Too many athlete students in colleges?

Parent Cafe
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There are some parents who put a lot of money into youth sports and don’t understand how college scholarships work, and they are disappointed when Billy and Susie are seniors and there is not a pot of gold waiting. There are a lot more who want to use the sport to get the child into college, and getting a scholarship isn’t as important as getting into the top school and on the top team. I know a few of each type. If there were no tips or slots into Ivies or no scholarships to Stanford would these families still have paid for all the lessons, all the training, all the teams? I think they would. Most I know paying the big bucks are wealthy, and their kids were golfing and playing tennis at the country club long before middle schools. They also pay a lot for piano lessons knowing their kids are not going to be professional muscians.

Then there are the thousands upon thousands of us who had our kids in youth sports because we believe youth sports are good for development. My kids tried swimming and skating and one horrible horrible session of soccer for 3-4 year olds (that was enough for me!), basketball and volleyball at school, gymnastic sessions and camps, tennis lessons, golf, rowing… My kids topped out at 5’4" and they were never going to be basketball players, never going to swim against Missy Franklin in the olympics (who was in their same age group for swimming and could have given them a 25 yard head start and still whipped them in a 50 yard race when she was 5 years old), but they had fun playing in the Catholic school 3rd/4th grade city basketball championship one year. They played for fun, for exercise, because their friends and classmates did, because their uncle was a coach and needed players. They dropped some sports, picked up others. One D does play in college but didn’t decide to do so until she was finishing her junior year season. She had not contacted one coach, not gone to one college camp before that summer. Basically she started recruiting in June and signed an NLI in Nov.

I paid for a club team and some travel during high school, but I also paid for hockey (no scholarship anywhere in sight), for band and band camp (no music scholarship coming our way), girl scout camps, church activities, field trips to the state capitol, art lessons, children’s choir, a trip to France. It’s all part of raising kids. I don’t regret any of it. Everything was paid for with the expectation that they were benefiting from the activity at the time, not because it was getting them closer to a college scholarship.

If anything, had I’d known my daughter was going to play in college I would have paid for more camps, more tournaments, more clubs during her middle school and high school years. I would have bought better equipment, better cleats, more tape and nutrition classes and cross-training. We would have started recruiting earlier and visited more schools so she would have had even more choices. If she hadn’t played in college, I would have no regrets that I spent the money I did for her youth training. As it has turned out, I have a great ROI as her scholarship more than covered anything I paid for youth sports in just one year, so the rest is gravy.

My sister paid 10x what I did for her kids to play youth sports with no expectation of a college scholarship, and neither of her kids played in college (both could have played D1). They also did music and horseback riding and swim team and fencing and football and church groups and art lessons and creative writing and piano and lots more…No regrets.

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“My premise is that kids who show themselves to be in the top 1% or so nationally in their cohort in any activity are provided a “bump” by admissions.”

ODad –

Recently heard of a very talented athlete who was told by Harvard that all he needed to get in was a 26 ACT.

How many uber-cellists or national HS debate champions do you think get into H with a 26?

Come on. We all know the athlete hook is the second best hook there is. Much better than the cellist hook or the debate hook.

The Ivies are free to give hooks to whoever they want to. I have just been surprised how much hook they chose to allocate to Ivy League sports, which (by Ivy League design) are relatively small time/low level.

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First, it is very difficult to believe that anyone who knows anything about recruiting in the Ivy, let alone a coach or admin would ever say anything like all you need is a 26ACT to get in. It just doesn’t work like that. That said, I would bet there is a like number of talented musicians and talented athletes with a 26ACT at Harvard. At the most one or two per class. And that is accounting for the fact that the talented athlete is likely to be in a favored ethnic demographic statistically while the talented musician is not. This idea that substantial numbers of athletes in the ivy are materially different academically than the general student body is just wrong.

