@OHMomof2: Some elites have music schools. It’s not either or.
@lookingforward. Heh. “Cushy” is not a term I would associate with IB. “Brutal”, yes. “Highly renumerative”, yes.
Right – as a lawyer in NY at a big firm, we worked long hours (12-14 hour days, and another 12 hours on a regular, not deadline driven, weekend), but IB folks worked much longer, crazier hours than we did.
Do any elites have sports schools? Where kids try out, like an audition, and then study that sport?
If not I don’t get your comparison.
MY point is that auditioning to study music at a conservatory or just as a music major at an elite is to be expected - the ability to play music is directly related to the degree.
Athletic ability is not.
Wanting people who can go days without sleep is MORONIC. No one is effective at their job when they’re continuously sleep deprived. Truck drivers have legal limits on how long they can drive. Med schools have limits on resident hours.
It’s figurative.
As noted by @iaparent , some sports can be very competitive at the club level. There are VERY few men’s volleyball programs, for instance, compared to women’s programs. The tryouts for men in club can be very competitive at some schools, and men’s club teams have regional and national tournaments.
At a lot of schools, students are not majoring in music performance, but are still dedicated to practice and performance in their ensembles. That would be analogous to athletes who are still majoring elsewhere.
As long as there is worldwide NBA, NFL and MLB and a lot of money, attention and fans that go with that, athletes in certain sports will be given bigger advantages in getting admitted. It’s a societal phenomena.
Worldwide, soccer (football) and volleyball are both very popular.
More generally, it’s a poor assumption that athlete status correlates to the ability to perform well in IB.
To those who pointed out lower test scores of athletes. There is a spectrum. Schools with low standards, often due to large size of the school (large publics often). They can lower standards to fill seats and yes for athletes, but those athletes are not taking away from other top students, they are often similar to the bottom half of a large student body.
Then there are academically elite schools. My S is an athletic recruit at a d3 top tech school. He was asked as a freshman to tutor students in his major. Not athletes, the general population. Most athletes in such schools trade some of their social time for athletics, not trading academics. They are among the more disciplined students.
Most families with recruits realize that the process is about getting an education, not pro sports. Yes, there is the Duke baskball team, and people who go to college for a single year and move to the pros. In some cases seats are taken from more academically capable students, but this is the rare exception.
I think it’s hard to make a generalization as to whether recruited athletes (lets say at the D3 level) are just as good of students as the non-athletes. It depends on the college and on the skills that the student is bringing to the school. We know both a state champion runner with decent grades who is at Harvard (his grades and SAT score were MUCH lower than kids at our high school who get turned down by Harvard) and we know a very good runner at the top of his class academically who will go to MIT.
Would MIT have taken the student who went to Harvard? Who knows. Would Harvard have taken the MIT recruit with the better grades but the slower times? Again, we will never know. Kids at school have no issues with the runner who got recruited at MIT. They only talk about the Harvard recruit and wonder if he can do the work there.
@websensation I always hope that the AOs that read S19’s apps are XC or LD track runners. They would get it. A thirteen mile run after school or a 8x800 workout at tempo pace is exhausting. S19 comes home, eats dinner, takes a shower, and then attacks homework. Last night that included studying for a BC Calc test, reading 50 pages for APUSH, finishing a paper for AP Lang, and AP French homework. It’s very difficult to focus when he’s so physically exhausted.
S19 played tennis and soccer competitively before moving to XC and track and he says there is no comparison when it comes to how grueling the work outs are. He may not be recruited, but I hope colleges recognize the energy and focus it takes for him to get through each day and come out of this with good grades.
^My son’s teachers told me they love having long distance runners in their classes because the students tend to be disciplined and determined. It really is a difficult sport. It used to burn me that my son’s PE teacher would make him run a mile for a grade even when he had a meet later in the day! Really? It actually annoyed me that he had to take PE at all since he was running about 50 miles a week!
I have a feeling that most XC and T&F athletes at selective D3 schools have super powers. They usually compete in three seasons (Fall XC, Indoor T&F, Outdoor T&F) and still usually outperform the rest of the student body in the academic metrics (don’t believe me, look it up). I guess that is why I get defensive when people say these athletes get special admissions boosts. At the most competitive D3 schools in XC and T&F I just don’t see it happening. Or in the case of the Northeast Liberal Arts Colleges, if they do, the bump they get is minor and they perform once they are in school at or above the average. Maybe not the case in football (although, that is a stereotype/broad-brush statement), but in the running sports that has been my experience (and I suspect swimming and other sports are similar).
“They usually compete in three seasons (Fall XC, Indoor T&F, Outdoor T&F) and still usually outperform the rest of the student body in the academic metrics (don’t believe me, look it up).”
Ok, I did look it up, here’s a report on 83K Div 3 athletes at 84 schools, it’s a little older but refutes your point:
Male, non-athlete: 3.04 gpa
Male athlete: 2.84
Female, non-athlete: 3.24
Female, athlete: 3.18
https://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/10/15/grading-college-athletes/
Yeah, that’s all sports, not T&F, XC.
I don’t know why, but XC athletes in general perform better. Or at least from the samples that we took at Williams, Washington & Lee, Colgate, Bowdoin, Johns Hopkins, Carnegie Mellon, and University of Chicago. It was one of the questions we asked at every recruiting visit. And each of these schools Team GPA was > than the school GPA. Coincidentally the Women’s team was higher than the Men’s team at each of these schools as well.
@brianboiler - evidence in support of your “feeling”
i.e an example of a T&F athlete at a selective D3 school who appears to have superpowers…
http://now.tufts.edu/articles/tufts-student-wins-one-two-ncaa-scholarships-country
He added a forth national title after winning the NCAA scholarship…
http://now.tufts.edu/articles/mitchell-black-wins-fourth-ncaa-800-title
Note that he was cut from the soccer team…
The kid who was the best distance runner in the state while my son was in high school got a perfect SAT score. He ended up at Dartmouth.