My family has zero interest in sports other than staying fit. We actively look for the nerd schools that have similar attitudes. Instead of the sound of Rah! from the overpriced stadium, we are listening for the sound of padded clicks from keyboarding.
It boggles our collective minds at the dinner table why colleges have big football teams at all and why the coaches are paid so much and the players are not paid anything and many don’t have a decent education to show for it once they somehow get through school (note the Harvard cheating scandal when their varsity players were assigned to classes meant to just pass them through.) I could mention several other scandals surrounding sports teams at colleges being so lauded as to lose a sense of proportion and decency (cough Sandusky cough), so many more, but I’d be afraid that CC community would think I’m just bashing. I’m not bashing, but it simply does not compute for me that sports are YUUUUUGE in this country at college level, compared with actual academics.
You would think that CC community in general would not be happy about the spaces reserved in the freshman classes for the athletes who often don’t have stellar grades . . . . Why are athletes given this privilege when your geeky, nerdy, super-intellectual adorable snowflake could have that slot? Or maybe everyone on CC are athletes looking for one of those slots . . . could be.
I think UCSC is a case of horrible mismanagement by the schools administration. They should never of increases the athletic budget by over 40% ($1.4M to $2M) unless they had worked out a method to fund it.
Sports accompanied by Buzz infuses a school with spirit. Unfortunately, the buzz is generally about football. It turns out the football fries players’ brains. Most of the damage appears to happen before college but it is made worse during college. Helmets don’t help. It is all about the abrupt stops when the brain continues forward. The issue may be solved if parents refuse to allow their children to play as pee wee players. There won’t be a cohort ready to play in college. But this problem is fairly unique to a couple of sports. Colleges should be about expanding the brain not helping to obliterate it. It would be great if schools would focus on other sports that don’t have such a devastating impact. There are a few schools that focus on basketball and most ignore nearly every other sport. Would be great to see a buzz associated with other sports that don’t harm players.
" Bending the admissions standards to treat recruited athletes in a way more favorably than treating their sport as a high level extracurricular."
I am not sure that admitting athletes with slightly (notice my use of the term slightly) lower grades constitutes “bending” (while markedly lowers grades and scores probably does). Students who have high achievements in nontraditional academic areas (sports, music, art) may spend more time on these activities in order to excel in them. I don’t see any reason for that not to figure into the equation. That does not mean doing away with standards to essentially buy a better team, which some schools have done.
I realize that this thread is about sports but I always wonder why the prospect of lower grades and scores associated with athletes gets so much more attention than the issue of legacy.
At least the athletes have worked for their slots. Privileged/entitled wealthy (usually white) people get into college all the time by essentially buying themselves into it or, even more amazingly, presenting schools with the potential for future donations. It’s called legacy. This happens very often. It isn’t just a token idea. But few people are up in arms about it. Who is though and when? When anyone challenges the idea. You’ll probably see that here in responses to this post. Say hello, Brown. Only kidding. Because that isn’t the only school by a long shot. Few don’t give preference for the entitled offspring of former graduates. And unlike those good at sports, legacies are riding on their parents’ coattails. You’d think most would have too much pride to do so but they often don’t. And often the reason they don’t is because they perceive it as perfectly acceptable.
We are a huge college sports family and both of my smart kids factored in the sports programs when deciding. They both love the school spirit and will always be fans of “their” teams. My son was a recruited athlete in a non- rev sport and chose not to particpate in the end. Mostly because he was not comfortable with the time commitment and the time away from campus to compete. My daughter on the other hand was a top student (ACT of 34, 4.0 non weighted GPA, 4.6 weighted,state level athlete etc) and was declined from UNC when a friend of hers the following year got in with much lower grades and test scores because she was a recruited athlete. Such is life, life isn’t fair sometimes and it always works out in the end. She could not be happier where she is attending with a fabulous scholarship.
For those who believe the conventional wisdom that athletic culture impacts big time Division 1 universities more that small Div 3 colleges, read “The Game of Life”. A few quotes from the Amazon book summary"
Shulman and Bowen show that athletic programs raise even more difficult questions of educational policy for small private colleges and highly selective universities than they do for big-time scholarship-granting schools. They discover that today’s athletes, more so than their predecessors, enter college less academically well-prepared and with different goals and values than their classmates–differences that lead to different lives.
James Shulman and William Bowen introduce facts into a terrain overrun by emotions and enduring myths. Using the same database that informed The Shape of the River, the authors analyze data on 90,000 students who attended thirty selective colleges and universities in the 1950s, 1970s, and 1990s. Drawing also on historical research and new information on giving and spending, the authors demonstrate how athletics influence the class composition and campus ethos of selective schools, as well as the messages that these institutions send to prospective students, their parents, and society at large.
And realize that at small LAC’s, typically 25% of the student body participated in intercollegiate sports while at a university like UCLA, Bama, or UM less that 5% of the student body participate.
“Bending the admissions standards to treat recruited athletes in a way more favorably than treating their sport as a high level extracurricular” means admitting recruited athletes with academic and other credentials such that admission readers would not otherwise consider that applicant a reasonable candidate for admission if s/he were not recruited for the sport (i.e. treating the sport as a high level extracurricular rather than a special “hook”).
Regarding legacy, it is a completely unearned (by the applicant) credential that is undesirable for college admissions (especially for public universities – though the perceived relationship with alumni donation is probably why schools like Michigan and Virginia use it). But that is not the point of this thread. You may want to start a separate thread on that subject.
