Too many athlete students in colleges?

Parent Cafe
121

Some schools have beautiful facilities, some have rooms that look like a garage band’s rehearsal space. We saw one (D1) that was an old warehouse-type building (probably used to store lawn mowers), with some couches that were probably picked up at a garage sale, and a washer and dryer. That was the big draw, that the coach let them do their laundry in the ‘club house.’ (my daughter was not impressed by this perk). My daughter’s coach has a tiny office, and she often has to store equipment in it. ‘Palace’ is not a word that comes to mind, but it is clean

Her coach has limited recruiting options because the student has to get into the school (mostly STEM) and it is too expensive to attend if the student doesn’t get a merit scholarship to combine with the athletic award. Other schools in our conference have a more general curriculum and a lower COA. Our coach is looking for high gpa kids because of the merit money, and because they’ll be students able to handle the missed classes (there really aren’t that many), the long days, having the focus on school and not on the Friday night plans (as often those ‘plans’ for an athlete involve taking a run and going to bed by 9). The coach wants the players to be happy at the school, happy with the courses offered, not struggling to get C’s.

Tutoring is available, but most often the athletes get help from each other. My daughter ‘tutored’ a soccer player her first semester as he missed several classes for travel. She loved it because she’d take better notes, review everything to teach him the missed class, and she’d find any holes in her own prep as she taught him.

When talking about the Princeton lax team being “below average” (and I don’t think that stats would support that), remember you are talking below average for Princeton, not below average for college students or even college lax players. These are still top students, many from academically competitive high schools or prep schools. A huge number of qualified students get rejected from the Ivy schools every year because there isn’t enough room, but they are still qualified to do the work, to get a Brown education and diploma. All the athletes are in that ‘qualified’ pool but they get the hook and are saved from drowning in the pool. Princeton is Lake Wobegon, and everyone is above average.

If you don’t like athletics, don’t go to a school that sponsors them.

122

I’m very aware of baseball RPI on team and conference level. The Ivy typically ranks 22-25 in conference RPI of the 32 Division 1 conferences. Another obscure and insignificant conference, the Big South - ranked 17th - won the college world series this year with Coastal Carolina. Those that understand Ivy baseball know it is about winning the Ivy conference and gaining a berth in the NCAA tournament, not about driving up RPI with a heavy non conference schedule of Power 5 schools. The spring season is just too short for that. In 2015, Columbia came within a game of winning their NCAA regional in the tournament over Miami and going to a super regional.

123

The only division I conference in the country other than the Ivy League that sponsors fencing is the ACC, which just reinstated the sport in 2014-2015 and only has 4 schools that compete.

124

“Also, before you generalize too much about weak Ivy League athletics, check out NCAA fencing and you’ll find that the Ivy League is the strongest in the country, with no other conference even close.”

You make my point for me.

There’s 26 D1 fencing programs in the NCAA, and those programs include both men and women. So call it 50 teams. That seems pretty obscure. By way of comparison, there’s 700 NCAA D1 basketball teams if you combine mens and womens.

I love sports and have no agenda to turn every school’s sports program into CalTech or Univ of Chicago or MIT. One of my kids was a college athlete fyi. I think the Ivies do a lot of admirable things to keep their athletics from running rough shod over academics. In college football, HYP (and Chicago too) used to be Alabama and Oklahoma, and the Ivy League was formed specifically for the purpose of downgrading the importance of sports.

But having said that, fact is that the Ivies still have (to my eyes) a surprisingly big investment and focus on sports. It isn’t bad or evil or something they are not entitled to do. Just a surprising large allocation given the keen competition for their scarce seats.

125

Princeton and other Ivy/peer elite college literature/PR were saying such things back when I was in HS/applying to colleges in the early-mid '90s and yet, I personally know of a few cases of athletic and legacy/developmental admits whose HS stats were not only below average for the schools concerned but also some who ended up struggling to graduate from the Ivy/elite in question or schools a tier or two down.

One particular standout is an older LAC classmate who was admitted as a legacy/developmental to an Ivy because his grandmother was a notable alum with great achievements and donated several million to her alma mater over the decades. He decided to attend our LAC thinking it would be “easier” academically. He found he was completely mistaken after being placed on academic suspension for 1 year, placed on parental mandated gap periods, and ended up taking nearly 8 years to graduate while struggling through courses…some he was repeating that I found were quite manageable/easy*. He was top 15-20% in his respectable East Coast boarding school and was initially dismissive of my HS education because I attended an urban public school.

Another was how some HS classmates recounted having athlete classmates who struggled in their classes despite having extensive support from coaches/admins. Some of those classmates worked as peer tutors for some of the classmates and couldn’t believe some even graduated HS…much less attending an elite U. And many of those athletes were from well-off upper/upper-middle class ORM backgrounds.

