At most Division I colleges, the reward for being an athletic recruit is a scholarship, not admission, which is not a big barrier. More importantly, at most Division I colleges, admitting a few recruited athletes doesn’t deprive any other applicant of a space, since they are not at capacity. The pseudo-problem of supposedly less qualified athletes displacing supposedly more qualified unhooked applicants is limited to a very small slice of the college world.
And even there, the “problem” is much narrower than people imagine, since not all the athletes have lower stats, and one athlete with lower stats can’t really be blamed for displacing more than one other applicant . . . but there are probably 6-7 higher-stat applicants not being admitted for every lower stat athlete who is. Getting rid of any admissions advantage for athletes would not make the process any more transparent or satisfying for the high-stats kids getting rejected.
I don’t agree 90% of colleges are transparent, unless you’re including all the CCs which will admit anyone with a pulse. Even Caltech, which is as close to admitting on academic qualifications only as you can get for a US college, puts out a lot of marketing BS on their holistic admissions process.
Yes, I would not say that 90+% of higher ed institutions in this country are completely transparent in admissions. Even if you include CC’s. The vast majority of privates aren’t transparent in admissions, and there are a ton of small/tiny privates across this country.
In terms of number of slots in higher ed in the US, I still don’t think 90% of slots in this country are admitted via a transparent method (CA and TX have admissions guarantees, but not all states do, nor do all publics), though a lot are.
“Of course in those situations, athletic ability is often a bigger hook than at the selective institutions.”
As @OHMomof2 points out and which is shown in the link, athletics at colleges div 1 or 3 or whatever division is mainly white participation. Basketball is the only outlier, here are the percentages of some popular sports:
basketball male: 40% white 44% black
basketball female: 52% white, 32% black
football: white: 48%, black: 39%
track: white: 60%, black 22%
cross-country, white: 73%, black 9%
lacrosse: white 85%, black 3%
ice hockey: white: 77%, white 1%
baseball: white: 81%, black: 4%
rowing: white 75%, black : 2%
You can figure out the percentages of some others as well - golf, equestrian, without needing the link, hint it’s close to zero. As I read in a book on admissions, athletics is essentially AA for rich white applicants.
Yeah, a whole of leveling the playing field via athletics (pun intended).
“the United States University system is dominating the competition. In other factors as well. How about % of international students at the US institution vs. percentage of US students at a foreign institution”
They are dominating for sure, but it’s not because of athletics, it’s because of the strength of the graduate programs that attract the top students outside of the US. International students make up about 8-10% of undergraduates at selective universities, probably a lot less for others. That doesn’t move the needle that much in the rankings. What does have an impact is the 40-60% of Phd students that are from foreign countries. The higher numbers are for STEM, the lower are non-stem, law school. B-school is around 20-25% I think.
If you’re going to Harvard, Chicago or Princeton to get a Phd in physics, you’re not going for the athletics and how that may add to your experience. You’re going to work with nobel laureates.
“So it causes less stress on high school seniors (some of it self imposed and some of it is imposed by their helicopter parents) is not a very good reason.”
Agree that a lot of it is self or parental imposed but that doesn’t mean we should say suck it up, use it as a practice for stress in your career. Stress, lack of sleep, all the conditions these kids have are real. Again for the ones applying to the top schools, for most high schools students, thankfully, it’s not. GCs need a lot more empathy and compassion than they’ve needed in the past. And I think teen counseling is available at a lot of high schools as well which is good not just for admissions but other things.
BTW- CC’s offer many of my students a vehicle into a college experience and eventually a four year university. Yes they have “a pulse” and a desire to learn and gain what we all want out of life. Could we drop the disparaging of those who don’t get to go to an elite school?..
It depends how you look at it. One study estimated that 21% of Div I recruited athletes were black. In that same year, 13% of the overall full time college student population was black. Across the full US black students are tremendously overrperesented in football and basketball, which are the 2 sports that schools and the general public most care about overall, and the 2 sports that colleges usually pour the most money in to. In the vast majority of US states, the highest paid public employee is either a college football coach or college basketball coach. Football in particular tends to have a huge number of recruits and scholarships compared to other college sports. However, black students are tremendously underrepresented in the majority of other college sports.
