“If anything many ARE SUPERIOR STUDENTS, and deserve the attention.”
They are not superior students maybe at best, competitive with the non-athletes. Colleges that report test scores and GPAs for athletes and non-athletes shows the non-athletes having better scores. This was a report a few years back on pac-10 schools:
UC Berkeley - Male Athletes SAT: 1078 Overall Males: 1329
UCLA - Male Athletes - 998, Overall Males: 1307
GPA of basketball players at Berkeley - 3.06, football - 2.85 overall males: 3.92
UCLA male basketball players gpa - 3.00, football: 3.07, overall males - 3.91
Sometime in the past, the mission of leading American private universities to educate ministers (which was the purpose of HYP when they were founded centuries ago) morphed into one of training male and female students to achieve concrete things in the material world without regard to religion (cf. Cornell and Stanford, which were founded for essentially that purpose in the latter half of the nineteenth century).
Nowadays, most of the top national private universities see their mission as educating future leaders in society and around the world, because doing this enables the universities to increase their power and reach and bolster their reputations, thereby positioning them to accumulate the best students and the most resources to pursue their primary activities of teaching and research. They fill their classes with a mix of students designed to satisfy various constituencies in order to achieve this, and some of those students are recruited athletes.
I believe recruiting the athletes necessary to field competitive sports teams at the top national private universities has two principal purposes (and the athletic department making money isn’t one of them):
It fires up the older, wealthier alumni and makes them inclined to donate and support the school in other ways if the college team beats its rivals and, even better, is nationally competitive in some sports. As someone noted above, Yale won the national ice hockey championship a few years back. Yale also won the national heavyweight crew championship last year and the football team may not be FBS but is beating Harvard recently - so I think the older alums are puffing out their chests and feeling better about opening up their checkbooks (important, with a capital campaign likely starting in the fall).
The qualities that make a strong scholar-athlete (and the great majority of the athletes at these schools are actually pretty smart) are markers for professional and material success later in life in a variety of spheres. Prominent, successful and wealthy alumni are good for the university from various perspectives (they have influence, they donate, they favor the university's graduates when recruiting for their companies, etc.).
There are plenty of graduates of these schools who will go on to become top-flight academics and cutting-edge researchers, which is also very good for the universities. The athletes help the universities in other necessary ways, though, which is why they’re there.
@theloniusmonk: Wasn’t the discussion about athletes (generally not among the elite athletically in the country) at academically elite DivIII and Ivies?
You can’t conflate conflate them with FBS DivI athletic powerhouses.
@PurpleTitan Average athletic stats at NESCAC and Ivies are still lower than the general accepted student population. That is why bands (NESCAC) and AIs (Ivies) exist.
To ensure academic standards aren’t lowered TOO much.
For some - probably most - athletes, academic standards are not lowered at all, but for some they are.
The flip side of having such good teams is a negative - many HS athletes won’t be able to play competitive sports anymore, either because the slots are filled with recruited kids, or the level of commitment expected is more than many want.
This isn’t an “everyone gets a trophy” sentiment, I think there should be tryouts and competition, with less for club and anyone should be able to play intramural. But at many (especially small) schools, there’s little in the way of resources left over for not-varsity athletics.
@theloniusmonk Berkeley and UCLA are probably the two colleges in the country where one would expect to see the greatest divide between the academic “stats” of male athletes and nonathletes. They are guaranteed to have extremely high average stats because they sit atop the most elaborately articulated public university system in the country, and are known to be largely stats-driven in admissions. At the same time, they are members of one of the most competitive sports leagues in the country, one whose skill standards are effectively professional. Many of their competitors in that league do not come anywhere near their academic standards. Almost uniquely, each has a close local rival with which it competes for top-quality recruits with high stats. And they offer fewer official team sports than most of the Ivies; they can’t pad their athlete stats with fencers, sailers, squash players, and members of the lightweight crew.
