<p>The "jocks" I knew in college went into (many of them) athletic related occupations- coaching, PE teacher, trainers, working in high schools and colleges within the athletic department. How many non-athletes with a 1540 SAT, steeped in academics, even want to become a coach or PE teacher? How many could?<br>
Why should, therefore, someone whose career path is to eventually work in the world of athletics/sports, need 8 APs and a 1500 to get into college, especially if they are going to play football and study athletic training or exercise physiology?</p>
<p>I think that is really condescending and frankly, downright ignorant. Athletes often have the same career/life type aspirations as everyone else. And many employers in the most prestigious and high paying fields value intercollegiate athletics very highly.</p>
<p>Here's the bottom line. Athletics counts a great deal in the admission process at the vast majority of our most selective colleges and universities. And coaches will typically try to get the best athletes that they can--after all, their job is to win. How far down they are able/wiling to reach in the pool varies considerably based on the school and the sport.</p>
<p>I guess Cur is right - sure is a shame when you "dumb down" the student body as a result of letting in "jocks". Was there a preference given because they also made an athletic contibution to the school - possibly. The way I see it is that just was one more dimension that they offered to the university community.</p>
<p>Did the school recruit and go out of the way to get these kids? - absolutely. In that context, 4 of them turned down Ivies and the other chose this school over other top 20 schools. So as much as there is competition to get into top schools, there is also competition among the schools for students. My feeling is that these kids worked hard for their achievements and certainly deserve the benefits.</p>
<p>doubleplay - I guess the world has changed since then. Not one of the kids on D team wants to be a coach. There are several engineers, several pre meds, 2 BME, a few pre law - quite a few are double majoring - in fact if anything these kids have more difficult majors than the average student. But then again, I am sure that different schools have different personalities.</p>
<p>Like I posted previously "Unfortunately old stereotypes die hard and as a result very deserving student athletes are perceived in a lesser light."</p>
<p>Quote:
Originally Posted by ticked off Williams coach
Critics may argue that if protects, or ultra high band admits (roughly 1450-1520 SAT range), were included then Williams would fall more in line with the group (the number of athletic priority slots would increase from 66 to 81 if you consider protects to be half of a tip as admissions does). Those numbers were correctly not considered because applicants at that level here are so called academic admits (accepted without regard to attributes) at every other school in the league including Amherst. In the last couple of years for instance, 2 baseball recruits rated as protects at Williams were academic admits at both Harvard and Dartmouth I know this because the respective Ivy coaches were not aware of the players in question prior to their acceptance.</p>
<p>How is someone getting admitted to Harvard with such relatively low SATs, if the school was unaware of other special talents they had?</p>
<p>"The difference with bassoonists is that the chair of the music department has no such mandated limits; no will he have as much influence as a coach in the admissions process." EMM.</p>
<p>I completely agree EMM. My D is a gifted string instrumentalist and had awards out the wazzoo in music. She was waitlisted at WashU St. Louis, and despite the WashU Orchestra needing HER particular instrument to fill out the Orchestra in a major way, no amount of letter writing accomplished our goal and she was never called off the waitlist, though we heard that WashU called fewer than 25 people this year.</p>
<p>Had she been a 6ft.2 basketball phenom, I suspect the result would have been different.</p>
<p>I was referring to student athletes who get into competitive schools with lesser stats. </p>
<p>My point was that if a student gets in with lower academic potential than most of the student population, the university usually offers degree programs (as well as tutoring and other services) that are appropriate for him. If a student cannot pass the sciences and maths required for, say, medical school, he can go into something else that's doable for him. Plenty of students find out (not just jocks) after their freshman year that med school is not going to be a possibility for them because they can't ace Calc and Chem. Some students find out that a business major is out of the question because they got weeded out of Intro Accounting (or whatever the weed-out course du jour is). There's nothing wrong with a student who enters college with, I'll put it this way, a less-competitive academic background, finding something within his range of expertise that he can get a degree in (and enjoy doing, and doing WELL for the rest of his life).</p>
