@theloniusmonk I guess that depends on your point of view and what the mission of the University really is. If it is only to provide a fair market place for all students who seek their product, you bullets are correct. However, every University Mission statement I’ve seen talks about the holistic benefit to society blah, blah, blah. I admit their definition of doing that is most likely different than what “society” believes. However, they own the market and therefore they make the rules. And I can’t argue that they aren’t successful at it.
Tonymom, “the assumption is made that an athlete’s application is some hot mess…”
No. The problem is those kids whose apps are not up to snuff but still get a pull. And imo, the impact on other kids from his/her area who have one less seat to compete for (on their full holistic merits.)
Btw, the students you know may not have actually produced a great app/supp. Being a top performer doesn’t guarantee that.
And any one or two posters asserting it’s all flawed, who’s preferred, or that it’s just too confusing…yeah, opinion. Often based on hearsay. Etc.
It was a poorly written post on my part.
The data in my post actually supports the first statement in your post:
Which suggests that one should be careful in generalizing some of the other findings in the Amherst report beyond the boundaries of Amherst.
In terms of academic performance of athletes (by schools) Middlebury takes top honors and by sport, cross country takes top honors.
What is counter intuitive (for me at least) is that even when I normalize for roster size, Amherst football players outperform Amherst soccer players.
Of course, this could be due to selection of major, taking better advantage of the open curriculum - so one has to be careful not to read too much into it.
“Btw, the students you know may not have actually produced a great app/supp. Being a top performer doesn’t guarantee that.”
Same can be said for any other high performing non-athlete applicant…
My point is you don’t know what any given student’s app is like irregardless of athlete…non-athlete.
@theloniusmonk: “the admission process favoring the wealthy and upper middle class, and wealthier neighborhoods”
Note that top UK unis (where admissions is much more objective) have almost the exact percentages of private school grads and socioeconomic class breakdowns as our holistic Ivies/equivalents. It may just be that they swap our upper-middle-class white athletes for their upper-middle-class white scholars interested in one subject.
Do they? I think the link you provided earlier is raw # of “All Academic” athletes without size of school or number of athlete correction. Midd has 700 more students than Amherst, 160 more athletes. Tufts is bigger, Bowdoin smaller.
For cross country, it’s possible that’s a large team, and women’s volleyball or other small roster sports would be expected to have lower #s of All Academics. Football has the largest roster, usually - no? A per-student comparison would be interesting.
https://ope.ed.gov/athletics/#/compare/search has detailed info on size, # of athletes etc. You can choose a league, a particular school, etc.
The discussion was about low scores compared to the Stanford typical range, which is by definition not most students at Stanford and not typical admits. The point was there can be other possible reasons for having a lower score compared to the typical class besides being a recruited athlete. Stanford has a holistic application process that considers far more than scores. A Stanford student who has a lower score than most of the class on a particular SAT section may excel in many of the other areas areas of the application, which includes, but is not limited to the other SAT sections.
If schools exclude sports and other hooks, they tend to end up with a student body that looks very much the same. Caltech. Reed. That’s fine if that’s what the school wants to be, but they need to accept that some really qualified and interesting student do not want to go to school with a lot of kids just like them. Some want a little diversity.
My cousin was a non-athlete at Williams (although she was a legacy). I met her suitemates while she was there. There were six of them, all from NY, MA or CT, all with humanities majors (history, Engish, American Studies), all probably protestants. Three of them were named Katie. They thought they were very diverse. I think an athlete would have helped the mix a little!
@ohmomof2 - I looked up the team roster for each sport at each school, counted the number of players and divided by the number of awards per team. That is what I meant by “normalizing by roster size”.
Dividing by undergraduate enrollment isn’t very meaningful because roster sizes for a particular sport in a particular league tends to be similar independent of school size. That is why the percentage of athletes at small schools that offer a large array of varsity sports is so high. Cross Country and T&F can be an exception because they are low overhead and sometimes “no cut” sports. The Cross Country team at Williams (50) is quite large -more than double the size of Amherst (18).
Since the number and mix of teams varies from school to school, the source that you provided (which provides total participation in varsity sports) would be more accurate than total undergraduate enrollment, but less accurate than roster level data.
Williams offers a very broad array of varsity sports (30) that also align well with the Directors Cup sports which gives them an advantage in that ranking. Bowdoin also offers 30, Middlebury 29, Tufts 28, Amherst 25.
The source that you provided is very interesting if you want to know how much a particular school spends on sports (including recruiting) which is relevant for this discussion.
The Reed president once said (I was there) that the student body is made up of “majority of outliers.” I guess that makes them all similar in that they’re all non-vanilla. 
Most of the CSUs in California admit only by a formula composed of HS GPA and SAT or ACT score. No essays, extracurriculars (sports or otherwise), or other subjective factors for the general applicant pool. In terms of hooks, neither legacy nor race/ethnicity is considered. Recruited athlete and development may exist as hooks in some campuses, but most are large enough that the number of such admits is only a tiny percentage of the whole.
But no one suggests that all of the students on a CSU campus “look very much the same” in terms of any of the usual non-academic characteristics.
My question would not be the same as @twoinanddone’s - “if schools exclude sports and other hooks” but what would the schools be like if sports hook was on the same level (in admissions and in resources devoted to students) of other student talents like music or writing or acting or debate. I don’t think diversity would drop - most colleges manage to keep newspapers, orchestra/ensembles, theater and debate alive on campus without the special system accorded to recruited athletes.
A big exception, to me, would be the colleges that currently require every student play a varsity sport every season. In those cases, the focus on sports makes sense to me. Their athletic performance is part of their grade and will become part of their career, at least for awhile. Even in those cases though, athletes can choose a club or intramural sport.
