Thanks @sherpa and @BKSquared
But our efforts to inform are futile here. I just hope all those kids and parents who think they have some fast track to being recruited through “commitment” are aware that the road is long and travelled by many There are no promises, nothing set in stone.
But back to the original OP post…
The Yale community has pretty much rallied around its athletes and my son reports most “non-athletes” are very supportive.
The original OpEd was poorly written and vastly uninformed about the recruiting and subsequent admissions process.
As someone commented on YDN section about the author, “someone got picked last for kickball”.
I know a graduate of Columbia who insists they never heard of Columbia, growing up even in the Mid Atlantic.
It was the coach who recruited him that introduced him to the school.
The guy got a degree in computer science, no dummy.
I have a son who is a student athlete.
Hardest working kid you’ll meet on campus.
He is not there to goof around, and wants grades more than
playing time on the field.
There are some who use college as a warm up for the pros,
but they are the rare exception.
@prof2dad and @JenJenJenJen, debaters, musicians, dancers and writers are all well represented. Applicants who are exceptional in these areas are as sought after as the exceptional athlete. The instrumental and vocal groups are a big deal on campus – Brandon Sherrod was gifted as a basketball player and as a Whiffenpoof. That being said, you won’t get 80,000 people to attend a debate.
I doubt very highly that money has anything to do with it. Most colleges spend more money on their athletic programs than they make as reported by the NCAA. Yale is no exception even without athletic scholarships. I guess we can argue that athletics are important to alumni donations, but the endowment is already $25.4 billion!!! Above all else, athletics creates a sense of community for the students and the alumni. At best, alums may reach just a tiny bit deeper in their pockets if the athletic teams are doing well. That might be an interesting graph to see, plotting gifts against some weighted sports record (or just the outcome of The Game) but I am confident the correlation is stronger to how the general economy is doing in any given year.
Just as kids look at the dorms, want to know about “student life” in general, sports are a part of student life, either as spectators or as players. There is club and varsity. The only issue here is those few schools that make a business of teams, getting tv revenue, and the temptation to sacrifice standards of admission and education. But even at the few colleges where this occurs, it would be only a particular team or two that makes money for the school. While I do question the academic standards, usually these are the teams that get the spectators. Many non athletes recall attending games for their nationally ranked teams fondly.
Maybe if we attended events to see other teams, and cheer them on, the ones NOT on tv,
the focus on the commercial aspects of ncaa sports could be reduced. Even with the famous AI,
there is usually a team thst is allowed to be below avg overall, academically, to have one team that puts the college on the athletic map. For Harvard, Cornell it’s ice hockey, Princeton and Johns Hopkins it’s lacrosse. But I have spoken to coaches in my son’s sport (not hockey nor lacrosse) at these schools, and the other teams have to make up for the academic impact. Johns Hopkins coach informed parents that the SAT score he could take a few years ago is very different today. Has to be same as the general population, or very close. Multiple ivy coaches expressed interest but would not do anything without grades/scores. Caltech has suffered entire decades without a win in 2 sports, rather than lower academic standards. Yes there are exceptions, but they amount to minimal statistical impact on academic standards.
“@prof2dad and @JenJenJenJen, debaters, musicians, dancers and writers are all well represented.”
@BKSquared My earlier question was not about whether they are represented well. My question was why some athletes were recruited at such a young age, whereas the others were not.
@prof2dad, the early recruitment has more to do with the craziness of athletic recruiting in general in this country vs. an active admissions policy decisions by the Ivies. The Ivies are competing with a very narrow selection of scholar athletes that are also very attractive to highly regarded academic D1 schools like Stanford, Duke, Vanderbilt, the UC’s, who all offer athletic scholarships and have more resources (human and money) to recruit athletes. This forces the Ivies to push early recruiting beyond a level that they probably feel is comfortable/appropriate, especially in certain sports – I think that is why they are at the forefront of trying to have the NCAA adopt more stringent rules in this area.
While you can see from my posts how important I think athletics are to the social fabric of any university, I also think that collegiate athletics is also way over the top as a general matter. It’s astonishing to me that head football and basketball coaches make significant multiples over college presidents and world renowned professors. Further, except for the very few marquee D1 schools, athletics are a net cost to universities and are often a significant budget drain. The athletes in the money programs, football and basketball, are many times treated like disposable assets. They come to a program dreaming about a lucrative professional career and end up banging up their bodies (often with long term consequences), getting no real education and are left with pretty dismal prospects. Here is where the Ivies and the academic D3’s get it right in terms of the balance of athletics and academics. At every group and private pitch I have heard from these coaches, not one has said their program will lead to a lucrative professional career. Their emphasis is about the incomparable value of an XYZ education. From what I know, heard and read these coaches for the most part hold true to their promise of academics first.
FWIW: I happen to know the kid the coach is referring to, as he played on my son’s high school baseball team – and I think his particular story illustrates what ivy league schools look for in a recruited athlete.
In high school, this kid was 6’6" and 225 pounds. He was a lefty pitcher, and his fastball was clocked at 91 miles an hour. His senior year, he threw a perfect game and was named NYC player of the year. Every college wanted him and he choose Yale.
Now – what made this kid unique was not his baseball, but his smarts,. He was wicked smart, having graduated near the top of his class at Stuyvesant High School (not an easy feat for anyone who knows the school).
Unfortunately, the kid blew out his arm in a fall practice game his freshman year at Yale and had to undergo Tommy John surgery. Consequently, he didn’t play baseball his freshman or sophomore year at Yale. But that was okay, because this kid was more than competitive in the academic pool!