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And speaking of how other societies handle sports, are you all really going to argue that things like the various European junior league systems for futbal, or their academies for gymnastics or tennis or the Canadian juniors hockey system is preferable? Really?

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Yes, Penn/Wharton, Cornell Dyson Is be hear too.

(Yes, There are kids who are athletes and have the scores, grades, etc.)

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@northwesty
Read post #46 to get a more accurate view on the scores athletes need to get into an Ivy.
There may be an occasional outlier, but there are probably more outliers that are from big donor families than are athletes

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O’Dad – the kid’s Dad reported that to me as a direct quote he heard with his own ears from the H coach.

Wisteria – I know all about the Ivy’s AI system. But don’t get lost in the details. Because the existence of such a system proves the point. Because the purpose of such system is to define the exact amount by which Ivy athletes are allowed to lag the non-athlete students at the Ivies in terms of academic stats.

In contrast, I’ve never heard of a system that calculates and tracks how much lower the credentials of dancers and cellists and debaters are allowed to be…

Harvard reports that it has 1,270 varsity roster spots for its undergrad enrollment of 6,874. Williams has 954 roster spots for its enrollment of 2,019. Are those numbers higher or lower than you would have guessed?

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Regretfully, @Ohiodad51, I could definitely imagine Amaker (Harvard’s men’s basketball coach) saying something like that if the recruit was truly exceptional enough and grades etc. had been vetted during a pre-read. It wouldn’t be 100% true since admissions will still have the final say, but it might be 80% true.

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IN RE: post #66

Then you need to add in the number of students who were admitted with an athletic hook and dropped out of the sport before they graduated. I recently heard of a local student who quit the sport before the first competition.

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@northwesty
That number for Williams does surprise me. Though I will say roster spots is not the same as number of athletes, as the kids on the cross country roster are on the indoor and outdoor track rosters as well. And while some sports recruit a big majority of their teams, others don’t, and you do find many walk ons at the NESCAC schools and also for some sports at the Ivies

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Williams reports 757 unique athletes filling the 954 roster spots. Still seems like a big number.

I see mentions that 13-15% of Ivy League students are RECRUITED athletes (so not walk ons). That also seems like a big number to me.

Apparently Yale had/has a policy to not fill up all of its recruited athlete slots that it is allowed per Ivy League rules and so more relies smaller rosters and upon walk ons that have to get in “hook-less.” That’s consistent with some anecdotes I’ve heard.

That was a policy pushed by the former Yale president. His daughter, by the way, was the co-author of the Bowen book referenced above.

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@northwesty
“Relatively small time/low level”
Don’t try that phrase around say…any Ivy Hockey, Lacrosse, Crew, sailing, women’s Basketball, squash…
You may get a different opinion from many and some student athletes sporting some hard wear from tournaments…:wink:

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The number recruited would be the same whether they stay on the team or not. There is a certain number of recruited athletes (the Ivy league allows 205) and it’s pretty steady year after year. The tennis coach get 2, the hockey team gets 8, the baseball coach gets 10, etc. It might vary by 1 or 2, but not by much. If a lot of players leave the team, the coach has to rely on walk-ons (or transfers).

It doesn’t surprise me that Williams or Harvard have a lot of athletic spots. Historically, they were all male schools that competed with each other on the field and off, and by adding women, they had to add more teams for them. I also suspect that some of the ‘country club’ sports allow the school to get some legacies in when they can fill a spot on the sailing team or squash team, so why not.

I didn’t need a scientific study to tell me that my daughter did better in first grade on days she had recess or PE than when they stayed in due to weather and played board games. She just did better if she could run around a few times during the day. Still does better.

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FWIW, a 26 ACT and a weighted 3.5 yield an AI number of 189, which would be a Band 1 recruit for football at every Ivy (meaning no more than two kids per year) and probably very close to the actual bottom at HYP. So there are maybe a couple kids a year max with stats at that level at any school.

