@dansmoaustin 25 hours a week sure seems like an incredible amount of precious college time to waste on sports. My perspective of hard working students are the ones that use those 25 hours on substantive learning endeavors. But yes, I agree that your child is doing college with a self-imposed disadvantage (time-wise), and thus is hard-working.
My son is attending Yale next year. This opportunity would not have been available to him without athletics. His path to to being a part of this institution was very difficult. A typical school day for him in High School is leaving at 5AM for morning workouts and getting back home at 8PM after school and practice. On a good night he is finished at midnight with his homework and many a morning I have woke up to get him ready for school to find him still studying. My son had a lot of opportunities but chose Yale because he could truly be a student-athlete. He may not have been blessed with ability to score a 1500 on the SAT but I feel he has earned the right to be a part of the class of 2021.
@capecodler2014, the varsity athlete that competes and does well at school is not “wasting” time on sports. That athlete is contributing to the school in and out of the classroom, learning and displaying leadership, and making themselves quite desirable in the job market in the process. Nor do all athletes require a break to get into Yale or other competitive schools. The type of student athlete attracted to top schools is disciplined and has time management skills that many non-athletes cannot begin to understand much less emulate.
Yes middle schoolers are recruited. My H is in the basketball arena and there is a lot of recruiting of middle school students going on. It is usually not for Ivy type schools, but schools that offer athletic scholarships (and whose basketball programs are the backbone of their institutions). They are also where academics can (wink, wink) be overlooked for the most part. There are players here in the County I live (my H is a basketball referee for middle school and high school), who have recruiters in the stands tracking them. We have constant arguments on how I think they are just treating these students as commodities and could care less how they do as students. He calls me a school snob. Sad part is that the parents are usually the ones helping to pimp out their kids. Go figure. I guess they have visions of NBA paychecks in their heads.
Also, each Ivy gets a certain number of spots they can recruit athletes in. I remember at a talk I went to at my last reunion that it was 185 across all the sports at each school (at least for that year). This keeps them from going out recruiting a lot of athletes. They find their choices and they are then clear that they need to meet minimum stats to get in. No matter how good the athlete, if they don’t meet that level, they do not get in. Too bad. I have interviewed student athletes who said they have talked to coaches but they are clear they still need to pass the hurdles of admission.
Maybe that’s why us Ivy League types know our basketball team is probably never going to the final four (getting past the first round last year nearly gave us heart attacks) and we know our football team will never in a million years beat a Alabama or Texas team. Since Ivy athletes go on to be Rhodes Scholars, doctors and lawyers and all graduate, then I can believe they stick to their academic standards even if it means they field less competitive teams. But, it depends on where your priorities are. These students and parents are putting their education first since it is very probable that they could be somewhere else on a full ride athletic scholarship.
@Sam-I-Am wrote: The type of student athlete attracted to top schools is disciplined and has time management skills that many non-athletes cannot begin to understand much less emulate.
The idea that the non-athletes at Yale can’t begin to understand leadership, time-management and discipline is laughable. They literally are at Yale because they demonstrated those very qualities in spades. Your athlete is a great student, no doubt, and athletics has given them many qualities preparing them for a top school. I just think that once you are prepared for that great education why tie one arm behind your back and miss out on taking advantage of what that school has to offer, because you have to go kick a ball around a field for 25 hours a week.
Some of you are assuming that non-athletic recruits don’t play sports. My kids all play competitive varsity and club sports but they are unlikely to be recruited. If I wanted my star baseball/soccer player to be recruited, he chose the wrong sport (Lax is more likely to get scholarships). However, he is in it for the pure enjoyment of the sport and I like the commitment, teamwork, and time management sports offer. Don’t assume other kids aren’t learning these same lessons just because they aren’t playing in college. Maybe they BTDT for their childhood and prefer to study and have other goals for college.
^ and some of the non-recruitable ones discovered that sports would be recreational late in their HS careers. DS played on travel teams, best skater on the team, good hands, very good ice sense, but realized during sophomore year that no matter how much he lifted, no matter how much he ate, he was never going to be able to take a game’s worth of checking from opponents that didn’t want him scoring against them. He did get a great Yale essay out of the realization :), so it could be said that hockey was his ticket to the Ivy League :)).