No, though the prettier picture is that these are scholar-athletes, it just isn’t always so. On CC, I do believe many kids that parents describe are all around qualified. But where there’s huge competition for a spot, say tippy tops, a coach-endorsed athlete can have an ace up his or her sleeve that trumps other aspects of the application. It can be a huge hook that pulls over a less compelling app. For other kids, it’s the app, all of it, that has to speak to adcoms. The holistic “all.”
Being at that college may raise a kid’s future leadership potential. Not just sports but the environment. I don’t know that it’s sports per se that produces that.
I’d add that unlike elite athletes at schools such as UCLA and UCB, competitive student athletes at the Ivies aren’t looking to their college placement as a possible channel to a pro career. Those UCs have produced many athletes who go onto the NFL, NBA…
@OHMomof2 I understand the frustration. It seemed that, at a lot of the 20-50 ranked LACs we looked at, there were active intramural programs in soccer, basketball etc. as a resource for kids who wanted to play, but not compete at a high level. At D1s, there is “club” – which usually involves inter-school competition and is more like a JV squad, with competitive tryouts, and then there is also intramural, “fun” sports. My D3 athlete plays intramural in his off season, in the sport he also enjoyed but was never going to be as strong in, and has a blast. Accessibility of intramural programs, and access to athletic facilities would be a good question to ask on tours etc.
Agree, @lookingforward - there are clearly some number of athletic recruits whose academic stats are well below average and round out the bottom of the class. They’re there because they have that huge hook - like development cases and other one-of-a-kinders that the university feels it needs. With the Ivies having to conform to the Academic Index requirements overall, though, I think mathematically there can only be very few of those who are athletes, and you need a lot of high-stats athletes to balance them. I would guess most varsity Ivy athletes cluster a little below the stats median at their schools, with some above it, a few significantly so.
I’d note that Stanford (not subject to the AI requirements) strikes the balance a bit differently than HYP, btw - which is one reason Stanford’s athletic teams are generally stronger, often substantially so. If you compare the Common Data Sets of the four schools, you’ll reasonably conclude that there are probably something north of 50 kids in each Stanford class, over 3% of the undergraduate population, who would be excluded from HYP based on stats (i.e., some are below HYP’s lowest levels, and there are more of them at Stanford at the levels that are at or near HYP’s lowest). I would guess the overwhelming majority of those are recruited athletes.
Regarding your last point, I would guess that being at “that college” puts the athletes in a better position to be recruited for lucrative jobs by alumni (often older members of the same teams) that position them for future success. When you’re looking for an investment banking analyst who’s bright, will work for days without sleep and understands intuitively how to function as part of a team, it’s a pretty good bet that someone who rowed crew at an Ivy has the attributes you need. That, together with the fact that a disproportionate number of investment bankers went to top-twenty universities/LACs and therefore are inclined to recruit at those schools, enables the system to perpetuate itself.
I’m not frustrated @Midwestmomofboys - more wondering how the college culture might change if all sports were effectively club and intramural level and being a very good athlete was just another aspect of the application like being a great cellist or debater or researcher.
Orchestra leaders are expected to put together an orchestra without a special athletic-type recruiting system, so I’m guessing most athletic teams could do it too. They wouldn’t be as good, and some years someone might have to play their not-favored position, but if that were the norm the competition among schools in any particular league would be similar.
In terms of competing and participating at the club level it is very situational/school/sport oriented. My son would have been a mid to high level recruit in water polo however outside of California the only real options were the Ivys. The schools he would have wanted to play for in CA were not a fit for him and no amount of coaching influence would have gotten him into an Ivy. He had to make the decision what was more important - school fit or playing polo - fit won out.
He now plays club and within their conference they are near the bottom. There are other schools in the conference where the clubs have paid coaches, recruit, and actively cut players. His school on the other hand is athlete run, no cuts, and everyone gets to play. This is frustrating for those in my son’s shoes but is probably more along the lines of how a club sport should be set up. He gets the experience of playing and continuing in his sport but has lost much of the passion just because that competitive drive is not present with the bulk of the club. Would he have changed his decision? No but moving everything to club sports does not level the playing field, some schools are always going to put more resources behind the things they feel are important, be it sports, theater, music, robotics, etc.
