So people want to think. In aggregate one has to wonder. CDS only puts the 25 - 75% and I can’t believe the bottom 25% are all helmet sport kids. Yet stereo type any other class of student and the PC police come out. As far as parsing them out in data…why not parse out ALL “special instances”…it gets ridiculous. In a holistic admissions…which many, many colleges and unis practice it is even more ridiculous to think about requiring the institutions to parse their data so we “know just why” Johnny or Suzie didn’t get admitted.
Someone got it correct upthread…the most miserable position is to be a smart, middle-class kid with no unique or special talents other than having good grades in High School. Those are the kids that are on the fishing expeditions and there are a heck of alot more of them than there are hooked kids.
Cal-Tech does not give preference to athletes, I suspect you’ll find more examples if you look. I also know that many schools (again in the DIII like MIT, UChicago, WashU, CMU, Emory, Williams, etc) only get a few Coaches picks in the admissions process. And generally, a coach will submit a wishlist of 5-10, in hopes the admissions office will give him 3 off of that list. It is much like the military academies, where congressmen will submit a list of 10 candidates they like and the academy picks 1 off of that list (or more precisely 5 students/4 years).
@arsenalozil Or how about Reed College? One of the “Top Liberal Arts Colleges” here on collegeconfidential. No NCAA athletics. No NAIA athletics. The entire athletics budget goes to fund club sports and great PE opportunities (PE is required).
It’s true that the Reed women’s rugby club (“The Badass Sparkle Princesses”) has had some success over the years, but girl’s rugby is not a big high school sport in the US, and I don’t think they specifically recruit athletes for the team.
There are student athletes and then there are student-athletes. I don’t know how much time hs footballers or basketball players practice each week, for competitive swimmers, they have to do minimal of 14-hour swimming + 2-3 hours of dry land, the swimming practice is done at 4:30 am, ice storm or not. And that does not count for frequent long weekend/travel meets. They are the most hardworking kids around if you ask me. And many, if not all of them, need to have solid stats to even be eligible and excellent stats to be competitive for TT schools.
If OP has any grudge about this holistic approach, it should not be targeted at student athletes, how about looking at the legacy/development kids?
Btw, athletes with good stats are also well-liked by job recruiters too.
IDK about the others but Williams is in the NESCAC so has a set # of athletic slots, just like Amherst and the rest of the league. And it’s not “a few” in the college as a whole, though for each coach it is.
Amherst had 66 the year of this article, Bowdoin 75, Midd 74, Williams is in that range.
Here is a very explicit and specific admission that musicians are not treated like athletes in admissions - they are treated similarly only to athletes who are academically on par with other accepted students. So a lower stat athlete cna get in with coach help but a lower stat musician can’t.
I haven’t read the full thread, so I may have missed a switch to a division specific tangent; but I’d expect 14 hours + 2-3 to be low compare most Div I sports. Div I limits to 20 hours per week of practice (not including travel/game), and schools that are serious about their sports (particularly football and basketball) often find ways to go well above that. When I did crew, we had almost dead on 20 hours per week of practice, not counting travel time to boathouse. The bus left for the boathouse at 6AM. This could be rough in the winter when it was dark out, cold, and raining.
@OHMomof2 Amherst fields 25 team sports at the DIII level 66 slots is 2.64 per team which is about what I said. Each coach will submit a list of 5-10 for hopefully 3 slots. I suspect that the bigger teams (Football, Field Hockey, Soccer) get more than the smaller teams (Basketball, XC) etc. Sure 66 is bigger than the music department gets, but there are more teams than music groups. I know first hand that Williams works that way. My son (4.0 UW GPA, 34 ACT, 1510 SAT) was told flat out that the coach can give a little bump in grades/test score but unless his times were top of conference coming in, his allotment of “pixie dust” was very small and was glad to see my son wouldn’t need it (although he did advise that another point on the ACT would go a long way). Williams has year-on-year the top DIII athletic department in the country. The coach was also one of the two who was very proud of the fact that his team GPAs were north of the cumulative GPA for the college. While some schools most likely do what your are saying there are schools that do not bend their standards for athletes. I suspect Amherst, Williams, Bowdoin, JHU, CMU, and UChicago are in that club.
@labegg I think it is very situational. I believe acro tumbling is only offered at less than 20 schools or so and is not recognized by the NCAA, they have a different governing body. I think those that are involved are very aggressive in their support of the sport but it falls outside of what is provided for NCAA affiliated programs can and do offer, the same way some schools provide a higher level of support for the marching band or drama programs.
