I think it’s bizarre and uniquely American the emphasis placed on sports and holistic generally in admissions, but it is what it is. Outside a few programs, ex. football at Alabama, most teams lose money.
Wow, the misinformation on here is rampant. Glumping athletes into the helmet crowd is so naive. Of course there are the lower percentile kids, but there are also the elite athletes that are also elite academically. If someone thinks the highest levels of speech and debate take the same amount of time as being an elite athlete, they obviously didn’t have an elite athlete. Elite athletes are given a bump because their commitment is unparalleled to anything else.
Cal Tech does give consideration but you only know this if you are an athlete that has been given consideration, but no doubt, they do. So do the Claremont Colleges. College athletics brings billions to the NCAA and millions to colleges, simple research. A lot of schools make a lot of money.
The Ivy’s would be so much less without their athletic programs. If someone wants a place without athletics, I’m sure there are places and schools that don’t provide those opportunities. So finding those would be better that disparaging or being jealous of hard working athletes.
@labegg I would also add that cheerleading is a more dangerous sport than swimming in general! So hats off to you! Lol. My point stands, it is no small feat for student athletes to maintain great grades and be competitive in whatever they do and if they get a leg up in the college mad race, so be it. Of course, I wish music, dancing, art, acting, …,all have the same pull.
@blueskies2day can’t agree with you more.
AFAIK, the reason that Ivy League existed in the first place was for athletic competition, no?!
Transcript is very important for admission to “top schools”, probably the most important criteria for admission at the vast majority of them. And 4.0 UW kids are tremendously overrepresented at top colleges. For example, back in 2014 when Harvard’s freshman survey last printed a text summary about incoming student’s UW GPA, they wrote:
It may seem like 4.0 UW kids do not get a break because there are so many of them. In some high schools, more than 10% of the class has a 4.0 UW. It’s not practical to give all of them break, and it doesn’t make sense (to me) to get hung up on slight differences between near 4.0 and 4.0, such that if a kid gets a A- in freshman year, he has little hope of admission.
And in my imagination, some of the differential factors in all these 4.0 or near 4.0 could/should be sports/elite athletes. At least it is much more fair to choose an elite athletes with near perfect gpa over a kid with a rich dad/politician dad.
St. John’s College (in MD) has no NCAA or NAIA athletic teams. Obviously they do have a top croquet team, but they don’t favor high school croquet players in admissions. The team prefers to select and develop croquet players from the enrolled student body, rather than by recruiting high school prospects. Clearly their approach seems to work.
By the way, if you follow college croquet, note that St. John’s is capping attendance at the Annapolis Cup this year. They will only admit 5,000 fans, and they expect to sell out, so get your tickets promptly when they are released for sale next week. https://www.sjc.edu/annapolis/events/croquet
@roethlisburger: Only if you don’t take in to account alumni donations.
OK, here is the 2016 ranking by endowment (top 25) and their relative change (if any) since 1991:
1 Harvard University
2 Yale University (+2)
3 The University of Texas System (-1)
4 Stanford University (+1)
5 Princeton University (-2)
6 Massachusetts Institute of Technology (+2)
7 University of Pennsylvania (+8)
8 The Texas A&M University System and Foundations (+1)
9 University of Michigan (+18)
10 Northwestern University (+3)
11 Columbia University (-5)
12 University of Notre Dame (+4)
13 University of California (??? Couldn’t find in the 1991 ranking)
14 The University of Chicago (-2)
15 Duke University (+9)
16 Washington University in St. Louis (-9)
17 Emory University (-7)
18 University of Virginia (+8)
19 Cornell University (-5)
20 Rice University (-9)
21 University of Southern California (+4)
22 Dartmouth College (-4)
23 Vanderbilt University (-6)
24 The Pennsylvania State University (+42!)
25 The Ohio State University (+9)
Notice something?
OK, let’s break down by separating in to two piles: Those schools who increased 3 or more places in 25 years and those schools who decreased 3 or more places in 25 years:
Winners:
PSU (+42), UMich (+18), OSU (+9), Duke (+9), UVa (+8), Penn (+8), ND (+4), USC (+4), Northwestern (+3)
Losers:
Dartmouth (-4), Columbia (-5), Cornell (-5), Vanderbilt (-6), Emory (-7), Rice (-9), WashU (-9)
8 of the 9 schools who increased their relative endowment rankings the most are in DivI FBS. Most are powers in either football or basketball and UVa and NU at least are not terrible in the sport they care about the most.
UPenn is the outlier, and I believe it’s because they have Wharton and finance professionals have amassed a ton more wealth in the past quarter century. But there is only one Wharton (for undergrad business) in this country.
Only 2 of the 7 schools who dropped the most are in DivI FBS, and Rice went from being in a power conference to being in one of the weakest conferences in DivI FBS while Vandy gets beat up a lot in SEC football.
Only 3 of the schools who are still in the top 25 are DivIII, and they’ve all dropped:
UofC (-2), Emory (-7), WashU (-9)
Look at the schools who have dropped out of the top 25 since 1991, and this point is even more stark:
19 NYU (-8)
20 Rochester (-22)
21 JHU (-7)
22 Rockefeller (-23)
23 Caltech (-16)
(compare to the schools right below them in 1991)
24 Duke (+9)
25 USC (+4)
26 UVa (+8)
27 UMich (+18)
NYU, Rochester, JHU, Rockefeller, and Caltech all are either DivIII* or play no sports.
