The Harvard data @Data10 cited doesn’t separate revenue sports from non revenue. So, those numbers are going to be influenced by Basketball, Football, Baseball, etc. You say it’s dangerous to make flat out statements based on personal experience. But, I find it unlikely that other recruits in a non revenue sport like Golf, fencing, etc would have a different experience than ours as my daughter was one of the highly sought out recruits in her graduating year. If a concession were to be made it would’ve applied to her. And, she absolutely had to clear hard benchmarks in GPA/ACT to be recruited to the schools she was interested in.
I can provide references for any numbers in my earlier post, if helpful. Continuing with the Harvard example, Harvard has 42 Div I intercollegiate sports teams. Only 7 of them are ticketed, potentially revenue generating sports. The vast majority of sports and the vast majority of Harvard athletes do not play revenue generating sports.
In the lawsuit sample, 75.2% of admitted athletes had a 3 or worse academic rating, which suggest stats much below the average for both the non-athlete hooked LDC student population and the non-athlete unhooked student population. The vast majority of athletes have a poor academic rating compared to the non-athlete student body, which is expected with the Ivy League athletic conference AI rules that set an AI athlete average limit of 1 SD below the overall student population.
It would be unrealistic to expect the large 75.2% majority of Harvard athlete admits that did not have an academic rating on par with typical students only are in the 7 out of 42 ticketed potentially revenue generating sports (I believe only 6 were ticketed during lawsuit sample period). This is especially true when you consider that the revenue generating sports are not permitted to have all athletes be especially low AI. Instead only a portion of team members are in the lowest AI bands. For example, football has a band system that allows only ~half the recruits to have an AI below the -1 SD overall athlete average limit across all teams. The other ~half of football recruits must have to have a better AI than -1 SD AI average limit for athletes across all Harvard teams.
I don’t doubt that Ivy League colleges have more stringent admission standards than Penn St. Ohio St, or similar Div I school. Most Div I schools are far worse than Ivy Leagues in how far they stretch admission standards for athletes. I also don’t doubt that your daughter may have or have had to achieve certain relatively high stats to be recruited. The AI system is based on average AI across all athletes and averages of other groups, such as team AI. You need some athletes with especially high AI to balance out others with especially low AI, to meet the average AI limit. Coaches do not necessarily have the same AI expectation for all players on the team. Instead if they recruit certain critical team members who have lower AIs, then that forces them to have a higher AI expectation for certain other team members.
Again, you are inferring. And, saying it’s “unlikely”. Actually, it’s highly likely that the majority of the athletes that are admitted with scores lower than general admits are in revenue sports. The recruits in the non revenue sports are used to bring up the AI and it’s common that less accomplished athletes in non revenue sports are admitted because of high scores. I know for an absolute fact that my daughter, who was one of the top recruits in the country in her sport, was told that if she didn’t meet certain academic benchmarks she wouldn’t pass the pre read. AdComs offer extremely limited leeway to sports like Fencing, Golf, Squash, etc.
You are misquoting me. None of my posts said your statement or used the word you put in quotes. Instead my earlier post said, “It would be unrealistic to expect the large 75.2% majority of Harvard athlete admits that did not have an academic rating on par with typical students only are in the 7 out of 42 ticketed potentially revenue generating sports.”
Perhaps the issue is what specific GPA/SAT/AI stats we are referring to. 15% of admitted athletes had a 4 or worse academic rating, which the reading procedures give a guideline as follows. I’d agree that this minority of athletes is likely dominated by key players in key sports. That’s not the group I’m referring to.
*Academic 4 – Respectable grades and low-to mid-600 scores on SAT and subject tests or 26 to 29 ACT.
Academic 5 – Modest grades and 500 scores on SAT and subject tests (25 and
below ACT). *
The vast majority of admitted Harvard athletes instead received the following rating. This suggests academic stats well below the general student body which has the a CDS reported 25th/75th SAT of ~750/~790… what I expect is near the -1 standard deviation average AI limit specified in The Ivy League conference rules. This doesn’t suggest bad stats or the athlete is not a good student. In fact the guidelines specifically say “very good student.” It’s just well below the non-athlete average. Given that the vast majority of admitted athletes received this rating and only a small minority of athletes are on revenue teams, I think it is safe to assume that many athlete admits on non-revenue teams received this rating. I have no idea whether your daughter was one of them. Your daughter’s experiences at what may be a different college does not negate this collective sample of ~1200 other athlete admits.
