First, “don’t get lost in the details” sounds like codespeak for “don’t understand the details; just listen to my opinion.”
Second, in my view this serves to perpetuate the myth of the undeserving dumb jock who took precious Buffy’s spot. But the truth is in the details. The details of a student I know are as follows: valedictorian of a class of over 300, 35 ACT, ST scores of 780, 790, 800, seventeen 5’s on AP tests, and went on to graduate magna cum laude from Princeton while serving as captain of his sport’s team.
Third, while there are standards regarding “the exact amount by which Ivy athletes are allowed to lag the non-athlete students at the Ivies in terms of academic stats”, there are no such standards for non-athletes, whether they’re development cases, underrepresented minorities, bassoon players, or kids from North Dakota. This double standard is rarely mentioned, but the fact remains that athletes are the only applicants for whom quantitative minimums apply.
@kiddie As you say, this is rare, and at schools that have relatively lower admission standards to start with.
Caltech and MIT NEVER NEVER NEVER recruit a HS sophmore. These D3 high academics barely show interest in juniors, for just the reasons you state. I did not take my son to athletic showcases until end of his junior year, as I felt it was no more than information gathering, not serious recruiting, and because I wanted him to just have fun playing up to that point, and finally, because he was too young to have an opinion on what college to attend. Yes, if you look huge and have very high level of athletic talent, coaches will express interest, but they cannot guarantee anything. I know kids who could not gain admission to fairly non competitive schools, despite coach interest, because of really low SAT scores.
Finally the thread was questioning if there are too many athletes at colleges, so those rare soph recruits most certainly do not explain a large population of students accepted for athletic skills alone. Personally even as a parent of an d3 athlete, which I consider just an extra curricular activity, I have mixed feelings about high end athletics. I attended a college which won national championships in ice hockey. Games were fun to attend, but I did see athletes sleep in my classroom. Felt like they are not really part of the school, at least those on the hockey team. The other athletes, were barely known to the student body as athletes. Did not “feel” like too many athletes, but we did have a tiny handful who were there for other than academic reasons (since I was not at MIT
The ones I know of personally were recruited by top D1 programs - Notre Dame and Stanford to name two. Again this may be rare but it is happening. Also, again anecdotally, a group of kids I know who went to Yale complained of hating it when they had an athlete in their class because of the special treatment the athlete got to help them do their work.
It is not rare to have committed recruits who are sophomores in lax (men’s or women’s) or women’s soccer. In fact, for the top D1 programs it is the norm. There is a movement among coaches with the ncaa to move this to no recruiting until junior year. The Ivies, the service academies, and even the D3 schools are in on the early recruiting too, but the Ivies call it ‘committing to the process’ and they will drop a recruit who doesn’t have the stats. For a spring sport, committing early makes sense as the college coaches are not going to see a senior season before they need a commitment. They often can’t see any of the regular season as they are coaching their own teams, so rely on the summer club circuit to recruit.
Another story. My daughter was part of a very successful HS class with over 500 students. There was a Presidential Scholar (wasn’t even salutatorian), admits to Yale, Harvard, Princeton - all the most competitive schools. But the only admit to Columbia that year was a recruited squash player - who probably wasn’t in the top 10% of this class. This is what makes people resent athletes - they think that not only is this squash player taking the spot of a better student - their low scores are making it harder for everybody else to get admitted so Columbia can keep up its averages.
The recruiting I see for sophomores/freshmen are lax, field hockey, and women’s soccer. I think it is way out of control, most 18 year olds struggle trying to pick a college, how does a 14 year old decide what college is best for them.
I am an old faculty member who has had lots of time to think about education and athletes.
Initially unsympathetic, I came to see sports as exploitive. I remember the BU freshman who was given ice time . . . And paralyzed for life. I remember a brilliant young softball pitcher whose GPA was severely damaged every season; I still wonder what research opportunities she gave up for sports. So many young people are used by big institutions.
In the last few years, my view has shifted again. At my state research U, I had reason to tour tutoring facilities, and I was show the hidden away facility for athletes. I was not blown away by their academic support, but what they had in study areas, recreational facilities, sports equipment, and personal attention dropped my jaw. I was outraged at the inequity in resources. None of the other students–not Honors, not EOP, not graduate, not international–ever see anything like it. As a taxpayer, I was disgusted. I pay taxes in the hopes of educating citizens, all citizens. Health services, libraries, student publications, tutorial centers all need money, and they service all students. For reasons that are entirely unclear, student athletes receive privileges others do not.
I don’t understand why people resent children. I have a student athlete who isn’t going to be recruited anywhere – she swims every day because she loves it – so I don’t know much about the world of college sports recruitment, but it seems to me that if the squash player loves his sport and would be a good addition to their team then the college has a right to choose him if they want. Their standardized test score ranges are just guidelines, they’re not set in stone.
Perhaps I don’t understand how you define “better.” Is a student with a 2400 SAT/4.0 UW GPA better than the one with a 2100 SAT/3.5 GPA? I’d consider both very capable students. I don’t really get the concept of one kid taking another kid’s spot either. The seats are the colleges’ to give, not high stats kids’ right to keep or have stolen out from under them.
How is possessing an athletic skill different from possessing others the college might want? If you’re a cellist and you apply the year they really need a cellist, that’s good for you. But if you’re a kicker and their football team doesn’t need one, you’re not any better off than a cellist applying during an off year, are you?