@Sam-I-Am Those are fair points. I don’t mean to denigrate the athletes. I’ve sunk thousands of dollars into competitve club athletics for two of my daughters. My third is a dancer and the hours she puts in exceeds the athletes (but college will be for college and not dance) It keeps them out of trouble and teaches them those soft skills like teamwork etc. That’s fine to prepare them to go out into the world in college. I just don’t get making the college experience (for academically strong students) one that is dominated by sports.
My daughter’s teammate received a preferred walk-on spot at her elite academic university, the team is ranked 4th nationally, and this girl is at the end of the bench, never plays, tells my daughter her life is nothing but class and practices, and is struggling to keep up academically. Two years in…I just think she is wasting a golden educational opportunity.
My daughter plays the same sport but on the club team (coincidentally, also ranked 4th nationally last week) , finds the level equivalent to her competitive club team and only attends practice and games when they fit her schedule.
@sunnyschool and @IxnayBob, your kids both have gotten the benefit of high school/club sports at a competitive level, and they surely don’t pre-judge the athletes they meet in college. High school sports come in all levels of competition and commitment. My kids maintained 3.98 unweighted GPAs through high school, playing varsity sports year round with a huge time commitment. One of their good friends, who also took straight AP/honors classes with my kids had a 4.0 GPA as a JV athlete until making varsity for a single semester. And that single varsity season went along with earning the first two Bs ever. Getting straight As as a varsity athlete is really not as easy as it looks from the outside.
“Maybe they BTDT for their childhood and prefer to study and have other goals for college”.
@sunnyschool
I’m not sure you meant it to come off this way but when you say “prefer to study and have other goals” it somehow implies that student athletes 1) don’t study 2) don’t have other goals…both of which are not true.
My son practices his sport 25 hours a week and ,when his season is up and running, will have weekends away but that doesn’t mean he isn’t studying (you will often see guys, as my son did in HS, books spread out under a tree at a regatta, stealing precious time to study. This is the type of multi-tasking and dedication that goes into a student athlete lifestyle. I would say many other students who engage in EC also find themselves juggling time (think musicians/theatre arts) but what I think many of us here object to is the not so subtle implication that they have been given a free ride, aren’t worthy, can’t keep pace or are “missing out”…all of these assumptions are incorrect.
I can certainly attest that while the first month at Yale was a learning process for my kid (how to juggle academics, varsity sport and social life) my son reports he is doing just fine. No doubt his 4 years of the same juggling routine as a HS student athlete have him an immense knowledge bank to draw upon. Is he making sacrifices because of his sport? Absolutely! But the trade off or benefit is worth it to him and I’d argue the skills developed are immense and will inform his adult life going forward.
And BTW Ivy sports do not garner athletic scholarships. The Ivy League is NEED BASED ONLY so student athletes are not getting a free ride $$$ as some have indicated.
MODERATOR’S NOTE:
I deleted the above quote, not because there was anything wrong with it (there was not), but because it responds to a post I deleted for ToS violation.
Having said that, the poster is correct. There is no reason to be uncivil to another poster’s point of view, and it is a ToS violation. You can rebut a post without being rude to the poster. Additionally, let’s dispense with the 3 person conversation please and take it to PM if you want to continue. Debating a point here is pointless (and not allowed) as nobody’s opinion is likely to change.
4 posts deleted.
This discussion is similar to many other CC threads on race and legacies, where posters debate whether anyone should be admitted to universities like Yale on the basis of anything other than purely objective academic criteria.
Yale and its peers are run like businesses. Instead of maximizing profit, though, their objective is to maximize their power and influence in the world. They do this by producing research that has an impact, and by educating future leaders in many areas of society. Yale and its peers want leaders everywhere with ties to them, since this improves their reputation and influence, enabling them to assemble greater human capital (through the recruitment of top students and faculty) and other resources (including through grants and donations) to pursue their missions.
A leader might be a great future theoretical physicist, concertmaster of a major orchestra, founder of an influential nonprofit, corporate CEO, renowned author, government minister of a foreign country, professional athlete or any number of other things. All of those kinds of alumni are useful to schools like Yale. Note that a minority of the roles just listed are achieved through academic qualifications, or sheer intelligence, alone.
The diligence, stamina, teamwork and leadership training provided by athletics, together with the baseline academic standards that Ivy League athletes are required to meet or exceed, can be a great preparation for success in many areas. This is in addition to the other social benefits that athletics provide to a school, as noted by @BKSquared above. There are related arguments to be made for various other groups of applicants who may have attributes that contribute to the missions of Yale and its peer schools in a broader sense. Of course, it’s critical to maintain an appropriate balance, and there will always be people and groups that are dissatisfied with the mix.