*Academic 3 – Very good student with excellent grades and
a. SAT and SAT Subject tests: mid-600 through low-700 scores
b. 29 to 32 ACT *
Ok, change “unlikely” to “unrealistic”. Do you know the total number of student athletes that are on revenue producing team vs non? I would think football would have maybe > 8x the number than the fencing team. Again, I would think the teams with the most leeway would be Football, basketball, baseball, hockey, lax, track and field, (I don’t actually know if they would all be considered “revenue”). But, these sports would have the most flexibility. Sports like fencing, squash, and golf would have zero flexibility from my experience. These schools expect these sports to positively impact the AI.
Btw, a fencer isn’t getting into HYP with an ACT score below 32 lol.
Put another way…football has more athletes on the team than Fencing, golf, and squash combined…by a large margin.
Football, basketball, and Ice Hockey are the 3 sports with special rules related to how AI is used in athletic recruiting within The Ivy League Conference, such as rules about the current recruiting team AI in these sports must compare to the previous 4 years. I expect these are also the key revenue producing teams. If we count football, basketball, and ice hockey as revenue generating (both men and women’s team), then 17% of Ivy League Div I athletes are on revenue generating teams according to the 2017-18 NCAA roster database. If you also count baseball (both men and women’s team), it increases to 21% of Ivy League Div I athletes. However, this isn’t the same as number of recruited athlete admits for a variety of reasons, so I don’t know a precise figure, which is why I’ve used ambiguous phrasing without precise numbers throughout this thread.
Harvard Men’s Squash has won the national championship 41 times, including winning the national championship this year. The women’s team has an even better record, winning national championships in each of the past 5 years. That degree of success would be quite a feat, with “zero flexibility” in admissions and an AI higher than the non-athlete average, in spite of your daughter’s personal experience in what I expect is a different sport at a different school.
Didn’t you get a perfect score on your SAT math?
Football is limited to about 30 recruits a year. Just looking at the Harvard varsity sports rosters for freshmen, and assuming no walk-ons, for Fencing, 4 men and 2 women; Golf 4 men, 1 women; Squash 2 men, 4 women, for a total of 17. If we take the sports that by reputation have the most “lenient” AI, men’s basketball (5), men’s ice hockey (8), men’s lacrosse (7), and men’s baseball (8), those sports combined with football make a total of 58 athletes. There are approximately 200 recruited athletes a year. Seventy five percent of that number is 150.
I have no doubt that the AI targets for certain sports are going to be pretty high. No one is doubting your personal experience, but it is also equally clear that athletes as an overall group are held to lower academic standards, although there certainly are recruited athletes that exceed the average non-athlete. BTW a 32 is at or below the 25th percentile at H (33), Y (33) and P (32) in the 2018-2019 CDS’s.
'Only 7 of them are ticketed, potentially revenue generating sports. ’
I don’t think any of the Ivies have revenue generating sports. They aren’t tagged with the scholarships other D1 teams have to cover to claim a profit, but the Ivy league doesn’t rake in the TV money, ticket revenue or merchandise sales that other schools/teams/conferences do. I doubt any team brings in enough money to cover its costs (coaching salaries, equipment, fields/courts/pools, travel, meals). The schools might set up the accounting so that they aren’t charged for the practice locations or game fields, but if the teams had to pay those costs, there would not be a profit.
My guess would be hockey might bring in the most revenue in the Ivy league, but it is also an expensive team to sponsor.
I just read this entire thread and found it very helpful and informative. There were only a few comments with which I disagreed and, to my great satisfaction, those were quickly countered.
At the risk of being overly trivial, I feel that one observation needs a slight correction.
While I generally agree with this sentiment, as a parent of two college recruited fencers I feel compelled to point out that few, if any “prep, super affluent public hs and boarding schools” are developing college recruitable fencers.
I’ve known many collegiate fencers, their parents, and the coaches who helped develop their skills. While they are disproportionately affluent, and many, perhaps most, attended private high schools, their fencing skills were honed in private fencing clubs by privately paid coaches, not in high schools of any sort, private or public.
There are also many examples of “ordinary kids from ordinary high schools” who fence at elite colleges, but those kids, too, came up through the club system rather than through fencing in HS.
Sorry, just had to get it off my chest.
I think this will be my last response. You say things that don’t connect IMO. For example, because Harvard Squash team dominates the natural connection is that the members need flexibility in regards to their academics? That’s absurd. I’m getting off this merry go round. Have at it. I’m very familiar with recruiting at Harvard, as my daughter was recruited there btw.
So, the 3 sports I mentioned would have 17 out of the 200 recruits in a given year. Less than 10%.
As long as people are debating academic credentials of athletes in non-revenue sports, and fencing in particular, I’ll share what DS was told were Princeton’s minimums to be recruited: SAT scores of 7xx in each section and 2 Subject Test scores of 7xx, as well as a 3.7 or better with a rigorous course load.
Athletics or not, DS was qualified; his Academic Index exceeded Princeton’s average and he was also nationally recognized in a non-athletic EC. Still, he was well aware his admissions odds would have been low if he hadn’t been good at poking people with a metal stick.
