitment. It seems â based on the number of athletes accepted with 4âs for their academic ratings â that admission as a recruited athlete essentially means clearing some baseline academic threshold, and little more. Compare this to the insane competition for other slots allocated to students who excel across the board in academics as well as extracurricular activities. And while a number of people have pointed out the positive aspects of the athletes (character, leadership, effort, commitment, etc.), the same can said for students who shine in other areas such as the performing arts and will support the âHarvard brandâ over the course of their careers. For context, compare the tremendous list of prominent Harvard alumni in the performing arts (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Harvard_University_people#Film,_theater,_and_television) to that in athletics (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Harvard_University_people#Athletics). The relative strength of the former is self evident, yet none of those one-time students had recruitment slots reserved for them. Moreover, from everything Iâve heard (in this thread, from my D at Princeton, and from articles like this Brown one: http://www.browndailyherald.com/2016/04/26/low-attendance-perennial-plague-for-athletics/), there is very little interest or attendance at the sports competitions. So why the continued love?
Because âIvy Leagueâ is a Division 1 athletic conference.
So yes, it is a priority.
The myth is that Harvard is somehow head and shoulders above all the others for undergraduate academics. It isnât. Certainly, it deserves its place as a top school for academics â but it has plenty of competition in that arena as well â particularly from top LACâs.
Some absolutely qualify. I know some Ivy athletes - all very, very bright.
And those students are the other 1500.
How do you know that none were athletes? You can be an athlete and have a career in something else.
The only reason the Ivies could possibly have for continuing sports is the schools leaders see value in sports. Not only in popular sports like football and rowing, but in all the little sports too like skiing and sailing (which are harder for spectators to attend). Title IX makes them offer womenâs sports to balance all the menâs sports. Many of the big schools (Texas and the likes) only have 18-20 varsity sports. Many of the Ivies have 35. Sports MUST be valued.
If the school didnât care about sports, they could be easily eliminated and the school would be thrown out of the Ivy League, which after all is a sports league. The schools in a conference agree to field certain teams and a certain number of teams to remain in the conference. If several schools decided to eliminate sports, the NCAA would stop recognizing the Ivy League as a conference or require them to add new schools. If a school decided not to give preference in admissions to athletes and just take students onto teams after tryouts from the student body, that school would quickly become non-competitive. In some sports, it is dangerous to have unskilled players on the same field with highly skilled teams. Hockey players who canât get out of the way are dangerous. Lax balls being shot at 100 mph without direction are dangerous.
I think Harvardâs former president had no interest in sports. She got rid of single sex organization and I think if she could have chucked all the sports teams, she would have. She couldnât.
What @Data10 and @calmom said, @lookingforward. No one is suggesting that Harvard adcoms are using regression coefficients to decide which students to admit - itâs precisely the other way around. This regression coefficients describe the patterns in Harvardâs behavior, how all those adcom evaluations and discussions in the committee room manifest themselves in whoâs actually admitted.
I think @calmom is on to something with the concept of coding vs. quantifying. Combinations of numbers serve as heuristics for different kinds of evaluation processes, I believe. I think when the committee sees a â1â in any category, itâs a signal for the decision process to take a different path. An academic â1â gets faculty review, an athletic â1â designates a recruit. Similarly, I think when a kid is flagged as being on the Deanâs/Presidentâs List, itâs a different review process; it wouldnât surprise me if all those kids (including anyone whoâs the child of someone on the Committee on University Resources, for example) got evaluated against each other at the front end, subject to a soft cap on numbers.
Similarly, I have a hunch that when they see any 2-2-2 whoâs also hooked (e.g., an URM or legacy), they view that kid as a presumptive admit and almost automatically move them to committee, where Iâll bet the discussion is relatively short. Similarly, I imagine that when they see a 2-2-3 whoâs hooked, or an unhooked 2-2-2, itâs not a foregone conclusion to admit them and thereâs much more debate at each level of the process.
Yeah, I know, holistic yada yada, you have to make the case, show the match, etc., etc. Iâm sure thatâs true. Iâm also sure that with 43,000 applicants, theyâre using heuristics and taking shortcuts, starting with throwing out more than half of the candidates as no-hopers after a 5-10 minute read.
LACs may have an even higher percentage of students who are athletes, because the number of athletes to fill a typical set of college sports teams does not vary as much as school size.
I get it , @deepblue. And tried to make the same coding point. Iâm trying to reconcile this supposing with the (very similar) process I know best, from a lot closer in.
After the reality of stats and rigor, this is a tremendously subjective process. Much can depend on the nature of the reviewer comments and the overall rating (which the H summary judgment shows is more than the simple sum of the parts/other ratings.) A kid can come in looking, superficially, like a run to the finish, but lose ground on various points, along the way. Mostly personal, ime. As little as a stray remark he makes.