If Yale simply racked and stacked its applicants based on some predetermined mix of academic stats, started at the top of the list and admitted students until it had filled all the slots, it might well have a highly academically qualified student body, but it wouldn’t be Yale - it would be something like Caltech, a top-flight but much smaller institution with a considerably narrower social footprint. That’s not what Yale and most of its many constituents appear to want.
@DeepBlue86: suggesting that anyone thinks Yale and other Ivies should use only “purely objective academic criteria” to determine who is admitted to the school is setting up a straw man proposition that is ridiculous on its face, No one believes anything of the sort, and non-athletes admitted to the schools are an incredibly diverse and capable group of students with great variety of talents and skills in and out of the classroom. The objection regarding recruited athletes is that admissions for those students is not handled in a manner consistent with the holistic process used for other students. Instead, a set of spots is essentially reserved for those athletes, and the athletes have an otherwise weaker profile than non-athletic recruits.
@foosondaughter: I was careful not to suggest that anyone on this thread was advocating admitting students on the basis of purely academic criteria. To expand on what I actually said: I’ve often found - especially in threads discussing legacies and race in admissions - that a significant number of CC posters argue, implicitly or explicitly, that some applicants get an “unfair” advantage over “more qualified” candidates because they belong to protected classes. Some of the posts on this thread reflect a similar kind of thinking, it seems to me.
It’s obviously impossible for anyone else to know what the “advantaged” applicants wrote in their essays, or what their teachers and counselors wrote about them in their recommendations - which are, of course, important components in the holistic admissions process. Accordingly, the argument is usually based on an appeal to academic qualifications - those people got in even though their grades and scores were materially lower than the average applicant, who has to work so much harder, or be so much smarter, or have some other special, more inherently valuable talent.
It’s clear that “sets of spots are essentially reserved” for many members of that “incredibly diverse and capable group of students with great variety of talents and skills in and out of the classroom” (to use your phrases), not just athletes. It’s just less obvious for the other students, in part because the athletes have a formal recruiting process. In admissions, Yale and its peer schools are committed to (among other things): increasing the number of first-gen students; ensuring that the proportion of URMs remains above certain critical (if not necessarily strictly defined) thresholds; having the right number of bassoonists, oboists, etc., for the orchestra; assembling the right mix of genders and balance of academic interests based on departmental capacity; admitting neither too many nor too few legacies and development cases; somehow ensuring that each class has students from as close to 50 states as possible and the right number and variety of foreign countries; and on and on. In my estimation, maybe a quarter of the spots at HYPS are reserved for kids on the basis of sheer brainpower.
Yale and its peers handle things this way for a reason, of course, which is that they believe that it’s in their best interest to do so, and that the mix of students with their various attributes - not least the athletes - is the one that best aligns with their short- and long-term needs. Some may not like the mix, or the methods used to fill the various buckets (they may in fact believe that some of the people in them have a “weaker profile”, to use your phrase). I’ll just say that some of the most successful people I know, who inspired their fellow students while they were there and went on to reflect the greatest credit on their alma maters (and often are very helpful to them in various ways), were Ivy League-recruited athletes.
Here’s an article that’s consistent with several of the comments above on the holistic admissions process i.e. Yale and its peers do not appear to be looking for just those with the highest SAT scores and grades, and athletic recruiting is only one aspect of that holistic process.
It also has some interesting data that Ivy League varsity athlete alums actually have significantly higher incomes than other graduates of the same colleges. . . understanding that income is just one way to measure success, of course.
It’s pretty generally accepted that recruited athletes are admitted with lower standards. No one would argue this. Academically speaking, most athletes do not deserve their spot at the institutions they go to (of course, this is a huge generalization). I’m not necessarily against this; Thank God for holistic admissions!!!
Also, @sherpa your son sounds very impressive, but keep in mind that bragging about your son being an AP Scholar (not that big of a deal, sorry), and not knowing about a few ivies is more of an anecdote than any type of credible background.
@DryMango - I’m having a difficult time wrapping my head around what you’re trying to say. I understand that my son’s situation is a single anecdote, but on what planet is it not credible?
And if you’re going to discount its meaning, please tell me how many State AP Scholars you believe there are each year?
@sherpa obviously they do not otherwise they’d realize their error 
Apologies to @tonymom. I edited post #78 above which makes response #79 a little confusing.