<p>A number of people have said he has a great GPA. A 4.2 is obviously weighted if it’s on a 4.0 scale. At some schools that 4.2 could be as low as a 3.2 unweighted, depending on what classes he took. Other schools are on a 5.0 scale. So I wouldn’t be too quick to assume he has a great GPA. </p>
<p>He probably has a good GPA (B+ or higher) if not a great one, however, and he’s apparently a gifted athlete. His ACT is better than his SAT; an ACT composite of 28 is 91st percentile, equivalent to a 1260 SAT CR+M. Typically that score doesn’t get you into Brown. Surprisingly, however, Brown’s 25th percentile ACT score is only 29. This is well below the 25th percentile mark for comparably-ranked schools like Northwestern (25th percentile 31), WUSTL (32), Notre Dame (32), and Vanderbilt (31). I wonder if they “hide” a lot of recruited athletes (and other hooked admits) by reporting only their ACT scores, thus protecting their reported SAT medians as the latter are the ones that get published in places like US News.</p>
<p>Note that Brown makes a point of not focusing on GPA and test scores. The CDS indicates that they rank all of the following criteria as more important than GPA and test scores:</p>
<p>-Course Rigor
-Essays
-Recommendations
-Level of Applicant’s Interest
-Particular Talent/Ability
-Character / Personal Qualities</p>
<p>The Brown admission facts page indicates that they have a 7.2% acceptance rate for students with a 91st percentile ACT, like the student in the news story… not much below their overall acceptance rate of 9.2%.</p>
<p>I believe that the AI of the athlete cohort must be within 1 sd of the all-student cohort (which obviously includes the athlete cohort). The average of the non-athlete cohort would be higher and the standard deviation would be much lower than that of the all-student cohort.</p>
<p>I believe the AI difference between athlete and non-athlete is not something these schools would ever want made public.</p>
I don’t know about that. About 4-5 years ago a bunch of good questions were raised on CC about Ivy league recruiting … so I send an email to the Ivy league to see if they would provide some answers. I received info back that included number of recruits per sport and the quota for each AI band for a school. That seems pretty transparent to me.</p>
<p>I think the way to look at this is that the Ivies–unlike many other highly selective colleges (ie., Duke and Stanford)–have in place a mechanism that is intended to restrict the degree of academic compromise that will be made to recruit athletes. There is nothing forcing the Ivies to do this other than their own voluntary agreement. If they all interpret the requirement in more or less the same way, whose business is it that they choose to do this?</p>
<p>CDS is not gospel. Brown certainly looks at stats. Since most people don’t know what those categories mean, what’s attention getting and what’s ho-hum, it’s pretty futile to judge based on CDS.</p>
<p>Eg, you’ll note Brown ranks level of interest as very important. And yet they keep no record of visits, tours, etc.</p>
<p>Agree completely. I have no problem with these schools admitting whomever they choose for just about any reason they choose. I would like to see more transparency though, simply because I believe conflating the admit stats of hooked and unhooked applicants serves no purpose but to obfuscate. How incredibly simple it would be to release data for non-athletes only, for example. It is not by accident or oversight that schools choose not to do so. It is intentional. And, of course, it is their prerogative.</p>
<p>Obviously I have no right to such data, it it simply something I would be interested in seeing. I believe it would be interesting to a great number of people. True, in a court of law I doubt I could convince anyone that any of this is my “business”.</p>
<p>Well, the game played between Rutgers and Princeton 9n 1869 didn’t much resemble what we now know as football (or American football, to the rest of the world). They played with a round ball, used a rugby-style scrum instead of a snap, and played 25 men on a side. Carrying the ball, much less throwing it, was prohibited; it could only be kicked or batted with hands, elbows, knees, head, hips, etc. Without a snap, there was no exclusive possession for a series of downs, and no opportunity to retain possession by earning a first down.</p>
<p>Modern football evolved out of organized rugby matches between Yale, Harvard, and Columbia, under rule changes introduced by Yale’s Walter Camp that brought in a snap instead of a scrum; 11-man teams; a system of downs, including the opportunity to retain possession by earning a first down; and a point scoring system that broadly resembles modern football scoring more than rugby scoring. To that extent, I think Yale has a legitimate claim to have invented the game. It’s hard to pinpoint a year, however, as these rule changes were instituted over time.</p>
<p>My own alma mater, the University of Michigan, claims to have been playing football since 1879, but their first intercollegiate varsity season was 1881 when they played Harvard, Yale, and Princeton. A few years later, the Michigan team got off their train to Chicago in South Bend, Indiana, and taught the game to Notre Dame. In 1887, Michigan played Notre Dame for the first time. Michigan won, and has led the series ever since.</p>