- JHU is a DivI power in lacrosse, but that doesn’t move the needle.
OK, what about small schools?
Well, the WASP schools are typically considered the top LACs in the US. Two are NESCAC and two are not. Here is how they faired:
Swarthmore (36->49)
Pomona (42->43)
Williams (43->35)
Amherst (54->41)
BTW, Reed, which isn’t even in DivIII, dropped from 126 to 172.
@labegg I’d argue gymnastics all the way. 20 hours per week in practice is low; at the college recruitability level many gymnasts train up to 40. 
Like somebody said above, the third rail is always what you don’t have. Some argue athletes who don’t benefit from an athletic recruit. Or legacy, etc. I don’t think the URM preference is as big deal as people say it is because URMs also have to be qualified- if you don’t have the stats, no matter what race you are, you most likely won’t be admitted. Besides URM is an underrepresented minority- majority and ORMs still take up much of the spots. Any benefit comes from being less common and having fewer fellow qualified URM to compete with (no “white girl” syndrome.) Many URM also happen to be low income or first generation as well, which is a separate argument in itself.
@Corbett don’t forget the schools that pioneered quidditch. If you think being an elite hs athlete takes as much time as being an elite quidditch player, you don’t have an elite quidditch player.
Caltech is smaller at the undergrad level than my high school. That, not the absence of a winning hockey team, is what limits their endowment growth. You would get a different result if you looked at endowment per student.
Neat trick to cherrypick. If you want to use size as a reason, then explain why huge NYU also slipped by 8 spots.
And why, when Cornell is much bigger than Duke,
Cornell went 14->19
and
Duke went 24->15
Columbia and Northwestern are roughly the same size, yet
Columba went 6->11
and
Northwestern 13->10
and explain the WASP LACs. They’re all about the same size.
Caltech does some level of recruiting , although athletes are not going to get in if not otherwise qualified academically. And no idea if coaches have much or any pull , but they do have ways to have potential athletes submit their info to coaches. The teams , in general, may not be that competitive, but they do not ignore athletics altogether. Even years ago, basketball sent an unsolicited form recruiting letter to my son after they “ran some numbers.” Very funny letter along the lines of wanting to start finding some kids that had actually played basketball before!
@klbmom18 funny thing… my oboe player is actually an "elite " Quidditch player, She actually gave up a spot on her collegiate club Lacrosse team to play Quidditch because she wanted to tackle people. Her team has qualified for Nationals and will travel from Wisconsin to Austin, Texas in April this year (They qualified and went to Nationals in Florida last year) No joke. They practice several times a week. The Quidditch Club is so competitive at Texas A&M they have three teams a Nationals team and 2 “jv” teams. There is actually a major league Quidditch organization. These people are dang serious about their Quidditch.
Caltech basketball had a 26 year losing streak in their conference (ended in 2011). It was notable enough that a movie was made about the losing streak. The summary of the movie at https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/quantum_hoops/ mentions that the team lineup includes 5 valedictorians who had never played basketball before. If the team is full of students who have not played basketball before, I doubt the coach has much pull in admissions.
Yes, I have seen that movie. It is great. My son actually would have been there if he had pursued it and gotten admitted. Caltech was a very poor fit for him,though -socially , geographically, and financially and he did not pursue it… They had at that time kids who had not played before but the new coach was looking to expand things to include kids who HAD played before, that could also fit in with the academic stuff. Those kids are harder to find.
That is true at every school. Every athlete has to be academically qualify for the school. The question is what is that qualification? At East Mississippi CC, that is the NCAA minimum. At Wisconsin, it is higher than that. At Ivies, it is much higher. Even at Stanford they aren’t going to let in football players who can’t do the work academically because it doesn’t do them any good if the student can’t play because he becomes academically disqualified.
My daughter’s team has the second highest gpa of all the teams at her school at over 3.5 and it’s a STEM school. They are ranked 6th in the nation athletically. Pretty good balance. Of her original class, 7 of 9 are still on the team, and 5 are graduating on time. One is in a 5 year program so will graduate with a BS and MS next year, and one needs a few more classes (not sure why). Pretty good showing for a bunch of dumb jocks.
@labegg I knew I liked you. So cool having a quidditch player. UMD is supposed to have a good program so if D goes there we can watch! One of my favorite silly movies is the Internship and the quidditch scene.
Actually, at the CC, the academics to qualify for both athletes and non-athletes are below the NCAA minimum (zero).
That’s actually why a lot of athletes go to CC; because they don’t meet the NCAA minimum but hope to improve enough academically to play at a DivI school (and why you can find players on CC football teams who are illiterate).
For the vast majority of DivI FBS schools (that is, outside of Stanford, Northwestern, and maybe GTech because they require every undergrad to pass calculus there), the academic requirements for athletes in the revenue sports is either the NCAA minimum or barely above the NCAA minimum.