<p>I don't feel that my comments about coaching or careers in athletics is condescending at all- I don't think that those professions are demeaning. Sports is a multi-BILLION dollar industry- the people who work in it are worthy of respect. I have the utmost of admiration for athletes, coaches, teachers, and managers. I'm drawing a blank at how saying that many great college athletes go into professional sports, college coaching, teaching, etc. is ignorant either.</p>
<p>I have spent a lot of time on threads like this in the past and hope not to repeat the expereince. But on one of those threads an admissions commitee person recommended the book: The Game of Life, College Sports and Educational Values, by James L. Shulman and William G. Bowen, Princeton University Press. Well I bought it and read it. It provides a wealth of real data on the issue of athletics and college admissions, some of which confirmed my earlier opinions, some of which did not. I heartily recommend it. As the authors say: arguing by example on this issue sheds little light, Bill Bradley was a varsity athlete at Princeton, but so was Lyle Menendez.</p>
<p>A protect in the NESCAC is a student athlete who has the "characteristics" to be admitted (grades, SAT's above 1425, etc) but would go otherwise unnoticed among the 8000 similar apps. The coaches of the lower profile sports get 1 or 2 of these. The standards are much higher than at schools like Stanford, Georgetown, etc where they can bury the bad academic admits in the much larger incoming class. If the next Tiger Woods had below a 1350 SAT he could not get into a NESCAC school.</p>
<p>friedokra - I am a bit surprised by your comment. I seriously doubt that the result would have been any different. Athletics and music along with a multitude of other factors are all variables that are considered as part of the admission process. Based on my experience, I doubt that either one is going to seriouly out weigh the other at the level of schools you are talking about. It all comes down to fit, the level of applicants in any given year (which can vary greatly from year to year) and a multitude of other factors. As they say - admissions is certainly not an exact science. But then again, I am sure this varies greatly from school to school.</p>
<p>One of the things that Schulman and Bowen document in their book is that the admsisons advantage for recruited athletes is very large. What surprised me about the data was that while this advantage used to be smaller than that for URM status, it is now quite a bit larger.</p>
<p>Here's a quote from the book that got the thread rolling:</p>
<p>
[quote]
The subject on which Stevens said he was most surprised was athletics. For all the talk about preferences for minority or legacy applicants, Stevens said that the preference that counted the most was sports ability. There are some anecdotes that will reinforce the stereotypes of many academics about jocks. Some coaches would, with some regularity, push for the admission of athletes who were not top students. Admissions officers in the book are particularly critical of the “helmet sports” — football and hockey.</p>
<p>But Stevens also discusses coaches who consistently would come to the admissions office with lists of desired applicants who were as strong in the library as on the field. There were many coaches he saw who put enough emphasis on recruiting the right kind of mental talent that their lists were people who would have been admitted without extra help.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>That seems to describe the reality on the ground pretty well, and it's the reason, perhaps, that anecdotes of dumb jocks at elite schools and teams full of future Fulbright and Rhodes scholars each have more than a grain of truth.</p>
<p>"How does the college know that the applicant's father is a big Dartmouth College donor? Also how does the college know that the sister of the applicant is a Dartmouth College student accepted with lesser credentials than the applicant?"</p>
<p>Judging by the relationship between admissions officers and GCs portrayed in <em>The Gatekeepers</em>, probably because the guidance counselor told the admissions rep in order to get the kid in. The school in question is probably a high-priced private school with plenty of parents who are likely development targets. (I suppose there is also some possibility that the school is a public located in a place like southern Fairfield County CT--Greenwich, New Canaan, Darien, Westport, et al--or Newton MA, but that is less likely.)</p>
<p>
[quote]