More to the point, when you have a vast pool of kids from certain areas, wanting similar majors, despite all those rating numbers, thereâs a sort of hand culling for, like it or not, geo diversity and balance among majors, etc.
And when theyâre going through 15-20k who make it past first cut, even a â2â is sometimes a default, an âaverage,â not an absolute better than.
There are parts I mind in these processes, parts I can accept.
Not counting athletes, the wild card is those â1â kids who get in as Bright Minds, the ultimate bye. The rest have to pass the whole muster, A-Z.
But the presence of athletes on campus doesnât detract from the academic value for non-athletes. (If anything, it creates more opportunities, because it is a cohort of students who donât have the time to compete for things like research positions).
The academic value comes from the caliber of the faculty, and the degree to which the most-qualified faculty is focused on undergraduate education. So by definition, at LAC, all faculty is focused primarily on their undergrad teaching responsibilities â and at many schools, advising responsibilities as well.
Thatâs not to say that LACâs are necessarily better than universities â but I think that for the student who values the academic environment above all else, then it makes sense to pay attention to the overall mission and structure of the school. Harvard may have an excellent faculty, but it doesnât have a monopoly. And other schools may offer richer opportunities to undergrads for access to their also stellar faculty â without reliance on teaching assistants to run labs or lead discussion groups.
Of course the reality is that even if Harvard did away with all athletic recruits, the admission rate would barely budge. The issue is the huge number of applicants . If Harvard offered 200 more âregularâ students admission, the rate for last year would increase form 4.6% to 5.1%. So virtually all of those complaining about the unfairness of it all, would still not get in! An additional 200 seats are not that meaningful when almost 43000 students apply. And the 200 that did get in would likely have some special characteristics, which still could be a top athlete in their sport.
I donât have a problem with student athletes having a high rate of recruitment at Harvard. I think many have missed the point on CC and believe there is some magic formula to getting into the Ivy league. There is not. That being said, most applicants are flat. An AO cannot read the personality of the applicant from the stats, essays and info. For those who have depth which can be sports, volunteer work really anything where someone can see the full person in the application those folks will be the ones selected. All accepted students have mostly 2s and 3s. Some might have a one or a four somewhere. But for every person on the Z list ( people who should NEVER have gotten in) there are thousands who have the goods.
Many diminish the role of sports, but it takes a lot to be a high level person in any field. Harvard is looking for people who are going to be the leaders in life-whether its sports, business, science etc. They are not just looking for people who will give them money ( though they take a few of those too).
My kiddo told me a story about a school visitor which at first seemed like nothing special. âWeâll first he learned how to climb a mountainâ ( ok), then he decided to climb all of the big mountains (ok) then he has to get special tools ( I began to get intrigued). âWhy?â, I asked. Because he is blind. âWhat???Heâs climbing mountains blind?â âYep, he isâ
They are looking for people who are going to live large. Sports people often have the characteristics to become leaders. They understand the grit, teamwork and plain hard work it takes to succeed. Many also can bring groups of different people together. While I was never an athlete I get why Harvard wants them in the class.
âthe schools leaders see value in sportsâ
Right, they do. Iâm arguing that their priorities are out of whack on this subject. Sports are enormously privileged compared to all other student activities. Thatâs not just at the admissions gate, but also day-to-day. During college, I learned that Harvard laundered the field hockey teamâs practice clothing as well as their gameday uniforms. Are you kidding me? Performing artists get NOTHING like that. If your leotard splits, you fix it. In the middle of the show.
I suspect that this is really about money â not that the sports teams themselves bring in dollars, but that their alumni do, and that they would raise holy hell if their sport were relegated to club status. Eliminating a varsity sport, or even measurably dialing back recruitment, would be kicking an alumni beehive that no sane college administrator wants to kick. So I get it. And the Ivy League handles this a million times better than the rest of Division I. But theyâre still wrong.
(CC veterans will note that I spend most of my time singing Harvardâs praises, so itâs a real aberration that I differ with them so strongly on this.)
Harvard admissions is not treating recruited athletes like they do other applicants who are potential leaders in âbusiness, science, etc.â or other applicants who have âgrit, teamwork and plain hard work it takes to succeed.â Instead Harvard (and many other primarily Div I colleges) regularly tip the scales to a greater degree than they would for any other common grouping â other hooks, z-list, best potential scholars in their generation, etc. For example, it was previously noted that the vast majority of recruited athletes who receive Harvardâs worst possible standard scale academic rating were admitted, while only ~0.08% of non-athletes with this rating were admitted. Prior to the lawsuit, Harvard OIRâs internal analysis found that being a recruited athlete was associated with nearly 3x the admissions benefit of any other analyzed hook.
