<p>"This is obviously not the case for sports, since MIT, Caltech, UofC, etc. are still great schools that function well without recruitment programs".</p>
<p>MITand UChicago recruit athletes for their sports. It might not be at the same level as say an Ivy but they do recruit and put a letter of recommendation in there folder and rank athletes on a "wish list". Should those schools quit recruiting too?</p>
<p>The process of recruitment differs based on which college your talking about. For schools more well known for their athletics athletic recruitment is based on making the team better, which will make the school money, which will make the college better. For academically strong schools it is mainly used as a tool to "steal" people from other schools. Princeton might extend a scholarship to a qualified student who plays basketball so as to lock him up early and prevent him from attending competing schools like Harvard.</p>
<p>Schools like MIT, Caltech, and UofC do recruit, but they are based solely on a letter of recommendation (at least as far as I can tell, everyone I know who was recruited to these schools got no advantage financially), and are used to lock up solid candidates.</p>
<p>Also, you have to consider that athletics is often looked on as one of the most solid extra curricular activities because it is a huge time commitment, often depressing grades, and requires a lot of skill and leadership qualities that are look for in an application, so even if they appear "less qualified" scholar-athletes are often considered very good applicants.</p>
<p>"I don't get why the schools need "justification" in the first place. They're private institutions who can accept whoever they want. Why the hell would they need to justify it to your standards?"
--Exactly!
Years ago, when Babe Ruth was asked what he thought about himself having a larger salary than the president, he said," Can the president hit a baseball."
Athletes excel in their sports, just as others excel in academics. Why the hell shouldnt their hard work be payed off with a slight advantage in college admissions. Its not like we are talking about an automatic acceptance. My brother was a state recognized athlete, with a 1290 on the SAT, as well as recruited intensely by Brown. Even with a mediocre SAT score and being recruited he was rejected.</p>
<p>Princeton football = 2006 Ivy League Champions</p>
<p>AGAIN, I'm NOT saying sports should be looked upon with disdain - just that athletes shouldn't be recruited, because no one else in any other EC is recruited. </p>
<p>And it's absolutely wonderful that athletes can show dedication on the field and other leadership qualities. That's why there ALREADY ARE many athlete-type people in HYP who DON'T NEED TO GET RECRUITED. RECRUITING doesn't really add anything to the mix - it just cuts people who can't measure up academically some slack to play on their respective teams.</p>
<p>And recruited athletes are academically weaker than traditional admits, are they not? Just read the DoE study on Harvard admissions - the two groups that have significantly weaker statistics all around are legacies and athletic recruits. I'm not just making these figures up. If they actually held athletes to the same academic standards, there wouldn't be a problem.</p>
<p>^And as for the above post - that's EXACTLY what I'm talking about. The Ivy Leagues recruit mainly to compete with themselves, which helps neither the greater sports community nor their academic communities.</p>
<p>And hunter. I'm glad that athletes excel in sports. I know someone who excels in balancing plates on long chopsticks while doing acrobatics. In fact, he's the leader of a professional acrobatic team, and he's still in high school. He spends hours a day working on this. Should he get recruited too? Would you feel good about him getting an unreasonably large advantage in the admissions process over you because of his "talents?"</p>
<p>"I don't get why the schools need "justification" in the first place. They're private institutions who can accept whoever they want. Why the hell would they need to justify it to your standards?"
