<p>I haven't heard or read about a good one as of yet..</p>
<p>Good athletes makes for more competitive teams, ergo...
More competitive teams draw more publicity, ergo...
Publicity draws more money, ergo...
More students want to go to a college that has competitive sports teams and money for things like aid and up-to-date buildings.</p>
<p>Oh...what about schools with crappy athletic teams to begin with. Like Princeton</p>
<p>athletic recruits make the teams better?</p>
<p>In addition to the money it can bring to the school, being good enough to play college sports (division 1 in particular) basically puts you at the top of what you do. Think of it as being good at an EC on the national level, something that can really add to an application.</p>
<p>And schools like Princeton or whatever with crappier teams, maybe because they don't recruit solely on the base of athletic ability and they take it into account academics of the athlete among other things?</p>
<p>What bothers me about athletic recruitment is not the preference in admissions--lots of people get preference for a lot of things, whether it be their race, their musical talent, where their parents went to college, anything else--but the schedule upon which it operates. There is one boy in my grade who has basically known he was going to Yale since late September, because of meetings/arrangements with the coaches and such. At least people who get preferred for other reasons have to sweat alongside the rest of us in the application period.</p>
<p>Life's not fair. People could say the same about EA and ED.</p>
<p>One big reason for athletic "tipping" is that students and parents at competitive schools demand that their students get an outstanding sports experience, just like they demand good experiences in the library, classroom, and lab. The problem is that they measure the quality of the sports experience--not entirely unreasonably--by whether the school is competitive, and this has the effect of creating an "arms race" for student-athletes.</p>
<p>You can see this competitiveness dilemma at it's most extreme at small colleges in a sport like football, a sport that requires a lot of players, each of them trained as specialists at his position. (There just aren't enough 2100-SAT offensive tackles to go around the Ivy League, NESCAC, Centenial Conference, et al :) In order to provide the kind of experience that many students want (not getting sacked on every other down), schools admit an athlete who's academically a notch weaker. </p>
<p>This argument obviously holds less water with individual sports like cross country, tennis, squash, etc., but these coaches typically get few or even no tips anyway.</p>
<p>Anticatalyst, it could be worse. You could be in a situation where the top students get "ushered' by the GC to non-HYP schools because the 3-4 slots typically filled have been already allocated to "guaranteed" recruits and legacies. How would you feel after all the hard work, you're told you can't have a shot at those schools because they're "reserved." I wonder if adcoms of these schools are even aware what they could be missing out.</p>
<p>Um...athletics being an EC is not a problem. I was a runner for many years, and I know the dedication needed to excel. But in many cases (and in the top Ivies especially), recruitment is much more than just "that one extra EC." It can give an otherwise banal student acceptance, more so than I've seen from any other factor (legacy or URM).</p>
<p>Besides, athletic dedication, while impressive, has so little to do with academics - especially at the college level. It's a nice EC that shows well-roundedness, but it's looked upon as much more than that in some cases in the eyes of HYSP recruiters.</p>
<p>Now - the profit motive, I understand. Good athletic programs bring money. That's why I can understand recruitment at schools with top notch athletic programs (i.e. Duke, Stanford, etc) But when your basketball or football team holds the record for least points scored in a game...well...I'm not sure recruiting those athletes who are leftover from OSU or UCLA recruitments is gonna be the tipping factor. It just seems that the Ivies are simply recruiting to compete with each other, a completely useless endeavor</p>
<p>I guess schools need good sports programs. But like someone already posted...a school can have a decent sports program without recruitment. This is true especially in schools whose sports don't bring in THAT much money anyways.</p>
<p>Actually...screw that. A top tier school really has no need for exceptional sports programs. Their main purpose is to produce people who will change the world in politics, arts, and science. Athletic programs at schools such as MIT or UofC are good enough, and they don't have to recruit</p>
<p>A decent sports program does not bring money. A competitive sports program does. So yes, athletic recruits "make the team better."</p>