D1 or D3 sports wouldn’t make a difference to my kids so long as there is a good intramurals program. A D1 school like Cal, UCLA, or Stanford would be just fine for my son, though he would probably never attend spectator sports events. The emphasis on sports at a place like Alabama would probably bug him a lot. We are just not a spectator sports family, much to my MIL’s dismay.
Big time sports do bring in money from the alumni donor base, so I can see the advantages. The students who get in for sports at a D1 school are a totally different group of students. I never even saw the football players on the Texas A&M campus in class or walking around when I attended there. Wouldn’t have wanted to, since there was a big scandal where they severely beat up a pizza delivery guy during those years.
DH was a grad student at UCSB when they voted to get rid of their football team (“undefeated since 1992”). The NCAA was going to make the team go D1 because other sports were D1, and the students voted on whether to add a fee to support D1 football. According to DH, the grad student vote made the difference at UCSB, because many grad students voted no, while few undergrads voted at all. UCSB is about 10% grad students, similar to UCSC. However, UCSB’s vote was before online voting was possible, so perhaps the voter turnout will be higher.
It would not have made a difference to me when I was in college, mostly because I attended a school with Division 3 sports and no football. I never attended a sporting event and could not have cared less if they had sports there. I am a college football fan. Had I chosen a Division 1 football school, it would have made a difference. My daughter goes to Alabama, and the presence of intercollegiate sports has greatly enhanced her experience. Of course, football is revenue positive there. And we are spectators, not participants, in intercollegiate athletics, although my daughter played intramural sports.
If a school is Div 1, it is division 1 for all sports; it could opt to host a club team in a sport, and many schools do that but a Div 1 school cannot play any sport in D3… To be a Div 1 school, the school has to host a certain number of sports for men/women (I think it is 10 each). If a school is Div 3, the school can have one men’s/one women’s team ‘play up’. Hopkins is Div 3 but plays up in lacrosse, and is the B1G 10 for both teams. Colorado College plays D1 hockey for men, D1 soccer for women. A tiny school like Presbyterian (~1200 students) can be Div 1 while a fairly big school like UCSC 916,000+) can be D3. The size of the school doesn’t determine which division they play in.
Any school could admit just on statistics, but I don’t know any that do. All seem to consider the rest of the student’s life, including sports. There are leadership skills, team work strategies that seem to help
I was just watching the Yale/Navy lacrosse game and the announcer noted one of the Yale players (a star) had a 3.9 in some kind of macro biology major. I wonder if he would have a 4.0 if he didn’t play lacrosse? I know he wouldn’t have enjoyed college nearly as much. The game was a sell out at Yale so some students seem to like sports.
I went to a huge school in Florida that had excellent sports. I enjoyed it.
My 2 kids who love to play sports have little interest at this time to watch others play. They do want to go to schools where they can keep playing on some level: intramural,club, varsity.
D17 absolutely wants to attend a school with intercollegiate sports that are at least somewhat competitive. She has always loved the atmosphere of school sporting events and the school spirit which they create. D is also just a big sports fan overall, so attending a school where she couldn’t go watch competitive games is unimaginable to her.
She is also looking for schools with broad intramural sports programs since she thinks that would be very enjoyable, but intercollegiate sports are much more of a requirement.
I attended a small liberal arts college: Reed. Absence of intercollegiate sports meant nothing to my choice. I suppose if I had gone to some other LAC I might have joined the track team. I had been a league champion middle-distance runner in high school. But this wasn’t a factor in my college choice, nor did Reed have any intercollegiate athletics.
Lots of moderately selective schools admit just on stats, except for perhaps special “hook” students like recruited athletes.
Of course, those schools which consider various other criteria can and do consider the applicant’s sport achievements as an extracurricular in regular admission readings if the applicant is not being recruited for that sport.
My son never liked being a spectator so he wasn’t drawn to Div 1 schools. He was recruited by a Div 3 coach, but chose another Div 3 school to save money. He probably played 4 or 5 club and intramural sports and was captain of two of his teams.
Our local state school just won Div 3 league championships in baseball, softball, men’s lacrosse, and women’s lacrosse.They are the defending Div 3 national champs in two of the sports. Sometimes parents of the players outnumber fans at their games. I went to a state school that only had intramural sports so it was never a lure for me.
We are not sports fans in our house, so my kids didn’t actively look for sports at all. They were turned OFF by schools that overemphasized sports. Schools dropped from or moved down on their list from that.
All of their schools have some sort of sports. I don’t think any of my kids have attended a thing.
We did, however, get a chuckle at a ceremony where a student athlete was getting an award presented to her by her research mentor. It went something like:
“X encouraged us to come watch one of her swim meets. It proved to be quite interesting as we found out our school has a gym.”
That fits us. We’re active people, but outdoor active - hikes, etc - not organized sports active.
We are huge sports fans in our house, watch most of the Mariners game, and placed an emphasis on staying active. Our kids were all state level athletes.
School spirit and the desire to watch sports, despite our obsessive nature, have totally bypassed S2. It will be 100% non-issue for him when looking at schools. So far his list consists of UW, our in-state college, and Alabama for its scholarships, both huge sports schools but he would be unlikely to attend any sporting events ever. Maybe being dragged to S1’s and D’s events was enough to make him averse.