<p>Can anybody answer the question of why recruited athletes are favored a lot more over other possible applicants?? im very curious about this.. thanks</p>
<p>Money! Money! Money! Athletics brings in lots and lots of money if a schools program is succesful. The big name sports in college (basketball and football) draw almost all of their athletes solely on athletics. Thus, the majority of a 60+ (im sure the number is higher) member football team at a school like USC is composed of scholarship athletes. As with many things, its not that schools ideologically favor sports programs, but they bring recognition, and with that comes donations and other various cash rewards.</p>
<p>Goldwater--Do athletics bring the same money into Ivies as they do to schools with more competitive/quasi-professional athletic programs? Do Ivies draw athletes soley on athletics? I think your answer to the OP is true for a certain category of school and less true for the Ivy League. As the OP posted on the Yale forum, I'm not sure whether s/he is asking the question generally or in the context of Yale admissions.</p>
<p>I'd posit that atheletes have an advantage at Ivies because alums like to see teams win and because many athletes are extremely successful later in life because of discipline, determination and teamwork skills they have. A person who is less intellectual but has these attributes may ultimately contribute as much or more to campus life (and later to the larger world) than a purely intellectual person who doesn't have the same drive. Plenty of the athletes I knew at Yale were plenty smart, so I don't mean to imply that there are not many highly intellectual athletes.</p>
<p>Money and alumni pressure are certainly factors in athletic recruiting at the Ivies, but they don't have the same importance that they assume at Div-I schools. In fact there are surveys that show that winning athletic teams are way down the list of things that matter to alums of elite colleges and universities.</p>
<p>There are lots of other reasons that recruited athletes get an admissions advantage. I think that one of the big ones is that students and their parents expect "excellence" when they go to an elite college (and pay all that money), and this means excellence in sports, too. To make this concrete, imagine a story based on the most extreme case, football:</p>
<p>Think of a super-bright, academically stellar wide receiver to whom playing football in college matters, even if it's secondary to a good education. Still, he'd like best of both worlds, a superb academic institution where where the level of play is much higher than he experienced in high school. So to enroll this student, and those like him, colleges must provide the superb sports experience he expects. Therefore, the college not only has to field a football team--but has to field one where the level of play is high. And everyone else in the Ivy League (or NESCAC or the Centennial conference) is under the same pressure. Yet to field a quality football team, you need talented student-athletes at most positions; unfortunately there just aren't enough 4.0, 2200-SAT nose tackles to go around, so you have to lower the bar a little bit, just here and there. Then things get worse: how does the student decide where he's going to have the best football experience? Maybe at the place that's won two of the last three conferences championships or better yet, qualified for a national championship playoff. . . and so the whole process intensifies year after year.</p>
<p>There are schools, of course, that simply say that's not what we do: MIT is a good example in most sports.</p>
<p>Sports excellence is neccesary for the maximum number of alumni donations. Athletes at ivy league institutions are almost always as qualified or better qualified than the majority of the applicants but they are garaunteed a spot if they were recruited in high school to attend and play. This is their hook. It is a talent just like playing the oboe. Now how being a different color skin is a hook I will never know, because color doesn't equal actual diversity, only on paper and in brochures does it add "diversity". So if anything you should probably ask yourself why AA exists. I ask myself that everytime I see lower qualified applicants get in without any talent, just being racially different or coming from an under-repressented state.</p>
<p>The initial reason for such copious (and seemingly bizarre) athletic recruitment was (and is, generally) Title IX. Schools like Yale have long traditions of football excellence, and the law says that for every male athlete there must be a female athlete (or some similar provision). Hence ELEVEN FEMALE ROWERS are recruited and admitted EA with the class of 2008 (there is no 'women's football team' to match the men's).</p>
<p>On another note, I find it silly that people say "alumni donations" as a reason. Yale returns upwards of 20% on what is now a nearly $20 billion endowment (as of 2006) every year. Do you honestly think they need or even care about a couple million$ from alumni? No, they don't, obviously.</p>
<p>Athletic recruitment is out of control, quite frankly.</p>
<p>Actually, I just read an article in the Yale Herald (I think?) talking about how much money Yale (and other D-I schools) lose keeping athletic programs going. I think it was about $10 million.</p>