I’ll cherrypick two more examples. Harvard and Yale hold the top two endowment spots. Harvard went 66 years without a NCAA tournament appearance in men’s basketball. Yale went 54 years. Having mediocre men’s basketball teams didn’t prevent these schools from winning the endowment race, and I’m betting the cross country teams performance is even less relevant to alumni donations.
@roethlisburger: How many Harvards and Yales exist in the US?
I can name DOZENS from my kids’ schools, rec teams, club teams, friends, neighbors, my friend’s kids. A little boy who we met at our community pool when he was 2 and my kids were about 4-5 is a superstar and as a freshman is leading his D1 school in goals and assists just 3 games into his career. At 2 years old he was determined to do everything those ‘older women’ were doing and he didn’t care if he drowned in the process. Several kids on my kids’ community swim team went to the Olympics trials and swam D1. Missy Franklin went to my nephew’s high school and was on the hs team with girls from our elementary school and community swim team.
My kids are the same age as Christian McCaffrey, so played in the same school league as he did (although mine are girls) Watched him in 3rd grade, then through high school, at Stanford and now in the NFL.
All those D1 athletes are from SOME community, and have been watched by community members for many years. I bet you know moreD1 athletes than you realize.
“Whether a musician or athlete, the very best who go to the very best schools often times did not get into their craft to help college admissions.”
They athletes definitely do, many of them talk in 8th or 9th grade about getting a div 1 or 3 scholarship. And to focus on just one sport at the expense of other ECs for college admission. You may have a point on the musician and artist.
A student not spending 20-40 hours a week training at something should make spectacular grades because they have so much more time than someone that is. But the student that is excelling academically while being an elite athlete or artist is and exceptional young person. I think some are just disappointed that their student didn’t have this amazing “thing” they got into at such a level, but what isn’t fair is to begrudge those that did.
“But what about the student that spends 20 hours doing difference-making, Mother Teresa-esque volunteering, wouldn’t that be exceptional? That person would not have the admissions advantage an athlete does.”
I don’t think students begrudge the athletes esp the ones that play div 1 revenue sports, it’s the universities that are begrudged for giving preference to athletes that play sports very few people watch. If 50 people show up to a sporting event and most of them are relatives of the participants, how’s the campus gaining by this? Especially if the athletes spend time only with each other during practice and study times and not engage with the rest of the community? These sports take a lot of time, they’re not getting a scholarship to play and do other clubs. They play on season and train off season. Again these are not sports where people watch and is part of the college culture. And it doesn’t have to be 100K, 3K ice hockey or 1K softball games are very important to a lot of colleges.
I think the help to the university can be in the type of person it attracts. Many athletes are fun, energetic people, the teams are involved in community service, in Greek life on campus. Sometimes the minor sports are supporting the major spots meet Title IX regulations. Yep, maybe no one goes to field hockey games, but if you don’t have a field hockey team the school is going to have to add other women’s teams to offset the football team.
If schools drop everything except classes, I think they would be boring places. No clubs, no Greeks, no athletes, no concerts, no theater. Go to class, go to the library, go home. What fun!
BTW, why this supposition that musicians can’t be as hooked as athletes?
Several elites (the ones who care about placing alums in Big 5 orchestras) do definitely favor the most talented musicians in admissions.
“Many athletes are fun, energetic people, the teams are involved in community service, in Greek life on campus.”
Do you really want to got there? Why don’t you google “athletes male sexual assault on campus” and see what you get. And see if these are still people you’d consider fun. You make a good point on Title IX, but the implication that there would be no campus life or culture if sports were dropped to club level is a little hyperbolic. My point is that athletes are not participating in these clubs because they’re focusing solely on academics and athletics, which is what they should be doing. They may do a service event sure, or join a frat but services and frats would still go on if they weren’t there.
“I’ll cherrypick two more examples. Harvard and Yale hold the top two endowment spots. Harvard went 66 years without a NCAA tournament appearance in men’s basketball. Yale went 54 years. Having mediocre men’s basketball teams didn’t prevent these schools from winning the endowment race, and I’m betting the cross country teams performance is even less relevant to alumni donations.”
Actually ice hockey is bigger at Harvard and Yale as is football. In fact I think Yale won the national title in hockey a couple of years back and Harvard won one in the 80s. However endowment to Harvard and Yale is from grad school too right? The donations from HBS or Yale Law grads who don’t really care about the sports apart from something to do to get a break, will overshadow by billions I’m guessing, undergrads who went there and are unhappy about the basketball program.