Just bear in mind, @DeepBlue86, that while Ivies have the AI for athletes, for the rest of the Ivy applicant pool, “it’s not all about stats.” So that endorsed athlete who flubs through the app itself, the record of rigor, activities, the writing and/or any Why Us, gets a bye others don’t.
Funny you mention IB. Two brothers I know, Ivy and S, good hs records, not stellar, both landed in cushy IB jobs. Strengths, sure. Hard working team players. But if it weren’t for football, I don’t think they’d necessarily have landed at those two colleges.
"When you’re looking for an investment banking analyst who’s bright, will work for days without sleep and understands intuitively how to function as part of a team, it’s a pretty good bet that someone who rowed crew at an Ivy has the attributes you need. "
There are many schools that have walk on tryouts, that field teams of players who are average or below average compared to other schools in the conference or league. It’s not fun for a varsity team to have to play that team, to spend hours on a bus getting to podunk Alabama or North Carolina to win 20-0, to miss classes for the weekend, to have missed everything at school that weekend. I’ll also say it can be dangerous for both sides of the ball.
The U of Texas-Austin has 18 varsity teams. Harvard has about 35. I think more than a few of Harvard’s teams have walk on athletes. It also has plenty of recruited athletes that had the statistic to get in on their own but the odds aren’t there for the coach to end up with 20 swimmers or 10 lax players without identifying them for admissions.
Sorry I misunderstood @OHMomof2 I suppose if there were not recruiting, and just sign ups and walk ons, with the best being chosen, it might be more like music programs, where certain schools have reputations for excellence and draw the most talented students while others are more “rec league” and open to musicians of varying skills.
For my kid, wanting to continue to compete at the highest possible level is who he is. If there were only walk-on style programs, with the best being taken for the Varsity team, and the quality and competitiveness dropping somewhat with the lack of dedicated recruits, I imagine he would be frustrated, the same way a musician might be if they only had “rec league” musicians to perform with. Why put in the 25-30 hour weeks, if there is no shot at beating some other schools? Not the end of the world, certainly. But for a kid who can turn anything in his daily life into a competition, it would remove a source of focus, dedication, and drive.
@OHMomof2: “Orchestra leaders are expected to put together an orchestra without a special athletic-type recruiting system.”
It would depend on the orchestra. Those schools that are Big 5 feeders (as well as any music school or college orchestra that is anywhere close to the top of any rankings of that sort, which includes some academic elites) certainly aren’t just putting together an orchestra out of whatever random kids the adcom admits. They recruit and they (other than the ones who do not give any merit money) give out scholarships.
Heck, orchestra scholarships are given way down on the academic spectrum.
Presumably musical ability is the end all/be all at music schools/conservatories - everyone auditions and I think everyone understands in that sort of school, musical ability comes first.
But I hadn’t heard of any of that sort of recruiting at the elite schools we’re talking about - Ivies, NESCAC, etc.
So at the schools you are talking about the orchestra leader gets to give admissions a list of which musicians s/he wants, and academic standards are lowered for the best ones? They are asked to come in ED so the musical “team” is locked in with all the needed instruments?
My daughter was recruited, but it was to a team that was new. She had no way of knowing if the team would be any good but she knew that was the school she wanted. The coach took all walk ons who wanted to play, and even converted a few (I think there were 5) soccer players. There were 9 recruited freshman, a transfer student from a D1 program, and walk ons.
The first year was okay. Two of the soccer players stayed (and played). Two of the walk ons had experience. As more recruits came in the second and third years, all the walk ons were replaced or graduated. Now in the 4th year, there are NO walk ons left on the team. They didn’t want to put in the work. They don’t come back to school in shape, they don’t train on their own or ask the captains for extra help. They want to play on the beach or have a fun scrimmage. That’s not what varsity teams are about.
