“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.”
That makes little sense, you’re saying that in a case where say an athlete doesn’t qualify per ncaa or school standards, and the coach decides not to take any more in the class, so the college can choose anyone they want, they would replace an athlete with a lower academic performing student than a higher one?
“In some cases seats are taken from more academically capable students, but this is the rare exception.”
It’s more common than you think, because you have a lot of schools like Duke in basketball that lower their standards, Georgetown, Wake Forest etc. And you have private schools that lower standards in both football and basketball - Stanford, Northwestern, Notre Dame, Vanderbilt, Rice et al.
And of course the selective public universities that do it totally tilt the numbers to make it more common - Michigan, Berkeley, UNC, Virginia, UCLA, Washington, Wisconsin.
I think this subject is sensitive, because we have parents with student athletes, some who are also academically high performing. Plus, there’s a difference between any college that stoops to build its athletic teams versus those with some higher expectations that have to be met.
And then the hope that those managing demanding practices plus doing well in school have skills that lead to post grad successes.
This doesn’t seem to me to be something that can be explained via stats/metrics, across a wide sample. You’ve got to look at individuals, their qualities, to start with. There is no one thing about athletics that ensures all kids are stronger.
My point is, at a top holistic, most kids are expected to submit an app/supp that communicates certain qualities in addition to stats and rigor. The process is more than rack and stack. Most kids struggle with this. So a kid who does bypass that, via a coach’s pull, may not have been so competitive in his or her app, the range of expectations and filters used, compared with others in his area.
I admire the dedicated athletes (and there are some other ECs that demand equal time and commitment or vision and activation.)
But, scooting to the front of the line is a tough one. Not even legacies and kids of major donors get the same sort of advantage a coach offers.
I get that sports is an institutional want. But, dang.
Wouldn’t those related to major donors also get overrides or bypasses around the usual admission screening like top-level recruited athletes (unlike common legacies who get some preference within the usual admission screening at those colleges that consider it)?
In division 3 athletics there is somewhat of a correlation between athletic performance (per Directors Cup rank) and
selectivity. Cal Tech is a notable outlier, but Pomona and the other Claremont colleges have been drifting upwards in recent history.
Here is last year’s ranking:
NESCAC has 5 teams in the top 20 and the UAA has 3
School, Athletic Conference, Score
1 Williams NESCAC 1335.25
2 Washington-St. Louis UAA 1227.00
3 Tufts NESCAC 926.75
4 Claremont-Mudd-Scripps SCIAC 895.00
5 Johns Hopkins Centennial 864.50
6 Wisconsin Whitewater WIAC 843.75
7 Middlebury NESCAC 836.50
8 Amherst NESCAC 769.50
9 Emory UAA 765.25
10 Ithaca Empire 8 716.00
11 MIT NEWMAC 667.25
12 Wisconsin La Crosse WIAC 659.75
13 SUNY Geneseo SUNYAC 655.50
14 Christopher Newport Capital Athletic 624.00
15 Chicago UAA 622.00
16 Calvin MIAA 596.50
17 St. Thomas (MN) MIAC 588.50
18 Mount Union OAC 552.00
19 Hope MIAA 550.00
20 Bates NESCAC 540.50
21 SUNY Cortland SUNYAC 530.25
22 Messiah MAC 526.50
23 Babson NEWMAC 519.50
24 Trinity (TX) SCAC 518.00
25 Washington & Lee ODAC 508.25
26 Wartburg IIAC 501.50
27 The College of New Jersey NJAC 490.50
28 Illinois Wesleyan CCIW 485.00
29 Pomona-Pitzer SCIAC 479.00
30 Rhodes SAA 473.50
.
big gap
.
Anecdata are all over the place, but certain sports have higher gpa students than others, I think we all agree. Also that this may vary by school.
Amherst commissioned a pretty thorough report on its athletic program (latest one is “The Place of Athletics at Amherst”, an older one is referred to as “the Diver report” from 2000-2002) because:
Coincidentally it came out publicly around the time of the the cross country team controversy (their email list shared derogatory descriptions and photos of female students, with racist and misogynist language etc) so the report was of special interest at the time.