There is a difference between not looking at stats and considering other factors as more important. The CDS indicates that they look at stats and use them in the evaluation process, even though they say course rigor, essays, recommendations, level of interest, and character/personal qualities are all more important than stats. This is consistent with their reported test scores. Earlier in the thread, it was mentioned that Brown has a much lower 25th percentile ACT than other schools with a similar selectivity and USNWR ranking such as Northwestern, WUSTL, and Notre Dame (I’d actually consider all of these schools less selective than Brown). </p>
<p>Also note that level of interest does not just mean visits and tours. Some colleges use this as more of a way of protecting yield. Back when Brown offered a non-binding, non-restrictive EA, many students who were primarily interested in HYPSM-type colleges used the Brown EA as a backup/safety. If they got admitted to Brown EA, then they didn’t need to apply to safeties and could focus on their preferred colleges. The director of admissions at Brown said they dropped the non-binding EA because, </p>
<p>*“The old policy was intended for students who had identified Brown as one of their top choices, but instead it became a means for students to cover their bases and then apply to other schools.” *</p>
<p>I’d expect that today Brown still isn’t keen on students who think of Brown as a backup/safety for HYPSM-type schools. For example, Boston Latin is a top magnet HS that has a reputation as being a feeder for Harvard. They have a very high acceptance rate for Harvard, Yale, Princeton and nearly all ivies; but not Brown. Their acceptance rate for Brown is similar to Brown’s overall acceptance rate. It’s possible that the vast majority of Boston Latin’s applicants to Brown are substantially weaker students than their applicants to other ivies. However, I think it’s more likely that the relative low acceptance rate relates to considering level of interest and their historically low yield rates.</p>
There hasn’t been an ivy league football national title in ~75 years. There have not been any ivy league titles during the period in which Division I (as we know it today) existed.</p>
<p>You’d have to see a host of apps to understand what kids actually convey. It’s hard to actually rely on any snapshot, thinking it offers formula clues. I’d guess rigor is marked higher because it qualifies the gpa/rank, not because rigor can overcome a middling gpa. Talent equates to promise- again, in the immediate college context, not the “someday.” And, it goes on. But, ability to master the challenges in hs also a matter of motivation, where one’s drive is. If R-R got top grades, as some have said, that’s good. He did it. But we’d need to see the overall inflation/competitiveness of the hs (and, of course, his transcript,) to see his context. </p>
<p>I always say interest isn’t simply about visits, when one is talking tippy tops. It has more to do with how you show your match to what the school offers (and the care put into the app/supps, which is also a test of judgment and etc.) But, the average kid who looks at the CDS is going to think interest is about visits, tours, raving about the campus, how long he’s dreamed of going there, and/or questions about emailing the reps. </p>
<p>It really is a matrix of considerations. Brown claims to offer significant academic support. I’m guessing R-R will make it through, if he’s savvy enough to make use of that support.</p>
<p>It’s pretty easy to get a lot of the pieces. We know the overall averages of all enrolling students, we know the numbers of recruits, and we know the worst case of the AIs of the recruits. From that one could get a pretty good worst case (biggest gap) estimate of the gap between the two populations.</p>
<p>All that said I’m not sure what the point is. Having read Levin’s book on Ivy league admissions one of the realizations I came to while reading the book is how unproductive the harping on the Ivy league athletic recruiting is IMO. Once slots have been designated for athletic recruits the academics required are a moot point (unless the break is so big is affects the overall level of learning at a school). In other words if Yale kept exactly the same number of athletic recruit slots and raised the academic standards for an athletic recruit to 2400 SATs and a 4.0 GPA it would not affect any other applicants admission compared to today’s standards and probably not affect their day-to-day academic life either … however the league athletic teams would not be nearly as good. Since they mostly play each other I’m not sure that is a terrible outcome … they’d have even a lower chance of winning national championships … but the within league games would still be competative.</p>
<p>If I were the god of the Ivy I would … maintain the recruiting spots … keep AI slots … but make the distribution of the slots match the distribution of the overall student population. </p>
<p>That said, the Ivy league and the NESCAC schools do more to ensure their athletic recruits are more similar to their overall student population than other schools … and ironically, catch the most grief for their efforts.</p>