Look, the fact of the matter is that American elite college education is a fairly unique product by international standards, and with a few exceptions like Caltech it’s simply part of the institutions that they should field competitive sports teams. They don’t use a single dimension to make admissions decisions. Intellectual ability and achievement is very important, but other factors come into play, too. And it’s not just team sports – great talents in acting, art, or music (or politics) get rewarded too, and people who do non-team athletics at a very high level also get a huge boost. (I remember many years ago hearing a relative who was on the admissions committee of a top 5 medical school talking about whether they would admit an Olympic figure skating medalist with a good but not-quite-stellar academic record. The answer was absolutely yes. And that was medical school.) But in sports where a college fields teams, it needs to populate those teams, so there are generally more athletes than artists, actors, musicians, and politicians admitted.
Nothing like 40% of the student body is recruited athletes. Even at Amherst, which is off the charts small, recruited athletes admitted on that basis alone are only 15% of the class, and the percentage goes way down from there. None of the Ivies has significantly more than 15% recruited athletes. (As many have pointed out, at the really big schools, the Michigans and UCLAs, and even large privates like USC or Boston University, athletes are a negligible percentage of students.) Furthermore, most recruited athletes are essentially admitted on some version of an ED basis (not at HYP, but everywhere else). So while they may represent 15% of an entering class, they represent a meaningfully smaller percentage of admissions offers made, especially at colleges that don’t get an 80% yield on their admissions offers. At Amherst, the 67 athletic admits they are permitted represent about 6% of admissions offers.
Yep, I’ll go there. My daughter is an athlete, in a sorority, in engineering societies, researches for a professors, does community service with her team and sorority, goes to the beach, likes country music. She’s never been involved in a sexual assault on or off campus as far as I know. Not all athletes are male and not all assaults are committed by men. The male athletes I know are fun, and fine people too. D is just a regular college kid but she happens to play a sport and that happens to pay for half her tuition.
@JHS: 40% of William’s student body are varsity athletes: https://www.forbes.com/lists/2010/94/best-colleges-10_Williams-College_950395.html
32% of Amherst’s student body are varsity athletes:
http://athletics.amherst.edu/information/department_information
Parent of d3 athletic recruit. I will say that people are only concerned here with competitive college.
We carefully sought out only d3 schools with rosters full of engineers, scienists, premed, or other substantive student athletes, as I was concerned my son’s influenced by kids who are there for the right reasons. We found the truly top stem schools, MIT, Caltech and the one ultimately attended, were all d3, and coaches had little or no say. You had to be in their normal admit range to get in.
Now many in the normal admit range are rejected and there is still an advantage, but the better the school the less the advantage. Caltech coach asked my son more about academics than anything. Yes there are d1 Ivies, Duke, GA Tech, but I can tell you 2 Ivies saw my son in hs and also focused on grades. This is not the free ride you think it is. These students have to get good grades while following a grueling schedule. If anything many ARE SUPERIOR STUDENTS, and deserve the attention. My son went to practice everyday in HS, then another academically oriented EC, then studied for his all AP workload until past midnight senior year of HS. He got good grades, competing with kids who had a less demanding schedule.
Folks, if your kid is NOT and athlete, you don’t know what you are talking about.
That's the number of varsity athletes, not the number of recruited athletes or the number of students that get significant admissions benefit. It's my understanding NESCAC averages ~2 recruits per team (football is an exception).
@Data10: Yeah, but to have that many athletes in the student body, you need to form a student body that is fairly athletic on average. It makes me think that having an athletic EC in HS is a slightly better EC to have for Williams/Amherst than it is for, say Caltech (or Reed).
Back to the original post, now why should “the best accordion players or ventriloquists in your state” be any tip? (That’s not the sort of ‘standing out’ top colleges would tip for.) Notice that what matters in a tip is the group impact. School’s like having sports teams, orchestras, kids who’ll field the newspaper staff or debate teams, or engage in the local community, kids who add diverse perspectives (not just diverse identities,) and more. They enhance what the school sees as the experiences for all, outside classes. Being a singletons isn’t the “it” many assume.
My problem with athletic recruiting isn’t when these are otherwise strong, compelling candidates. It’s when they aren’t, but an adcom needs to go by the coaches’ wants. This happens less with, say, musicians, where it can tip a strong applicant, but isn’t the hook even an academically weaker athlete can get.
This is going to sound snarky, and I’m sorry. But if you want to start a college that favors accordion players or ventriloquists, you should start one and see how that goes? The current systems seems to be working well for the US University/College system. Why change it? There are schools that put a huge emphasis on major college sports (State Flagship D1 schools). There are schools that put an emphasis on the entire student body that does de-emphasize money making athletics, but view athletics as an important part of the school culture (selective DIII) and a few that don’t have a huge emphasis on varsity sports (Caltech and Reed). That is a great variety that doesn’t cover everyone, but from a general standpoint there should be something for everyone. With the possible exception of accordion players and ventriloquists.