"@theloniusmonk: You’re picking out isolated examples but again, all 3 of NU, ND and Duke (none of them anywhere near Silicon Valley) beat out all 4 of UChicago, WashU, Emory, and JHU in endowment growth.
In 1991, all 3 of UChicago, WashU, and Emory had bigger endowments than all 3 of NU, ND, and Duke.
In 2016, NU and ND was ahead of all 3 of UChicago, WashU, and Emory, with Duke ahead of WashU and Emory and just barely trailing the U of C.
How do you explain that?"
You made a generalization that colleges with successful athletic programs grew their endowment faster than colleges that didn’t. I pointed out counter-examples where colleges with athletics that did not do well (Michigan football) endowment grew faster than Alabama (maybe the most dominant college football program of all time). There are other things that impact endowment, how it’s invested e.g. that have a bigger impact than athletic success.
There may be a small correlation between athletic success and endowment growth but certainly there’s no causation.
" A Stanford student who has a lower score than most of the class on a particular SAT section may excel in many of the other areas areas of the application, which includes, but is not limited to the other SAT sections."
I don’t when you applied but that’s not the case today. Stanford has indicated at least informally to anyone who asks them that you should have a 700 on each test you take, unless you have a hook (athlete, urm, first-gen, legacy, donor). In fact they prefer 750/750 over 800/600. As I posted before they want people that can start out as an electrical engineer major and switch to english or vice versa.
“And any one or two posters asserting it’s all flawed, who’s preferred, or that it’s just too confusing…yeah, opinion. Often based on hearsay. Etc.”
Lol, it’s not just me, a 2015 article had the number of college consultants grow from 2000 to 5000 recently and in 2012, it was a $400 million business, and this doesn’t even count the money spent on tutoring and test prep.
“Applying for college is not what it used to be. It is insanely more competitive these days and if you can afford the help of a professional, get it.”
This from the article and posted by Berkeley parents network a few years back. Here’s my point - perhaps you think it’s a flawless transparent, process, but the customers of the process - students and parents do not, and they’re the ones that count. And I think the discussion in this thread is whether athletics contribute to that distortion of the admission process.
I think the fundamental flaw with this is that Universities, and to a lesser extent Liberal Arts Colleges, don’t look at potential students as customers, but a raw material. The selective ones always fill their “machine” with the “raw material” that they need to satisfy their “customer.” Their customer is thought of as society, which of course each individual potential “raw material” is a part of, but really an insignificant part.
They are looking at Society as the totality of Employers who “buy” their students, the intellectual community that buys their insight, and the globe which should benefit from both. They can get their “raw material” to pay them to enter their machine. We, as parents and in some cases students, can belly ache all we want about how it isn’t fair. As long as we continue to be willing to pay $350,000 for a four year degree to enter that machine it won’t change. Every highly selective college and university can pick from many willing pieces of raw material to process. If that condition exists, they will be able to use whatever selection criteria they deem appropriate.
When you look at the scoreboard of college performance, they appear to know what types or raw material they need to be successful in their industry. In the spirit of true capitalism, if you want them to change, you need to enter the game and change it. As “raw material” suppliers, we have little power.
I don’t think it’s flawlessly transparent. I do think the sort of activated, thinking kids that the tippy tops want are looking for a deeper and broader understanding than where their stats fall via the CDS or any old titles in hs. Or what they read on some blog, media article, or forum. Sure, there’s a lot of confusion. And in the sort of competition that a tippy top admit is, it’s adcoms you need to satisfy, not default to parent and applicant confusion. As in any tough contest. Your app/supp is key. They may be “customers,” but there’s no shortage of them. For tippy tops, a line around the corner. You don’tget it? Well, clearly they find enough students who do, to build a class.
Except. Except when athletic skill trumps, regardless of the match otherwise.
What’s the point of worrying over whether it’s a “flawless, transparent process,” though? What, exactly, entitles the thin film of highly competitive students at the tippy-top of the performance pyramid who make a decision that they want to compete for scarce slots in highly selective colleges to flawlessness or transparency in that process.
The colleges, clearly, do not value transparency at all. They could make the admissions process completely transparent – as it is at 90%+ of institutions here, and probably at 99% of the institutions elsewhere in the world – but instead they have gone the opposite direction. Why are they required to change? If a student and family want transparency, they don’t have much trouble getting it. All they have to do is to have the student apply to colleges with transparent admissions. They tend not to be as prestigious, or as wealthy, or as rich in networking opportunities as the opaque-process colleges, but what I take from that is that transparency has a cost. If applicants value transparency so much, they can pay the cost.
Flawlessness, too, has a cost. Why should colleges pay the enormous premium it would take to produce perfect decisions, when imperfect decisions look like they are plenty good enough, and the “penalty” on “victims” of imperfect decisions is actually negligible. What happens to someone who “should” have been accepted at Harvard? Does he or she have to go to Brown? To Wake Forest with a big merit scholarship? To a state flagship? To Alabama, with a full ride? There is absolutely nothing terrible about any of those outcomes, and no evidence that the life or career of a particular student will be impacted negatively by that result. And even if that’s wrong, so what? How does Harvard owe him or her flawlessness for the $70 application fee (assuming it’s not waived)?
@BrianBoiler: Actually, colleges do react to their customer base, but their customer base are alums (present and future) as those are the folks who donate money. Evidently, not too many alums of most private elites want their alma mater to become Caltech (or Reed).
@theloniusmonk: You have to control for other factors as well. In my case, I compared elite privates with other elites privates. In your case, you compared a prestigious public with a public that is not very prestigious.
So yes, having high-powered alums is important. But among schools who take in the same inputs and put out the same outputs, it does seem like having (at least decent) athletics programs gives a boost.