  • We took the same intermediate/advanced classes as he was repeating many of them after failing them and I convinced the Profs to allow me to take them without taking the prereqs beforehand as an underclassman. I was completely puzzled as to how he had failed those classes and was still struggling through them despite taking them for the second time while I had no difficulties taking them for one and only time. One recurring thought I had back then "How in the heck does one manage to mess up in college that badly considering the numerous advantages of his SES background, parental educational background, and attending respectable private schools from K-12??"
126

@sbballer Katie Ledecky and Simone Manuel were both Scholastic All-American swimmers. Both had a 4.0 gpa. Yes, both of these athletes were the caliber of student taken by Stanford. To be eligible for Scholastic All-American a swimmer must maintain a 3.5 GPA or higher and must swim a time faster or equal to the 2011 junior national bonus time standard. Both girls exceeded those requirements and were the only two swimmers in the country to have a perfect score. A perfect score is achieved when a swimmer has a 4.0 GPA as well as a national championship title. To be able to get a 4.0 while putting in the training hours required at an elite level is absolutely amazing.

Plus, Maya Dirado, who just graduated from Stanford and won several gold medals in Rio, is now a business analyst for McKinsey & Company, one of the top management analysis companies in the world. These girls didn’t lower any standards for admission.

127

@northwesty, lol excellent use of google yourself. Unfortunately for your point, my son’s best friend from high school almost went to Howard until Kent Stare came through at the last minute. The MEAC, like most FCS conferences except maybe Missouri Valley are pretty stratified with a few good teams at the top consistently who push out a couple NFL guys like North Carolina A&T, Bethune Cookman, NC Central. You can also make a pretty good argument that the MEAC and the SWAC are (not unlike the Ivy) really not a part of D1FCS because of their status as HBCUs. And yes, given that to the best of my knowledge most MEAC schools full fund football I would consider it a pretty high level, and that very few could compete there. Do you have another question?

128

“First, we do not know that the Princeton LAX team is allowed to be “below average”. What we know is that all recruited athletes at Princeton must in the aggregate fall within one standard deviation of the mean AI over the last four classes.”

The below agrees with what I’ve been told, which is that the measurements are taken team by team rather than by the entire athletic department. But no one knows for sure because the schools don’t publish their rule book. So we wouldn’t know if the P lax team is actually below average (that would be up to Princeton to decide), but it does appear that the team as a whole is allowed to be below average to the tune of one SD. Also possible that Princeton gives the lax team a bit more leeway than the cross country team since lacrosse is a prominent sport as Princeton.

https://www.mka.org/uploaded/college_counseling/Publications/AI_Guidelines_Worksheet.pdf

129

From Wikipedia:

Do you think that 1 point SD would be the same across every subset of students? The marching band? The theater groups? The kids taking intro to English Lit? The kids on work study jobs at the library? It IS a cliche joke: not everything can be above average.

If your position is that you disagree that athletes should not get admissions preferences, that is an reasonable opinion. But the point of the AI was to ensure that the athlete population was NOT out of line with the student population, and to claim it is an instrument to do the opposite is not really defensible.

130

^^^ Sorry, I edited myself into bad syntax in the last paragraph above. I meant :“If your position is that athletes should not get admissions preferences”.

The phone rang and I clicked “post comment” before proofreading. My bad.

131

“Do you have another question?”

No that was great info.

So now I know that Ivy conference football is just as dominant as the brand of football played in the well known (to everyone but me apparently) MEAC and SWAC conferences. I learned something today!

132

“But the point of the AI was to ensure that the athlete population was NOT out of line with the student population, and to claim it is an instrument to do the opposite is not really defensible.”

PM – which of these statements is true:

  1. The AI is there to make sure all the athletes together come out to the average.
  2. The AI is there to make sure all the athletes together come out to something that is above the average.
  3. The AI is there to make sure all the athletes together come out to something that is not too far below the average.
133

Of course the AI is there to make sure athletes aren’t too far below the average.

However, the average athlete at an Ivy League school is - by the standards at a typical college - an incredibly good student. HYP will have the highest standards in the Ivy League … at Harvard a couple years ago the average AI for all recruited athletes was around 215 or so. That’s pretty much equal to a score of 2100/2400 on the old SAT scale, which I think is about 1470/1600 on the current SAT. That’s squarely within the territory where if a kid posts on CC wondering if they should study to retake a 1470 they are told to quit obsessing about tests and do something else with their time.

That’s the average athletic recruit. To put this in perspective, if the HYP athletes were their own college then they would be right there among the top 25 schools in the country with the highest stats. They are definitely not a bunch of dum-dums unless you think that 98% of the population is as well.

On the other hand, they are academically a bit weaker than the rest of the student body. I’m also pretty sure that cellists do not get anywhere near the same slack cut for them during admissions unless maybe their name is Yo-Yo Ma. But, Who Cares? - 80-90% of the HYP student body aren’t being admitted for their brains either. I think it’s far better to judge the success of admissions by how well alumni do in life after they graduate, and by this standard my experience has been that former Ivy League athletes do better than the average NARP (Non-Athletic Regular Person).

Well, you know how kids and parents often hear what they choose to hear. Or they run their mouths when talking to their friends.