“Elite” colleges often have a similar pattern. For example, Harvard has had some good basketball success recently, frequently making the national tournament. Looking at the roster pictures, I’d estimate 47% of students on the team are black. That’s not the majority, but it’s many times higher than the black representation in the overall student body. A Crimson article also mentions black students being very overrpersented on the football team compared to the general student body. At Stanford, I’d estimate 60% of the men’s basketball team is black, which is again well above the percent in the overall student body. I don’t care to take the time to go through the full football roster, but among the first few dozen players on the Stanford roster, more than 70% were black. However, most of the many other teams at Harvard/Stanford have a very different pattern – mostly white players, and average family income is even higher than the already high overall Harvard (and presumably also Stanford) average.
I’ve noticed a big difference in the number of minorities playing lacrosse in the last two years. My daughter was often the only minority on either side of the field, but that isn’t the case anymore. It’s moving at a glacial pace, but it is changing.
@thelonliestmonk while basketball is a larger % African American, the US is 12.3% African American, the top 4 sports you listed are north of that line. The goal isn’t to get to 50-50, but a better representation of the diversity of society.
I argue that sports are part of the campus enviornment, and sure not as prevalent at Chicago type schools, it still is part of the culture.
@Data10 “It depends how you look at it. One study estimated that 21% of Div I recruited athletes were black. In that same year, 13% of the overall full time college student population was black.”
I don’t know why you need a study with estimated numbers when the link that ohiomom posted was the actual data from the ncaa, you know data, as in your handle.
““Elite” colleges often have a similar pattern. For example, Harvard has had some good basketball success recently, frequently making the national tournament. Looking at the roster pictures, I’d estimate 47% of students on the team are black.”
Just focusing on the ivy league does not change the conclusions at all of the athletics being AA for rich white students. It probably reinforces them. Here are the numbers:
basketball white male: 39%, black male 28% (the remaining are other or more than one race)
football white male: 55%, black male 20%, so black students are not “tremendously overrepresented”
track (indoor and outdoor) white male: 52%, black male 13%
That’s it, those are the only sports with over 10% participation by blacks at ivies.
And on and on. The selective colleges do a good job of focusing people on the tv sports and saying, see look how we’re helping the poor black kids, while in the background all their other sports are mainly white.
@thelonliestmonk while basketball is a larger % African American, the US is 12.3% African American, the top 4 sports you listed are north of that line. The goal isn’t to get to 50-50, but a better representation of the diversity of society.
As I posted in my response to data10, of the 75 or so sports across US colleges, only two are over represented, football and men’s basketball, track and women’s basketball are about the same 12%. All the other sports are 0 to 3%. That is not a good representation of society, unless you think society is wealthy white people.
@JHS…you are kidding about Lebron right? He attended one of the most affluent private catholic HS in Akron (and NE Ohio). He def received the affluence leg up regardless of his family’s income. Not to mention going from a top notch Catholic HS to a football recruit for Notre Dame. Dude lost his NCAA eligibility for basketball because of playing in tournaments, but you can bet 100% that he received a lot of national attention simply from the team(s) he was playing on in middle school and HS. Don’t get me wrong Lebron is the bomb and as an Akron native, I love our hometown hero as much as the next guy, but Lebron had a lot of “helping hands” along the way. There are plenty of awesomely naturally talented athletes out there not rising to the top or being seen by recruiters because they don’t attend the right school, haven’t had savvy coaches and pushy parents making it happen for them, like Lebron.
Y’all are right though athletic recruiting does favor affluence.
There is no need to eyeball roster pictures. There’s data on this already linked in the thread, as @theloniusmonk pointed out. You can get #s for the entire Ivy League (or any NCAA league in the country).
Note that I said “recruited athletes.” If your link lists information about recruited athletes, rather than just the full roster; I don’t see it. You can get different results for “recruited” athletes from the full roster for a variety of reasons, including football often having an extremely large number of recruits compared to other sports, as I listed in my earlier post. For example, there has been a lot of discussion about the NESCAC in this thread. They allow 2 recruited athletes per sport… except for football, which allows many times more… If you divide it further into “elite” recruited athletes, rather than just recruited athletes, then the racial balances shift even further towards black students being overreprsented across the average of all sports, even though the majority of non-football/basketball sports are exceptions. Ivies tend to offer a much larger number of such sports than more typical colleges…
If you can search for specific schools in the link, I don’t see it. I only see a way to search by conference. The post I was replying to talked about “elite” colleges. Stanford works better as an example of an “elite” college than an average of the full Pac 12.