One discussion that bothered me was about AA and its effect on the application of immigrants from Eastern Europe. It acknowledged that they had overcome plenty (and by "plenty" I assume not only poverty, but also language barriers and culture shock) but the admission officers still went for the so-called "multicultural" kids. Huh? Are African-Americans more "multicultural" than immigrants? As a supporter of Affirmative Action, I found that particular rationale disturbing.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>good points. I find the rationale disturbing as well. How many of the AA students who were admitted are the children of upper middle class parents who 25 years ago were, "students who had overcome plenty, had worked hard, and had little money"? Multiculturalism has little to do with leveling the playing field these days.</p>
<p>Re: knowing about the father's giving at Dartmouth . . . </p>
<p>It's pretty much in EVERYBODY's interest to get this information out, so it's not hard to imagine that it gets out. The kid wants admissions to know it, the HS wants admissions to know it, dad probably wants admissions to know it, and the college itself darn well wants admissions to know it. The only party that doesn't want (somebody else's) admissions to know it is Dartmouth, but Dartmouth probably makes the information public in 50 ways, especially if dad is a really major donor.</p>
<p>This only comes up where Beloved Child wants to go somewhere that's off the family's current map. Where -- as is probably more common -- Beloved Child wants to go to Doting Parent's (or Beloved Sibling's) alma mater, the information is already THERE.</p>
<p>Also, re: Eastern European strivers vs. URMs</p>
<p>The high school from which my children graduated has lots of both (and lots of Asian immigrant kids, too). While I have no doubt that the bar is somewhat higher for Eastern European kids than for URMs, I see plenty of great Eastern European kids with compelling stories getting great college admissions results and financial aid, too. As with Chinese-American kids, the issue is probably that the 103rd first-generation Russian science student doesn't do as much for diversity as the 17th African-American.</p>
<p>"Based on this knowledge, I can say with complete assurance that the players on coach's lists (by this I took to mean the "tips" that each coach is allowed) typically do not have the same grades and test scores as those who are admitted without being on the list."</p>
<p>This was actually well-studied at Williams, and a publicly available report posted. Recruited "tipped" athletes are not nearly as accomplished academically as their counterparts (and I see no particular reason why they should be, given that they devote so much time and energy to athletic excellence.) Coaches would have to be crazy to use their limited number of tips on students who might otherwise get in anyway (and they don't).</p>
<p>And I don't see why that should be considered a problem. They are able to handle the work just fine, despite grueling athletic schedules.</p>
<p>At top D3 schools, like Hamilton, if the coach wants to use a tip on an applicant with 'borderline' academic qualifications, that coach will run it by admissions: "is this kid recruitable?" Even a tip won't get certain kids past admissions.</p>
<p>My D3 D was recruited (and likely got a tip as well). She had a 1350 SAT. She attends a top academic D3. </p>
<p>She was NOT the best recruit athletically that year, but I think she was the one who potentially needed the tip the most academically (which tells you how strong the profiles of her co-recruits were). 1350 is only a hair below median at her school BTW. She's got a high B average in a college known for grade deflation (she just started junior year) and in addition to her sport she also does a cappella and she works.</p>
<p>So I don't think they dipped too low on her!</p>
<p>I think that it is important to recognize that even the admittable recruits with the worst high school records are no slouches by ordinary standards. For example, my S (who would clearly fall into that category) could have been admitted to our flagship state university, and, without any help from coaches, was offered merit scholarships at Randolph Macon, College of Wooster, and Northeastern.</p>
<p>Further, the fact that they are often not academically competitive with the better students at the Ivies or highly selective LACs that they attend does not have an adverse effect on their subsequent job prospects. I was in fact worried about this, and questioned some business people about this issue before my S made his final decision. I was told that he would have been in effect vetted academically and intellectually by the fact of his admission, and that his experience as an intercollegiate athlete would make him highly desirable to many of those doing the hiring.</p>
<p>If he wants to be a PE teacher, fine (there's no money in coaching). However, other doors will be open to him even if he does not have the best GPA or take the hardest courses.</p>
<p>Ditto. My D was admitted to UC Berkeley (no way, no how could she play her sport there).</p>