I think football recruiting in the Ivy’s is policed better than basketball because of the band system. The bottom of band 2 at Harvard is about a 189, so there at most only 2 football recruits below this each year. On the other hand, it seems like Amaker has had a few kids who’ve had to sweat it to get to the 176 minimum AI. Personally, I would rather they lose a few more games each year but keep their standards higher. So the Ivy’s aren’t completely pure angels either, but they’re still tons better than almost all the big time schools.

I think the Ivy League, NESCAC, etc. do a really good job of living up to the student athlete ideal, and most of the athletes recruited there should be proud of what they’ve accomplished academically while also competing at a high level. A lot of people don’t realize how hard it is.

And, I might as well just say this to the person who wrote that a professor at Harvard confessed to him that they are pressured to give undeserved grades to athletes - your storytelling is bordering on compulsive. Get help.

134

Too many athletes in colleges?! How about One Million foreign students in US?!

135

The answer is 4. None of the above.

The AI was designed to ensure Ivy League schools would not build athletic teams who were not representative of the general student body.

136

@cobrat

“Some cynics may point out that this might be more due to the anti-intellectual/anti-nerd* mentality prevalent in US society at large and how many athletes who were hired because they reflected the values/preferred “look” of the hiring managers/bosses hiring them who were likely athletes and anti-nerd in orientation themselves.”

No I wouldn’t say cynics but ignorant people. Please inform my son and his teammates who study the following: biology, chemistry, statistics, history, world lit, and many other brainy pursuits how they would be the face or focus of an anti-intellectual bent (which I don’t believe is pervasive contrary to current politics) in a post grad work place…

Oh and I better alert my son to the fact that he’s been missing out on someone else doing his work for him or professors offering up padded grades. See he was a bit busy practicing his sport upwards of 30 hours a week, studying, going to class and, well sleeping to get the memo, secret handshake or wink and nod from his professor. Darn! That really could have come in handy this past finals week :wink:

137

@northwesty, look at the Montclair Academy sheet you linked, and turn it to page two. On the bottom is a pretty standard bell curve which demonstrates rather clearly (at least in the prep school’s opinion), that the huge majority of Ivy athletes fall within the normal range of admits to the school. I am not sure how much clearer that could be.

And yes, as I have said repeatedly the Ivy is not the BIG. I don’t think anyone ever said it was. But there is a fair distance from athletics in the BIG and “no big deal”.

And no matter what you were told, team AI is a function of football, men’s basketball and men’s hockey. All remaining sports are grouped together. If you look closely at the sheet you linked that becomes obvious, because the banding system only applies to football. I used to keep a copy of the Ivy Common Agreement on my computer, but apparently no longer have it. If interested it should be available through the magic of google. It will lay out the current rules.

@alsimon, why do you think athletic recruits are generally weaker? Why do you think that exceptional musicians do not get the same type of bump? As someone who has delved pretty deeply into these numbers over the last handful of years I have not found it to be so. And FWIW, three years ago the bottom of band 4 at HYP was 215/216, which would have corresponded with the mean fir the last four classes. I don’t know exactly where band 3 ended, but anecdotally the thinking has always been to try and get above 200.

138

Looking at the Harvard common data set, it looks like 25% are URM, another 11% international, and 2% unknown ethnicity/race. Above someone mentioned about 18% of undergrads played a varsity sport at Harvard. If you throw in legacies, it seems believable to me at least half the class would have one or more of the three big hooks: URM/athlete/legacy.

139

Let’s compare numbers to see if we agree. The numbers I used are these: average AI across entire HYP freshman class is about 228-230. Standard deviation is 15-16. Average AI for athletic recruits at Harvard is about 215. Princeton about the same, Yale a tiny bit higher I think but I don’t know for sure. That would put the bottom of Harvard’s band 4 at 229-15.5= 215.5 and the bottom of band 3 at 229-2*15.5 = 200. So I think my numbers are about the same as yours.

Maybe the difference is that the 215/216 is the mean of the last four class of athletic recruits. It’s not the mean of the last four classes of all enrolled students, which is more like a 229. You can check this using published data since we know that the average SAT scores at HYP are about 1500/1600 (old SAT), which is roughly an AI of 150+78 = 228.

Anyway, the 215 is lower than the 229, so the recruits are lower stats-wise. But the real reason I think that athletic recruits are a bit weaker (though it varies a lot by sport) is based on classroom experience as a student and teacher. It’s not really that their grades are bad … it’s just as much about the choice of courses and majors. Again, there are tons of exceptions and I’m not trying to insult anyone and I know that athletes have a 30 hour / week commitment but there’s a general trend there. I also think that former Ivy athletes often have a better base of life skills that help them do better after they graduate.

I’ve seen tons of admissions results over the years from our region and I don’t see a lot (any) preference for musicians. They just have too many good musicians in the applicant pile, so they don’t need to give a preference. Maybe they cut some slack for the best musician in the country or something but I think we’re talking 1,2,3 of these every year versus 200+ athletic recruits. And I don’t think the #1 musician gets the same amount of slack on their stats as the #1 football / basketball / hockey recruit.

140

This is all very interesting info! Frankly, the only atheletes I personally ally know who were recruited by ivies had the grades/scores to compete on their own. Would they have gotten in anyway? Probably not without a coach using their influence, but they were well qualified.