The only year he played baseball for Yale was his junior year, as he was drafted and signed with the Cincinnati Reds. I bumped into his mom about 6 months ago and he currently plans to finish his education at Yale when his baseball career runs it’s course.
This is the kind of student-athlete who exemplifies what ivy league schools are looking for in a recruited athlete!
I kinda have to chuckle when I see people associate $$$$ with Ivy sports because my son’s sport, while having the distinction of being the oldest inter-collegiate sport, is hardly a revenue maker… It is, however, much beloved and continues because of the strong ties to tradition at the school.
As to Ivy student athletes, I forget what the actual title is…perhaps @gibby knows but at the end of a season the AD will showcase the season’s athletes who have achieved academic excellence. Often time many of the athletes have GPAs well above their non-athlete counterparts.
Unfortunately, this doesn’t appear to be a very high bar. A good overview is available here: https://www.mka.org/uploaded/college_counseling/Publications/AI_Guidelines_Worksheet.pdf. Bottom line is that if you took the average recruited athlete and compared them to a randomly selected student from the school, 84% of the time the randomly selected “regular” student will have a higher AI (or, in laypersons terms, will be smarter).* A lot of academically stronger candidates are rejected to ensure winning sports teams – most of which draw little interest from the broader student population. I’m not surprised some students are resentful.
*For “special” sports that do draw interest and revenue (e.g., hockey or wrestling at Cornell), the AI average will be even lower.
Recruited athletes must be within one standard deviation of the admitted classes Academic Index.
Yep, the non athletes must certainly be “smarter”, you know, one standard deviation smarter…
There is already a huge amount of information out there and here on CC if you’d like to do research to get an accurate sense of the AI. Funny but the only Ivy athletes I know include National Merit semi-finalists, and class valedictorians. Pretty subpar I know…
Perhaps true in your sport @tonymom . But many I know from public school are recruited athletes to Ivy schools but no where near the top of the class, and not Natl Merit Semifinalists or even Commended.
No one is disputing that there aren’t athletes that are smart.
I was asking why the early recruitment, before they are HS athletes or have any HS GPA or standardized test scores.
The following is a 2010 Q&A between Yale Alumni Magazine and then Yale President Rick Levin:
"Y: On the question of recruiting. There are college admissions slots reserved, under Ivy rules, for varsity sports, even though admission to Yale College is incredibly competitive.
L: It would be impossible to be competitive in the Ivy League if we didn’t employ this system.
Y: What fraction of each class are recruited athletes?
L: About 13 percent. It was 17 or 18 percent when I became president (1993). I have wanted to maintain a strong athletic program, and I believe we have demonstrated this can be accomplished without admitting quite so many athletes. We now admit significantly fewer recruited athletes than the Ivy League allows. Some of the coaches are not happy with this, understandably. But I believe we have struck the right balance between making our athletic programs successful and wanting to make the Yale experience available for students who excel in other areas."
Having read this thread and the original Yale opinion piece, I can attest that the process as described by @tonymom is correct. My experience is that students and their parents (and journalists) throw around terms like “commitment” like they have a final say in it. They can commit all they want but until they have been approved for admission by the adcom and have a likely letter in their hands, they are not attending that school. So many parents have told us that their kid got a “full ride” to an Ivy. Again, they may have received enough financial aid to cover their COA, but only after they would have submitted their FAFSA and all supporting docs. As for the original article, I am biased but my student athlete is one of 3 kids on his team pursuing an engineering degree and working harder than most kids at the school not because he is not smart but because he is doing it while putting 25 hours a week to his chosen sport.
The extension of @foosondaughter’s definition of “smarter” and " A lot of academically stronger candidates are rejected…" would be that candidates with super high test scores (SAT, ACT, SAT2) are more worthy than other candidates. Note under the AI calculation, test scores make up 67% of the weighting. Without getting into the highly charged discussions of affirmative action, this logic places higher value on the highly prepped expert test taker than the talented young writer who may have scored a bit lower on the math section, the brilliant young scientist who had issues with the English/writing sections, the concert pianist who just struggles with reading quickly, etc… It is just a fact that in any highly selective competitive process, there will always be qualified individuals on the outside looking in. In order to create a great community, there will always be some who have higher qualifications in certain areas (call it A) who are left out compared to others who have higher qualifications in other areas, but lower qualifications in “A”. There is great room for debate on how much weight should be given to each component of a holistic process. I maintain the Ivies do a pretty good job as far as athletics are concerned.
The whole genesis of the thread has to do with a poorly written and poorly researched opinion piece written by someone who, at least in this piece, does not exhibit the level of critical thinking one would expect of a Yale student. In stark contrast, @tonymom posted a link to a piece written by a current Yale baseball player http://thepolitic.org/in-defense-of-student-athletes/ that is a well-written and well-thought out rebuttal. If the only data points were these 2 pieces, I know which kid I would say is more deserving of admissions.
Well then – why don’t the schools disallow these “journalists” from publishing these commitments if they are not real? I do think things can change and somewhere a statistic indicated 15% don’t end up at the school of early commitment (implying that 85% do - which is most!).
I don’t doubt that ivy leagues have smart kids in sports. That is what they are looking for. And some sports (ie, fencing, crew) may attract, on average, “smarter” kids than other sports. I do know that from our LPS, the kids getting these early “commitments” are not known to be among the smartest kids in their grades. Pretty smart yes, top students, no.
There are no promises, nothing set in stone.