--Exactly!</p>
<p>I agree. They are the school. If you don't like their admissions policies, don't apply there. You can make an arguement for most applicants over many accepted ones, but it doesn't matter. If they don't want you, then forget about it and go to another great school. I was dejected from Harvard, but I won't suck up to them to be one of the few lucky souls who actually get accepted RD. Us "normal" unhooked overachievers will always get screwed as a group because they want some amazing EC out of everybody, but a lot of outstanding applicants don't have it and very few get in. C'est la vie...</p>
<p>Asiaknight: Recruited athletes may be academically weaker, but they are an overall better applicant than a person who has purely academic ECs and is academically strong.</p>
<p>The problem is you're assuming the people who are being recruited are stupid. They aren't, at least not at HYP and MIT, CalTech, and UofC, and the advantage they have for a university is they will devote themselves to a sport, which will give them more of a personal incentive to donate money later in life, which just so happens to improve the academic community around them.</p>
<p>They are not weaker than traditional admits, they are just more well-rounded, which happens to be exactly what competative schools are looking for.</p>
<p>To reply to DOC's comments - you will still see people with those qualities in the workplace if HYP stopped recruiting. And it's not as if recruits are more successful in their future endeavors (they don't contribute a larger proportion of funds to the school). What you said is generally true for people who play sports (or participate in any sort of an organized activity). But recruiting does not boost the effectiveness of our work force - it doesn't even affect the quality of alumnus of their respective schools at ones that don't produce professional players.</p>
<p>Ask around where you work...are the recruitments more successful as a population? If they are, then I'm probably wrong.</p>
<p>And what is this about justification? Should Harvard employ a "whites only" or "males only" policy just because they can? I mean - you could just as well not apply to them. </p>
<p>That's such a STUPID argument. It's analogous to saying - well, if you don't like the policies of the United States, you're free to go to Canada. Running away from or avoiding the issue is not the way to solve your problems. You voice your opinion in the hopes that someone influential hears it or that enough people will see your reasoning to make a difference...</p>
<p>I highly doubt schools are gonna change their athletic recruiting policies just because you don't like it. Get over it.</p>
<p>tennisjump, I see what you're saying. But 90% of the recruits I have seen that have gone to the Ivies were markedly weaker than a lot of Ivy rejects. And are u saying that schools that recruit have happier students than if they otherwise didn't? I don't know - I just think recruitment leads to a lot of inconsistencies in the admissions process. But I hate taking the "life's not fair" attitude - it's just...lazy.</p>
<p>A "whites only or "males only" admissions policy is very objective and extreme, and likely to turn of many white or male applicants as well as the ones shut out by the policy. Letting in the best athletes in the pool, as well as the best of anything, is very subjective(because many well rounded applicants with better stats get turned away) and evidently doesn't turn very many applicants away. There's no comparison between them; the former will never happen at the top schools, and the latter always will.</p>
<p>asiaknight, I think you undersestimate the importance of athletics to the administration of the Ivy League schools. The Ivy League is first and foremost an athletic conference. It is not unusual for the President of Harvard to call the President of Yale after a football triumph to say, "neener neener!" which prompts an immediate phone call from the President of Yale to his athletic director telling him emphatically to not let this happen again, or else!</p>
<p>I'm against recruitment also, but you have to understand why they do it. It's not that hard to grasp.</p>
<p>Society values sports. You want your school to have good athletics, because society values them. By recruiting, you can better your team. People (society) will come to your games if your team is better. You will net more money (tickets, food, gimmicks) and prestige (sports titles, news, talk among people). The presitige and money will better the school, which in turn allow them to attract more top-notch students and more donations from alumni. Logically, by letting up maybe 10% of the college's slots to extrememly talented athletes, they are leading to the improvement of their college in the future.</p>
<p>They don't justify it because its the right thing to do. It's simply the logical one.</p>
<p>Oh, come on, folks. I think you must know what asiaknight is saying. There is a huge difference between a school seeing athletic ability on a par with other significant EC's, versus seeing athletic ability as the sole criterion for admission. If a kids shows discipline in being a good athlete while having a good gpa, and the school treats this just like being a good and dedicated musician with a good gpa, I don't think asianknight has an issue. </p>
<p>I think what he's talking about is what we all know happens, regardless of what many of you are saying: that many schools run two tracks - one to support the work of the university's educational mission, and one to support the university's fundraising mission. I know of one kid who had to decide between Duke and an Ivy, who had great stats and work ethic. He's on the basketball team and a stand out. That's incredible, and he should be proud.</p>
<p>But the question is, should Duke admit other kids with 1150 SAT's, with a B- average, who play basketball really well ? Really? Let's get real. This has nothing to do with "discipline" or EC's, or diversity. It's just to make their "business" more successful. </p>