While I agree with the general sentiment, the specific details are not accurate. For example, the majority of admits have a 1 or 4 somewhere. Itâs not just a small minority. 1âs (including recruited athletes) only make up a very small portion of applicants, but they make up a more significant portion of admits due to their tremendously higher admit rate. 4âs in the athletic category are quite common among admits. Harvard admits many students who do not mention anything athletic of note on their application. The fact that there is a special ratings categories for athletics beyond the ones that include âhaving the characteristics to become leadersâ is a strong hint that there are significant special admissions considerations beyond the ones you listed.
Of course Harvard is far from alone in favoring recruited athletes and tips the scale to a lesser degree than most Div I colleges. For example, UConn basketball won the national tournament in 2014. They obviously managed to recruit a great class, but the class wasnât as impressive from an academic perspective. In the previous year the team had 0% federal graduation rate and 8% graduation success rate. There were claims that some members of the team were illiterate. In contrast, Harvard has had a good enough menâs basketball team to make it to the tournament that year (made it to 3rd round of 32), as well as several other times in recent years, yet Harvard managed to do it with a 95-100% graduation success rate for those teams. Harvard also has special rules about how far academic stats for the team and individual players can differ from the overall class, as measured by SDs below mean, much stricter rules than the overwhelming majority of Div I teams.
One top-tier school was a founding member of the Big Ten and had one of the best college football programs for almost 50 years, winning national championships. Then the university president decided that football wasnât part of the mission of the school and abolished the team. Decades later, football returned in much-reduced form, and the school now has a D-III team that plays against LACs in the Midwest. That school is, of course, the University of Chicago. There are lots of reasons why UChicago became the school where fun went to die (not saying itâs still that way today, UChicago fans - donât @ me), and why its endowment today is about one-fifth the size of Harvardâs; I think this is one of them.
Conversely, with the next capital campaign rumored to be on the launch pad, I think Yale is quite happy with two national champion teams (menâs heavyweight crew and menâs lacrosse), and having won the Ivy League football title this past season. Older alumni get grumpy when they read about social justice warriors protesting on campus, but they get a lot happier and more generous when the sports teams are beating Harvard.
UChicago abandoned its football program long before the era of big money in college football. (But I was still reminded often by the school of its glorious football history while I was there.) If it were facing the decision today I seriously doubt it would have given it up for hundreds of millions in TV rights and free marketing for the school. Even NFL wasnât big business back then; the four time Superbowl winning QB Terry Bradshaw had to sell used cars to supplement his NFL income.
With most Harvard kids not even attending a lacrosse game while in college I would find it hard to imagine thirty years later they would get excited about their lacrosse team.
As a Harvard parent though I do see some unique pattern of its athletic recruits after encountering a few admit families earlier this year. These athletes were incredibly accomplished in their sports but put equal emphasis on academics and school prestige, and their families have financial resources to support them too. One kid who was a national champion for several years turned down a $200k scholarship from Stanford (for playing a sport Stanford is known for) because Stanford would require practice time starting 12pm everyday while Harvard only requires after 5pm. The family said the full academic schedule and course availability at H were what made the difference, and they were hedging their bet that if the kidâs sport career wasnât working out a Harvard education would be a great fallback.
@jzducol: youâre the alum, but Iâd guess that if UChicago had maintained its football program, it might be a very different place today. Campus tone would be different and athletics might be much more prevalent, with a D-I program. It might feel much more like the Ivies or Stanford, with a greater number of the kind of financially successful athletic alumni that you see at those schools, more school spirit and much more alumni giving.
I think any national championship team in a widely-played, well-recognized sport gives a lot of alumni a warm feeling, irrespective of whether they attended a game when they were in college. As you say, itâs also a lot of free exposure, even if itâs not a big direct moneymaker.
Related to the above points, I think those Harvard athletic recruits that you admire, with their smarts, teamwork, drive and work ethic, are exactly the sort that go on to success in the world outside athletics, and then become engaged and generous alumni.
âThere are lots of reasons why UChicago became the schoolâ that it is today, a.k.a. tied with Yale on a number of measures despite Yale having a 190-year head start? It is a global academic powerhouse, with a research reputation around the world that compares to Oxford, which is nearly 800 years older. If your argument is that abolishing football contributed to the trajectory UChicago took in the 20th century, then everybody ought to abolish it tomorrow.
â daughter of AB '61 and AB '63, MD '67
@Data10
Could the low graduation rate of Uconn team be its players left for NBA? I guess athletes with pro-potential or Olympic dreams will choose powerhouse D1 schools, quite different from the pool of recruited athletes who choose Ivies.
@Hanna
American (college) football to me is like modern Gladiator fight. The sooner it is gone, the better it is for all of us. Lol.
@makemesmart What!!! Are you not entertained?!? Clearly you are not immersed in American culture, and what about that other sportâŠsoccer, I think thatâs what they call it.