I haven’t seen any data about black students being over-represented as athletic recruits for elite schools. If you posted it I missed it.
In the NESCAC each sport (except as you note, football) gets 2 “athletic factor” recruits - recruits who are not otherwise qualified to get into the college. They get - in at last one NESCAC case - a greater number of “coded athletes” - students who have the stats to be in the pool but are admitted over non-athlete students with similar stats.
At Amherst, it’s 67 athletic factors a year and 60-90 coded a year (there’s no limit on coded athletes but that is what Amherst reported). The school says there are about 20 walk-ons per year but they rarely stay past the first season.
So at this school we have 67 + 75 (splitting the difference with coded athlete range) = 142 recruited athletes who are specifically given admissions help per class, and 20 walk-ons who generally only stay on the roster as first years.
The #s on that NCAA chart show full rosters, so 1st-4th year team totals. Recruited athletes would make up roughly 568 (4 x 142), walk ons would still be 20, but let’s be generous and give them all 2 years, so 40. They would then make up about 7% of the roster.
So when we look at the roster #s, we are looking at 93% of those, in the case of this college at least, having been recruited and given admissions help.
You could mess with the #s a little bit, some # of recruited athletes probably drop the sport before their 4 years are up, but I think using roster #s gives a pretty good picture of the situation.
Or the best one presented so far in this thread, IMO.
That’s why I’ve been using Ivy and NESCAC leagues for this discussion. By and large all of their member schools are considered elite.
And none give scholarships - the recruiting reward is not money, it’s admission.
“Recruited” athletes can be defined in a variety of ways, and as you mentioned recruiting can have much more impact on admissions decisions for some athletes and some sports than others. My original post referenced “% of Div I recruited athletes.” Div I recruiting is defined differently. Most of the listed NCAA Div I roster are not recruited athletes, by NCAA definition. Ignoring scholarships and looking at student’s definitions at an “elite” college, Harvard’s freshman survey suggests about half of their their athletes consider themselves to be recruited.
Regardless of how recruiting is defined, the point remains that minorities are not underrepresnted in “all sports”, as was originally claimed. Using the referenced link. The percentage black students among all colleges are listed below, ordered by the sports with the largest number of athletes. Any sport with 15%+ indicates significant overrepresentation.
Football: 73k Athletes -- 39% Black
Track Outdoor: 59k Athletes -- ~21% Black
Track Indoor: 54k Athletes -- ~21% Black
Soccer: 53k Athletes -- ~6% Black
Basketball: 35k Athletes -- ~40% Black
Among the top 5 sports with the most athletes, black students are overrerpresented at 4 of them. Sure black students are almost non-existent in sailing, skiing, equestrian, …; but these sports often have low enrollment. The sports with the larger numbers of athletes have a more influential impact on the overall average. If you limit just to Ivies instead of all schools, a similar pattern occurs. Again black students are overrepresented compared to the overall student population in 4 of the 5 sports listed above. However, one difference is black students have good representation the fifth sport – soccer, similar to the overall college representation (at Ivies)… in some cases more represented. Of course Ivies also have a larger number of the low enrollment sports than typical colleges.
These aren’t Ivy or NESCAC numbers. I didn’t say anything about colleges in general, OP wasn’t talking about colleges in general (“competitive and highly competitive colleges”) so I’m not sure how this data above is relevant to the discussion.
My post explained why it is relevant, as quoted below:
“If you limit just to Ivies instead of all schools, a similar pattern occurs. Again black students are overrepresented compared to the overall student population in 4 of the 5 sports listed above. However, one difference is black students have good representation the fifth sport – soccer, similar to the overall college representation (at Ivies)… in some cases more represented.”
According to the figures in College Navigator and IPEDS, black students make up 7% of the undergraduate full-time enrollment across the full Ivy League. According to http://web1.ncaa.org/rgdSearch/exec/saSearch , black students make up 8% of the sports roster across the full Ivy League. Both numbers are underestimated due to the way they classify race, but it’s a consistent classification between the two databases. It’s not a matter of being under-represented overall. It’s more being over-represented in the popular sports that I mentioned earlier… particularly the two sports that colleges tend to give the most admission boosts for top athletes… and under-represented in sports like sailing, skiing, equestrian, etc. Ivy League colleges offer far more of these under-represented sports than more typical colleges.