<p>Yes. But the problem is - athletic recruits don't really, on a grand scheme, "make the university better" in the schools I'm talking about.</p>
<p>They make the athletic teams better. Just like music recruits make the orchestra better. And on a grander scale, a wide variety of people with different skills, pursuits, and passions - including sports - make the university better.</p>
<p>Dude, you obviously have a disdain for athletes. But the athletes that are recruited by Ivies are qualified to be there, make no mistake.</p>
<p>meh...disdain? I dunno - maybe i'm in denial, but I wouldn't call it disdain. After all, I was an athlete for a while, and I didn't do it just to pad my college app. And I support recruitment at schools where it really matters. And I have no problem with it helping - just, the recruitment thing really doesn't seem to make sense when we're talking about the big guns who suck (no offense) at sports.</p>
<p>It's just that, at least in my opinion, athletics aren't as important as music or the sciences, both at the college level and in general (and there are a LOT less music and science recruits put together than athletic recruits...haha I don't remember the last time someone got recruited for being good at CS). But I guess Yale doesn't share my opinion.</p>
<p>And if the recruited are "qualified," then so is about 75% of the applicant pool. Without their sports, they wouldn't stand a snowballs chance in Hell.</p>
<p>
[quote]
Oh...what about schools with crappy athletic teams to begin with. Like Princeton
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<p>Princeton does not have crappy athletic teams. I quote Wikipedia:</p>
<p>
[quote]
The Princeton Review declared the university the 10th strongest "jock school" in the nation. It has also consistently been ranked at the top of the Time Magazine's Strongest College Sports Teams lists. Most recently, Princeton was ranked as a top 10 school for athletics by Sports Illustrated. Princeton is best known for its men and women's crew teams, winning several NCAA and Eastern titles in recent years.</p>
<p>Princeton won a record 21 conference titles from 2000-2001. By the end of 2004, Princeton had garnered 36 Ivy League conference titles from 2001-2004 sports seasons. In 2005, its women's soccer team made the NCAA Final Four, the first Ivy League team to do so. The Tigers have taken every field hockey conference title since 1994.</p>
<p>Princeton's basketball team is perhaps the best-known team within the Ivy League, nicknamed the "perennial giant killer". From 1992-2001, a nine year span, Princeton's men's basketball team had entered the NCAA tournament 6 timesfrom a conference that has never had an at-large entry in the NCAA tournament. For the last half-century, Princeton and Penn have traditionally battled for men's basketball dominance in the Ivy League; Princeton had its first losing season in 50 years of Ivy League basketball in 2005. Princeton tied the record for fewest points in a Division I game since the 3-point line started in 1986-87 when they scored 21 points in a loss against Monmouth University on December 14, 2005.</p>
<p>Princeton's men's lacrosse team has enjoyed much success since the early 1990s and is widely recognized as a perennial powerhouse in the Division I ranks. The team has won thirteen Ivy League titles (1992, 1993, 1995-2004, 2006) and six national titles (1992, 1994, 1996-1998, 2001).[20] Dave Morrow, a member of the 1992 championship team, is the founder of Warrior Lacrosse, the official supplier of the Princeton team.</p>
<p>The Princeton women's volleyball team has won 13 Ivy League titles, and its men's volleyball team in 1998 became the first non-scholarship school to make the NCAA Final Four in 25 years.
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<p>Sure, but you could say that about almost everyone at those schools, just replace the word "sports" with "music," "art," "math contests," etc.</p>
<p>Let's face it - college students (often) like to go to games. College students do not like to watch the three stooges try to play basketball. Recruitment is there to stay - and of all the things to criticize about the process, this ranks far down on my list.</p>
<p>Yeh but I'm not talking about the teams that are good. They recruit for things they suck at too. Like football. Princeton isn't good at football.</p>
<p>You can't say the same things about art and math contests. Art and math are more important than football.</p>
<p>Just how much money would they lose if they stopped recruiting?? Surely they could still function well academically.</p>
<p>And do Oxford and Cambridge recruit? (not trying to be sarcastic, just wondering)</p>
<p>.....................</p>
<p>"Princeton isn't good at football." Okayy but I know several Princeton students and others who like to go to Princeton football games.</p>
<p>"Art and math are more important than football." That's your opinion.</p>
<p>Question: Do you think AA is justified?</p>