It found some “cons” to the athletic program:
-While Amherst “has considerably greater diversity among its student-athletes than all of its peers in NESCAC”, athletes are less diverse than the college as a whole - much more white and wealthy than non-athletes. If recognizes that from an early age athletes are expected to do camps, travel teams and such that are expensive, making it hard to find good athletes who are also low income, or nonwhite.
-Athletes tend to major in a small number of departments, take fewer science classes, fewer classes with small enrollments, and are far less likely (especially male athletes) to write a senior thesis (16% vs 49% for non-athletes). Athletes concentrate in certain majors, notably Economics, Political Science and History.
-Athletes report that they have on occasion felt stereotyped, stigmatized or penalized for their participation in athletics.
-athletes are almost twice as likely to concentrate in Economics, Political Science and History as non-athletes,it is rare for them to major in any science, tend to avoid small classes,
-There are ~20 walk-ons per class, but few of them see much playing time, and many drop the sport after freshman year.
-Winter and two semester athletes rarely do a semester abroad (not shocking for obvious reasons).
-Athletic factor athletes (the 66 per year with low academic stats) graduate with slightly lower cumulative grade point averages (GPAs) than coded athletes (those with stats like other admitted students)and the student body at large.
-Club and intramural sports have to compete with varsity sports for gym, field, etc time and varsity sports are given precedence, which causes conflict. Club sports have nearly as many participants as varsity sports there, and it’s not the same kids.
-There are issues with class/sport conflicts, especially on teams that do so well there’s a lot of post-season play, which seems to coincide with exams and other end-of-semester work and requires special arrangements for them.
…and some “pros”:
-Athletes have a higher 6 year grad rate than non-athletes - 98% vs 94%. The majority of Amherst kids graduate in 4 but that % wasn’t in the report.
-Since the 1960s, athletes have been frequent and generous donors to Amherst, consistently eclipsing non-athletes in participation percentage as well as level of support.
-Athletes with an admissions “4” (factor athletes) graduate at a higher rate than “4” level non-athletes who matriculated with equivalent academic credentials.
“i.e an example of a T&F athlete at a selective D3 school who appears to have superpowers…”
One person is not evidence of a larger trend that T&F athletes have Einstein genius and Jordan-esqe athletic ability.
“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.”
At least here you’re stating they’re samples, so I can see how you got your opinion. However GPAs vary by major, so if a T&F athlete is pulling in a higher GPA while majoring in computer science/EE at CMU, biomedical engineering/chemistry at JHU or physics/economics at Chicago, that’s impressive. Those are the typical majors where the competition is toughest.
@theloniusmonk - Actually one data point is considered evidence.
The original statement by @brianboiler represented the union of of XC and T&F, intersected with D3 and “selective”.
The last term needs to be considered as it reduces the scope of the claim.
Although I tend to to equate “superpowers” with schools like Hogwarts and sports like Quidditch, there are potential explanations for the stated observation/perception.
One is that running distance well is the only athletic ability that translates directly into the three distinct seasons of collegiate competition. Competing in other sports requires more sport-specific training that usually needs to be conducted year round in order to achieve the skill level necessary to excel in college. It is much harder for the same person to excel in football, basketball and baseball than cross country and the distance events in indoor and outdoor track. So, if the metric for “superpowers” is number of seasons competing on a varsity team, then there is a strong bias toward XC and T&F.
Generally speaking, for non-revenue sports at the most competitive colleges, a recruit’s academic profile needs to be at or near that of the general student body. If it is, and if the coach wants the kid, then admission is almost guaranteed. My kids were well qualified for Princeton and Duke, but it does seem silly that their ability to poke opponents with a metal stick took all the risk out of the admission process for them.
@Mastadon: That’s because, outside of the sports and leagues that can lead to lucrative big league careers (or at least fame and big crowds or maybe more scholarship money), the education/prestige of the school is the currency by which student/athletes are paid for their labors (especially in DivIII where there are no scholarships and pretty much no one expects a lucrative career playing sports after college), so you’d expect the academic elite schools to hold an advantage in recruiting (unless they don’t value sports prowess at all, like Caltech).