@mamalion, you highlight an excellent point about the “arms race” in facilities, bling and general bells and whistles going on in college athletics. Even my son, who plays in the Ivy, gets a ton of t-shirts, shoes, bags, shorts, etc every year. Far, far more than I got back in the day for sure. He also has several former high school teammates who are playing at huge football or wrestling schools, and occasionally he shows me the pictures and such these guys tweet out. Palatial is an understatement. One area where I disagree with you though is on academic support. The undeniable fact is that kids playing football at Alabama or Ohio State have schedules that many of you would not believe. With so much time required by their sport, I think the kids should get as much legit academic support as possible on the off chance that some of them may be able to get out with a usable degree rather than just staying eligible through their five years.
Too, it is not the taxpayers footing that bill. The schools need somewhere to hide the obscene amounts of money generated by big time football and basketball. It simply wouldn’t do if people actually knew how much money schools are making on these kids.
That said, I don’t know that facilities and associated costs apply to admissions, which I think is the subject if the thread. In addition, in the schools we are really talking about, the Ivy and NESCAC schools, by rule spending on such things comes either from the various alumni groups or the contracts the schools have with Nike, Under Armour et al.
Ohiodad51, bling was the word I was looking for, though the fancy carpets, wall art, lounge furniture exceeded bling. I think I wasn’t clear about academic support. I wrote that “I wasn’t blown away by academic support.” I didn’t think they had particularly well-trained tutors. I actually approve of athletes receiving lots of academic support. In many colleges, athletes take longer to graduate at lower rates. Many of them wind up in easier majors because they don’t have time for heavy study schedules. Obviously there are exceptions.
Bling never makes up for longer times to degree, gift majors, and injured bodies. Furthermore, at state schools, bling is outrageously unfair to taxpayers and other students.
It’s seems amazing to me that this is still a discussion:
To answer the OP's question....of course not
For those of you even still asking the question as to why colleges or more specifically why YOUR college has athletics or recruits athletes...pretty simple, ask your administration. They can tell you exactly why it benefits the school. Do you really think all these colleges don't know exactly what they are doing? That it's not a winning proposition for the school?
Here is just a short article regarding the matter. It’s from 2010 but still relevant.
@mamalion, I get you. On your point, there was a kind of funny story a couple years ago when a number of huge schools revamped their locker rooms, and someone tracked how each succeeding waterwall in each locker room was just a little bigger that the one in the last school’s renovation.
I read much of this thread and just smile and nod. I too don’t understand resenting any young person with commitment and passion in anything they do, be it athletics, music, math, science, business, engineering, the performing arts, or any other arts, or a combination of all of them. Nor do I resent URM, low income, or anyone else that gets into a school however using their status, and frankly, I don’t care what grades they bring in and how they compare to my kid. Who has time for all that and the resentment (“wasn’t even saluatorian,” really?) Haters gonna hate hate hate I suppose, I feel sad for them.
Having an intolerance for a person unlike oneself, hmmmm, that stereotyping sounds familiar, let me think, oh yes, it’s bigotry. And that is an ugly ugly trait to carry around.
@blevine We had the same experience with women’s LAX – my dd is going to one of the top D2 programs and was recruited for a few very bottom D1 programs too. Like @twoinanddone she didn’t decide until junior year to play in college so we were behind the D1 recruiting curve. I am sure with her academics and seeing what her teammates did she could have gotten a more prestigious D1 spot with just a bit more training. She didn’t even know what LAX was until MS and she is not that special as far as athletic ability goes.
That said, as others said, I had her in some training/tourney teams because she wanted to start in HS - not for scholarships at first. And we moved to LAX country so she was not the most seasoned player.
But as far as begin qualified she was at a recruiting event at one of the highest ranked D2 schools and there was a dynamo player from FL-- way way better than my dd (who is no doubt a very good player). Her father told us all the D1s stopped even talking to her why? GRADES.
She ended up finally recruited to a much lower ranked D2 school than my dd-- why??? GRADES. IME this getting into much better schools than your grades warrant is a fallacy-- I have not seen it.
@ucbalumnus, I think the problem is that some people seem to believe that the absolute floor, whether that be the NCAA eligibility minimums or the AI floor, applies to every sport and every athlete. Stanford, which makes tens of millions of dollars a year off its football team, is likely to bend its regular admissions stats more for Christian McCaffery than for a baseline women’s lax recruit. McCaffery almost won the hiesman last year and is a likely first round pick this year who is also on tv or in sports illustrated at least once a month. On the other hand, the women’s lax player’s sport is a financial loser for Stanford and even if she turns out to be all world she will not bring a tenth of the free publicity to the school that McCaffery does.
I really doubt there are very many if any women’s lax recruits who are going to any colleges with stats much below the 75/25 line at that school.
“know who went to Yale complained of hating it when they had an athlete in their class because of the special treatment the athlete got to help them do their work.”
Perhaps you somehow misunderstood as nobody does work for student athletes at Yale. Athletes are not afforded special tutoring or given any extra academic support. They do, however, have access to the academic support as any other Yale student does…
This differs from other schools. I remember distinctly when my son was looking at some UC programs, coaches were quick to say they had a system of academic supports for their athletes. In contrast when I asked the same question of HYP coaches there was a similar response: athletics is like any other EC and all students can avail themselves of same campus resources…
So NO, nobody is doing these student’s work for them.
I guess above minimum to play but not good enough for coaches at prestigious schools – my dd has teammates commited to Vanderbilt, St Joseph and Tulane