The third rail could be athletics if one doesn’t have athletes, it could be legacy if one didn’t attend the child’s dream school, it could be race/ethnicity if one is not a URM, it could be money if one is not rich, it could be gender if one has a son but the dream school favors girls (or vice versa), the third rail is always what we aren’t/don’t have. As someone noted up thread, someone will always be perceived as being left without a piece of the pie.
In full transparency, I am the parent of two D1 athletes (one current, one high school senior starting in the fall) both of whom had/have GPAs that start with a 4 and high test scores, so I admit not feeling too badly about this third rail thing. The magna cum laude son and the soon to be valedictorian daughter don’t feel too badly about it either.
A&W at least are explicitly NOT in that club. Academic standards are bent for those 66 or so per year. An additional 60-90 are given an admissions tip but are otherwise on par with the rest of the accepted class academically (though may not have gotten in without the tip).
The 66 or so per year number is students who NEED the help to get in. (It is # of teams x 2+ 14 if there’s a football team).
@Data10
I am referring to high school age club swimmers, and these hours are minimal for them, 11.5 months of the year, not counting travel time, nor meet time, nor times spent for high school swim season, the last one is in addition to what they have to do for their clubs.
I don’t know about DI athletes but would assume they spend more times on sports.
But if the athlete does all those things and isn’t going to play for the school, he gets the same bonus points as the debater - it’s a nice EC and shows leadership or dedication, but doesn’t get a slot or a boost. If the college debate team wants to recruit (or has a need to recruit) the best high school debaters, then the coach needs to convince admissions that it needs a few dedicated spots in admissions for debate. The orchestra director needs a few spots for oboists, and the dance program needs a prima ballerina spot (which I’m pretty sure they have).
Very biased as I do have a D2 athlete, and I love everything it has provided to her. She was required to go to study tables until her gpa was at least 3.0, which for her was one semester (but for others on her team it has been all 4 years). There were special athletic tutors available but they weren’t necessarily the best tutors for calculus or physics. If she needed help she preferred a TA or the professor’s office hours, which of course are available to all students.
Lots of free clothes which is nice if you like to dress exactly the same as your 21 best friends and you like the school colors of gray and crimson. It’s wonderful if you want a wardrobe of sweats and t-shirts and waterproof warm ups that squeak when you walk. Free food when you travel is great if you like Olive Garden, which my daughter doesn’t. On campus she lived in the same freshman complex as 95% of all freshmen, and ate at the same dining hall as 100% of the students who eat on campus.
I’ve loved the money. She gets about 1/2 her tuition from a merit scholarship and 1/2 from athletic. If she didn’t get the athletic money, she couldn’t afford the school. I do think the school gives more in merit money overall than in athletic money.
Why does her team help the school? It brought 22 women to the school that probably wouldn’t be there otherwise. Thank you Title IX! It is a STEM school that has a 70/30 male to female ratio. It has a football team so needs to balance those male scholarships with a few to female teams. Her team is not bringing in the big bucks to the school. There are rarely 100 people watching, and the parents and other students get in free.
@makemesmart I would argue that cheerleaders are the hardest working athletes out there, lol. Many HS cheerleaders do school cheer which is a year round activity and competitive All-star cheer outside of the school cheer responsibilities. All-Star Cheer requires advanced tumbling skills, dance skills and stunting skills and is also a year round sport. They are often cheering at multiple games a week, along with there own HS and All star practices and then are at cheer competitions on the weekend and making grades to remain on the HS team.
Cheerleaders “You play football? That’s cute. We throw 100 pound girls and you throw 2 pound football and rest between plays. Oh, and we actually catch ours and smile why we do it!”
Lol, lets face it every parent thinks what their kid does is awesome, the hardest and deserving of recognition and want universities to recognize it too!
@DadTwoGirls: “The thing that bothers me is that a student with a 4.0 unweighted GPA doesn’t seem to get much of a break for a top school in the US.”
Many American publics do weigh GPA/class rank heavily in admissions (at least for in-state applicants). The problem with the US system is that because publics are funded by states rather than the federal government (at least directly), you have in-state and OOS rate and admissions differentials.
@momofthreeboys: “CDS only puts the 25 - 75% and I can’t believe the bottom 25% are all helmet sport kids”.
No, not all, but you’ll likely find that at elite schools, the majority (and possibly the vast majority) of the helmet/hoops sports kids are in that bottom quartile by stats.
There’s a lot of space there. Research U’s can fit the entire football, hockey, and men’s basketball teams there and still have plenty of slots left over for other kids.
Anyway, schools will do what they deem best. That is good for some and not for others.
If you want a school that doesn’t emphasize athletics at all, you can find them in both the US and abroad. Caltech and Reed have been mentioned. Probably several of the Claremont colleges as well (some of them combine to form squads, and I really doubt the schools recruit for those conjoined teams).