I have a fair amount of direct experience in this area. I know kids playing currently in the Ivy, and several more with Ivy offers, including a couple All American wrestlers, a football player who started as a true freshman at a perennial top ten program and another who started as a redshirt freshman at a recent national champion. I have never heard anyone report anything as direct as “a 26 ACT and you are in”. I agree that if there was one coach in the Ivy that would even potentially have the juice to make such a statement it would be Amaker, but even then we are talking about one kid a year who would be an absolutely top talent in a revenue sport.

And Ivy schools are limited to supporting 1.4 times the number of varsity travel roster spots over a four year period, which I believe works out to about 220 a year, assuming the school participates in all varsity sports. Many schools, including Yale, have publicly stated that they do not use all available slots. And once more, roughly half of those supported athletes will have stats above the median and a large majority will have stats well within the normal distribution for a given class.

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Father of athlete. S was approached by coaches from many top colleges at an academic recruiting showcase. Most of the colleges made it clear that you have to meet their academic standards, and if they liked his athletics skills, would next want to see their HS grades/test scores. Yes there are lots of schools with lower admission requirements for athletes, but they tend not to be the academically hyper competitive schools.

Best extreme example, Caltech has lost every game for a decade in 2 major mens sports.
They really wont make a spot for someone who is not qualified to be there !

Schools will all have about the same number of athletes, just a matter of size of school.
A larger school can absorb some lower grades in their avg admissions stats, a smaller school
can not, or they accept the outcome. Some schools have SAT test optional admissions today,
to pump up their avg stats, but that’s not just for athletes.

I see athletics as a two tier recruiting tool.
At top athletic programs, in major televised sports/campuses, the team is there to attract non-athlete students. At other programs (same school even) teams are their to recruit student athletes themselves, to get their tuition $. Most athletes are not there on scholarship, and pay their way. Many students look for activities of interest to them to supplement the college experience, fun, friends, exercise, and schools without teams are at a disadvantage in recruiting those students. How many colleges advertise “we have no extra curricular activities, we just study”.
Even if true, nobody would market that. Sports are just another EC.

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HS students are being recruited and get verbal commitments from colleges during the fall semester of sophomore year. With only one year of HS grades, no SAT scores, no PSAT scores, nothing to really judge them - except their athletic potential. This is not the majority of student-athletes, but this is happening. How can anybody know if these students are really competitive with the rest of the admissions pool for that school?

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You know if a kid is a good student long before a SAT or PSAT. They are just a tiny piece of the overall picture of a student and frankly pretty insignificant to who that kid is and what they can be.

Many kids train for the test, just makes them harder workers with more resources, not necessarily better or smarter. I know of one that got a 2400, on his 22nd try. Seriously.

But back to topic, by sophomore year a coach does know if a kid is a good student and good athlete.

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It always amazes me that parents hear of an outlier and use it to gird an opinion. Are there athletes admitted into Ivies (and other very select schools) who do not meet the average stats? Of course. Are they in the numbers the general public believes? Not even close. Why we quibble about the 1 or 2 football athletes who “took a deserving student’s spot” out of the thousands admitted is beyond me. Every school is going to admit students who “shouldn’t be there” in all kinds of categories: athletes, money, ethnicity, artistic talent, child of a politician, on and on. I say let’s stop picking on the just the athletes. Or how about let’s stop picking on any person in any category? In the end, it does no good and only serves to push a me vs you narrative.

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And I’d add here that many companies specifically seek out candidates for internships and jobs after graduation SPECIFICALLY because someone was a student athlete. In order to succeed at a varsity sport and stick with it for four years at an academically vigorous school…well I think it takes many skills, many of which are attractive to competitive companies.

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Yale and Brown and other top schools do recruit early, but they make it clear that if the student doesn’t make the grades/scores, they are out. However, the coaches do a lot to make sure the recruits DO make the grades and the scores, checking in with them from the time they commit until the do the prereads/ED.