Nothing against Wartburg, but if you qualify academically for both Amherst and Wartburg, which one are you gonna pick?
“My kids were well qualified for Princeton and Duke”
There’s a difference between well qualified and getting admission. These schools reject 80% of qualified applicants. Let’s take Duke basketball out because they lower the standards to the 10% to get the athletes in. The other selective admissions offices tell the coaches make sure the applicants are competitive, meaning 25% ACT or SAT, even a little lower but nothing that makes them look like they don’t belong academically. For schools that have a 31-34 distribution, that would mean 26 or so, still a very good score. But without that hook or one like it, no one with a 26 is applying to Stanford.
BTW, @roethlisburger, HYPS have the largest standalone college endowments by far (the UT system endowment is also up there, but that is for more than one uni), and yes, HYP do not emphasize football now, but a hundred years ago, when they were becoming some of the richest colleges in the US, they were football powers and cared a lot about football, which also made them a lot of money. Yale still has the most college football national titles of any college. The Yale-Princeton game was a major affair in NYC and also lucrative. When it first opened, the Yale Bowl was the largest sports stadium in the world, being able to hold more than 70K. Yale did not give away tickets to football games there for free.
BTW, from 1991-2016, Harvard’s endowment increased by 7.4 times, Yale’s endowment increased by 9.9 times, and Princeton’s endowment increased by 8.44 times.
But DivI P5 FBS HYPS peer Stanford’s endowment increased by 10.96 times, beating all 3 of them.
The endowments of DivI P5 FBS private academic elites Northwestern, ND, and Duke increased by 9.22 times, 13.14 times, 12.96 times, respectively.
Note how much football power ND and basketball power Duke outpaced HYP (and even NU, which is just average in football and historically terrible in basketball, beats out HPM, being held back only by Yale’s terrific chief investment officer David Swenson).
Compare also with the endowment growth of DivIII private academic elites MIT, WashU, Emory, UChicago, and JHU:
9.14 times, 4.48 times, 4.96 times, 6.48, and 6.02 times, respectively.
All 3 of the DivI P5 FBS private academic elites (who aren’t terrible in at least one sport) beat out all 5 of the DivIII private academic elites in endowment growth.
Speaking of which, once upon a time, the U of C had the second largest college endowment in the country after Harvard. But back then the Maroon were a football power, playing Michigan in front of huge crowds every year to be crowned the top football team in the (Mid)West. They then gave up football and, interestingly, they have fallen a fair bit back in the endowment rankings since then. You judge if that is a coincidence or not
Of the 25 research U’s with the biggest endowments, only 3 (MIT, WashU, and Emory) have never competed in football at the highest level.
Look at the per capita endowment rankings and there’s not much change: Only 4 of the 20 research U’s with the highest per capita endowment have never competed in football at the highest level (MIT, Caltech, WashU, Emory).
@roethlisburger, yes, and when did they jump up to the top of the endowment rankings?
Once you’re up at the top, it’s easier to stay there as it’s a positive feedback loop: more money → better profs and goodies → better reputation → better students → more successful alums → more money.
@ohmomof2 - I would be careful generalizing the results of the Amherst study to other schools, even within NESCAC.
As one check, I looked at the list of All Academic awards (given to athletes with a GPA greater than 3.4) for men’s sports last fall for some of the more selective NESCAC schools. (Listed by Directors Cup rank with acceptance rate included).
Interestingly, by this metric, relative to other schools, Amherst was strongest in football…
Thousands of kids apply to Stanford with scores in that range each year, many of whom are unhooked. Whether they get accepted or not is a different story. You might be surprised by some of the kids near the bottom of the score ranges. For example, my CR score was among the lowest ~6 scores in my class at Stanford, putting me well within the bottom 1%, yet I was unhooked. Instead I was a prospective engineering major with top scores on the math and science sections/subtests, as well as more impressive other sections of the application.