<p>The fundamental question he is asking is, should schools exist to educate, or should they exist to both educate some kids, and be the farms teams for substandard students who want to be in the NBA on the other ?</p>
<p>We all recognize it's the right of these schools to do this. But it can be questioned, and discussed, which some of you are saying he should not even raise the question.</p>
<p>Zoubek? lol</p>
<p>Look...my purpose wasn't to get tempers flaring. My question was mainly about how recruitment athletics affect a school's finances and prestige (i.e.donation rates and all that junk) when the school itself doesn't have a good athletic program (for whatever sport) to begin with.</p>
<p>It is my opinion that HYP don't recruit to diversify the student body. Here is why:</p>
<p>I respect athletics. I respect athletes who commit much of their time to their sports and still manage to do well in school, and I definitely understand that adcoms must adjust the academic standards accordingly for these athletes, because their focus isn't limited to academics.</p>
<p>However, recruitment has nothing to do with the athlete's character and such. The only thing recruitment officers are responsible for is assessing the athlete's ability - they give little about his dedication, abilities to work in a team, etc. that the adcoms don't already know. The admissions officers, on the other hand, can deduce these qualities, which ARE important (never said that they weren't) WITHOUT the r.o.'s recommendation, and they DO and are good at it. Recruitment simply relaxes the standards SOLELY for the good of the specific athletic program. For instance, an individual can be racist, lazy, and selfish, and if he is good at whatever he does, the recruitment officer will STILL recommend him. Once again, the adcoms can already see the individual's propensity to work hard as well as the fact that he might not be as acadmically competitive as some of his peers because of his commitment to sports and adjust for those things. Recruitment only signifies that, on top of that, he just happens to be pretty good at the sport (due to natural athletic ability or whatever), which I don't think has anything to do with the character assessment or the academic assessment of the admissions process.</p>
<p>That is, a well-rounded athlete will be able to get into a school without recruitment, because the adcoms aren't stupid, and they realize that some of his deficiencies are due to the way in which he manages his time. His getting recruited only signifies that he would be good for the school's team, which I don't think IS or should be part of the academic and character admissions criteria. Particularly, I don't see why a hard-working athlete who is not that good as his sport or is involved in a sport that doesn't recruit should have a disadvantage (from the character and academics standpoint) when compared to another athlete who is good at his sport and is recruited.</p>
<p>Now, what I REALLY want to discuss is how recruitments boost the school's funding and such for teams that are expected to perform badly anyways. I know that there is a reason schools do this, and I thank those of you who addressed this issue. One said that recruitment assures that the athletic team isn't absolutely terrible, further unifying the school and giving it spirit. That seems reasonable, but I wonder if school spirit can be brought about in different ways more effectively, as it is done in MIT, UofC, blah blah. Another mentioned that recruitment steals applicants from other schools. That also seems pretty reasonable, but I doubt that happens all too often. I would to like to discuss these things. For those of you who are persistent in declaring that I'm anti-athlete or that recruitment is there to boost the quality of the student body, I have nothing further to say. We are clearly on two different pages, and I am sorry if I have offended you in my frustration, particularly hunter.</p>
<p>Asiaknight's concerns, I think, are limited to a relatively small number of schools: those that are both highly selective and also have relatively small enrollments. (There's not much opportunity cost to admitting one more underqualified athlete at UMich, Penn State, or even UVA.)</p>
<p>There are a fair number of selective schools where there is little preferential treatment in the admission of athletes. The University Athletic Association, for example, (Case, CMU, Brandeis, Chicago, Emory, WUStL, UChicago, Rochester, maybe I'm forgetting one or two) is dedicated to the principle that athletes should be treated like other students in admissions and other facets of college life.</p>
<p>But some students want an experience more like the one provided at Williams, Middlebury, or some of the Ivys, where the level of athletic play in some sports is pretty high for D-III, and there is a campus culture of a large % of the student body participating in varsity athletics. Those schools wrestle with the costs of providing that experience all the time and how to balance athletics and academics; both the Ivys and NESCAC have been examining the standards for athletic admits for the past few years and revising their policies. </p>
<p>But as a student, you have a choice of the type of culture you want, and that choice is not between good and less good academically.</p>
<p>You guys say only the ivy's and NESCAC school really recruit and give nice breaks for athletes. I know that UAA schools (Chicago, WUSTL, Emory) give breaks to athletes as well. Here are a couple recruited athletes that posted stats on the Chicago board. 1.) 3.85 gpa, 1230 (M+V) SAT, 640 Math IIC, 610U.S. History., recruited athlete. 2.) 3.9 gpa, 27 ACT, Didn't send SAT scores, recruited athlete. So you can see that the stats aren't too bad but still they don't have the average SAT or ACT score for Uchicago. Athletic Recruitment goes on everywhere so you can't just say the Ivy's give breaks to athletes.</p>
<p>^I think you are what you are seeing because Chicago is rather lax on their admissions standards. I hate to admit it, but the calibre of students at Chicago is lower than that at many other elite schools, especially HYP.</p>