There are programs that are looking for just students too. These are usually state schools that have a huge student body. Many schools only accept on GPA and test scores.
It’s all part of holistic application process. For me I appreciate what sports have taught me: the never say die until the fat lady sings attitude because I played a lot of sports growing up.
I can testify how tough it is to participate in a physically grueling sports and try not to fall asleep before completing homeworks. My non-athletic kid ran cross country and track for one year during his freshman year (he actually turned out to be good in long distance running) and because of how sleepy or tired he felt after physical exertion, he realized for him there was no way he could pursue other activities he wanted to, so he quit after one year. After he quit, I asked him why he ran so hard when really didn’t like the sport and he said he ran hard to help the team get as many points to win at competition and because people depended on him. He didn’t even put down his one year of athletic diversion on his college applications because it might detract from his main accomplishments but he ended up appreciating how difficult it was to excel in academics while pursuing sports intensively. I think that one year of running made him more resilient and willing to endure some pain to achieve goals so I am glad I forced him to go through it. His coach was actually sorry to see him quit because he turned out to be one of best runners among freshmen runners. I still remember him grimacing as he is climbing up a hill trying to receive more points. Lol
A few schools teach music/art to future professionals and look for those already talented in it, yes. Juilliard, CCM, Curtis, Eastman, etc.
The appropriate comparison would be schools that teach future pro athletes their sport. Since I can’t think of one, that role is likely filled by the Big10, Pac, SEC and other big sports schools that recruit the best D1 athletes who have a shot at going pro.
They aren’t comparable to an Ivy, NESCAC or other elite college, though they have an entire separate admissions system for athletes, and not for musicians or artists.
I can name a dozen or so. From my kids HS (class size 200ish) typically 3-5 go D1, a couple more D2. In my D’s class 2 football players, 1 soccer, 1 softball, 1 lacrosse.
For roughly 15% of the class the college lowers its academic standards and lets in students who otherwise wouldn’t have a shot. ANOTHER 15-20% get a “tip” with admissions for the sport and would otherwise be competing against the large pool of “qualified” students.
Every incoming class totals 125 to 150 athletes (out of ~450). So 25%+. Before any walk on spots.
I agree, it’s not the same thing as music or art.
I basically agree with this. If the college wants more URM students, more athletes, more kids form Montana, fine.
But they do tweak things over time. And based on the fact that Amherst, for one, sees a potential problem that deserves two major reports on the impact of their athletic program on the college, this may be one area that is going to change a bit.
Another D3 athlete parent.It seems what “gets” to people on CC is the recruited athlete at highly selective schools, the top 20 universities and LACs, and not the student who gets the full, head count scholarship, at a very competitive athletic program at a school which is not so competitive for admissions.
My impression is people often do not see how much screening and “rejection” happens long before the one ED decision or likely letter comes through. Many programs are looking for specific needs – whether it is a particular swimming or track and field event, or specific position on a team like soccer, lacrosse etc. You’re a goalkeeper, and your top schools are not recruiting GKs in your year? Move on. Or a soccer team only wants big, physical guys, and you are a quick, technical player and 5’7 (looking at you, Amherst) – move on. The competition to even get looked at by these schools is intense, and then you are competing against all the other prospects. Getting that offer is the product of significant competition, and the quid pro quo is that you apply ED or convert your app to SCEA so that the coach knows you aren’t going anywhere else and they can stop working to fill that need.
As far as measuring up academically, these kids are usually spending 20+ hours a week in their sport, most of the year, and taking the most rigorous curriculum and getting good grades. The NESCACs and Ivies are pretty transparent about the stats needed to be recruited, and the folks who have gone through NESCAC recruiting say there is less flexibility in academic credentials than at schools. And there are schools where athletics might get you noticed, but your application still needs to be among the strongest and your ED application could still go either way, like Grinnell and Haverford. The students who are deferred or rejected ED1 then play a game of musical chairs to see if other schools are still interested in your particular sport/position for ED2. Maybe ED and recruiting collapses, and you have a few RD acceptances, and contact the coaches about walk-ons. They may say sure, come to preseason and I’ll take a look, but the odds are stacked against you. We know some kids who didn’t go through recruiting but thought, as highly successful high school athletes, they could walk on – they didn’t make it through pre-season training because they realized they were not at that level, in terms of skill or conditioning.
And we ran across lots of kids and families who said they were in it for the scholarship – but many of those kids dropped out of the sport, or the recruiting process, by 11th grade. The kids who are still competing and seriously going through recruiting by 11th grade, are the ones for whom their sport is as essential to them as music is to a musician or art to an artist.
At the end of the day, I would hope that, sometimes, others could recognize that the kid who gets into Dartmouth or Amherst etc. as a recruited athlete already went through an intense competitive process for those few spots on that team.