Same…I also was going to point out elite fencing that leads to being recruited is done at the club level, not in High Schools.
Again, you are misquoting me. The whole reason why the Ivy League conference implemented the AI limits is the first place is to put different Ivy League teams on a more level field and not allow any one team to have an advantage by recruiting less academically qualified athletes than others. College athletics is separated in to Div I, Div II, and Div III for similar reasons. If one particular school is held to higher standards than others, it puts that school at a disadvantage against the schools it competes against.
Similarly if or some reason Harvard chooses to hold their athletes on a particular team to a more stringent standard than the non-athlete student body that has a mean SAT of ~770, or mean ACT of ~34, then it would put that Harvard team at a severe disadvantage in recruiting. If would be quite a feat for a team with this severe a disadvantage in recruiting to be the most successful Div I school in the sport, including winning the national championship 5x in a row. The far more likely explanation is that the coach is able to recruit key players who have an AI below the non-athlete average, which is permitted under Ivy League conference recruiting rules.
While this squash player have higher stats than non-athletes scenario seems unlikely, is it really that important which of the lawsuit reported <25% of athlete admits have a 2 academic rating that puts them more on par with non-athlete admit; or which team had the one athlete in the 6 year sample who received a top 1 academic rating? Regardless of how the split occurs between teams, these <25% of athletes are in the minority. The other >75% of athlete admits had academic ratings suggestive of much lower stats than the non-athlete average, including much lower stats than the hooked LDC non-athlete average. Being a recruited athlete is a big hook, one of the biggest hooks possible for Ivy League applicants, and as such, athletes tend to have worse stats than non-athletes, in accordance with the AI average and band limits specified under the Ivy League conference rules. It’s not 100% of athlete admits, but it’s the vast majority.
My point wasn’t about fencing. I love fencing!
It had nothing to do with fencing. It is just not a sport most public schools consider or even have access with local academies etc. it was just part of a list of less common sports in the broader theme. I wish the general point could be teased from the gist of the post. Not trying to offend anyone at all.
I love fencing!!! FWIW.
But to the larger point. A 1400+ and 3.7uw gpa without the skills and dedication to achieve a spot of the Princeton team, would be a nearly zero chance of admissions for anyone in my neck of the woods.
The combination of this profile and sports excellence is really strong and congrats to those who’ve achieved the opportunity.
To the millions of non fencers or raquet sports stars pole vaulters or running backs it’s just not an even playing field. But it is what it is and this is just a thread to discuss why 15 percent schools seem even more unattainable than ever. The bottom line is the admissions rates are over 50 percent less outside of certain categories.
That being said…
Athletes urm students and legacies individually may be at the very top of statistics as well. So I can see when a parent of this sport and academic star react to the general stats and see it to mean that their student “didn’t earn their spot from an academic standpoint”.
It undermines their achievement.
This thread is just about broad categories not individuals. The sports star who gets in, gets in. They’ve certainly earned their spot. If they weren’t incredibly bright and accomplished this wouldn’t have happened and they most assuredly wouldn’t be as successful at the school as they all usually are with grad rates near 100 percent.
@privatebanker I always appreciate your input. Great perspective. This is a great way to end that discourse.
Your post said “near perfect gpa and scores,” not perfect scores on one SAT sub section. I definitely did not have “near perfect GPA and scores.”
I believe all my scores having to do with math, science, or similar were perfect; but my combined score was in bottom 25% M+CR for 3 of the referenced schools (vocabulary was weak point). I also did not have a perfect HS GPA. I was barely even top 10% HS rank. However, I received straight A’s in a variety of university classes that went well beyond the highest level of classes offered at my HS and were not a part of HS rank. There are other contributing factors as well, but the point is, I did not meet any of the listed criteria for it to not be a wasted app.
Instead it was one of many possible exceptions due to highly selective holistic considering context and additional criteria beyond a simple set of rules. For example, it’s best to have a high score on everything, but holistic colleges often also consider the context of the scores and how they relate to your planned major. I planned to study engineering, so I expect math/science scores were especially relevant, which were perfect. It’s best to have a near perfect GPA in everything, but colleges also consider which subjects had the non-A grades, and I received straight A’s in my many external SUNY/RPI/… college classes related to my planned major, as well in all SUNY classes that were in electives outside of math/hard science. This was highly suggestive of being able to continue doing well in college courses at other colleges. The HS non-A classes were lower level and less relevant to my planned major.
These are forum posts, not essays, so they’re not going to be comprehensive. The broader point is if you want reasonable odds of admission, you need a hook or to be exceptional in something. In your case, you had exceptional math and science test scores, and did dual enrollment.