Athletes continue to get preferential treatment when recruiters visit Yale. Clearly, the successful student athlete is highly valued by colleges and employers.
^ The New Yorker article that @canoe2015 linked is a real interesting read in terms of different ways to define and predict success. As a former “Wall Street” lawyer and banker, my experience has been that sheer academic credentials did not always predict success in the workplace. While there was always a minimally high standard of intellect required, a person’s EQ, perseverance and work habits (time management a biggie) were all critical. I still remember the Harvard honor graduate on the Yale Law Review who couldn’t hit a single deadline on her summer intern assignments. When I interviewed and evaluated employment candidates, applicants that had significant commitments outside of pure academics (could have been music, athletics, service) got a plus mark in my evaluation because it was an indicator of other qualities necessary to be a successful lawyer/banker (or probably any vocation).
@sherpa I stand corrected. I honestly only read National AP Scholar because I was skimming the thread.
I still stand by what I said about credibility. One anecdote about your son’s lack of knowledge proves very little about recruited athletes and their subsequent preference in admissions.
That New Yorker article gets it pretty close to exactly right, imo - it’s almost eerie how much I agree with it. I think @BKSquared is also correct. An investment banking analyst, putting in hundred-hour weeks in a role that requires a certain amount of brainpower but is at least as much about stamina, teamwork, ability to follow instructions and talking the talk - who do you want for that job? Someone who, say, rowed crew at an Ivy is generally going to have more of the building blocks than an argumentative, book-smart prima donna (no sexist implication here - I’m talking about males and females in both cases).
What that article also brings out is something else I’ve been trying to say and where I disagree with statements like those from @DryMango. To quote that former dean of Harvard admissions, "“Above a reasonably good level of mental ability…the only thing that matters in terms of future impact on, or contribution to, society is the degree of personal inner force an individual has.”
On the other hand, @DryMango asserts (similarly to various posters on this thread and others):
This is the issue: neither athletes, nor URMs, nor first-gens, nor kids from North Dakota, nor legacies, nor [insert your favorite group to snark at] are “admitted with lower standards”. They all clear the academic bar that the admissions office has set, or they wouldn’t have been admitted. Was the kid with a 3.9 GPA and a 35 ACT “admitted with lower standards” than the kid who was admitted with a 4.0 and a 36, or all the kids with 4.0s and 36s who were denied? What about the kid who got in with a 3.85/34? There is no magic scale that says that some kids are academically deserving and some aren’t - they all are.
For the minority of the class that’s admitted because they’re bona fide geniuses in the context of the applicant pool, academic achievements matter more, because it’s what earns them a ticket for one of the slots in that portion of the class. Once applicants clear the minimum academic bar, though, the decision to admit them or not comes down to all their other attributes, including whether the admissions office judges they have that “personal inner force” alluded to above. If they have what the university wants - if they fill some slot that they university wants to fill - they get in, if not, they don’t.
To represent otherwise not only reflects a misunderstanding of how the process works (it implicitly assumes that there is or should be some magic formula based on academic standing, rather than just an academic baseline to be cleared by all admitted students), but contributes to a culture of stigmatizing groups rather than evaluating people as individuals.
That’s undoubtedly true. Whether or not it’s “fair” (whatever that is) is less clear. It might just reflect the preferences of the hiring group. Attractive people are also highly valued by employers and are better paid, even if their job does not involve sales or other public facing duties. Taller people make more than shorter people.
DW and I often marvel at some of DW’s associates, who disproportionately hire people of their background: Russians, Indians, etc., to the point where one might expect that discrimination is involved. There comes a point where your “feeling comfortable with, or being impressed by” a common characteristic crosses a line.
I hired computer programmers for decades. I found that musicians were often the best, but beyond a theory about why that might be, I couldn’t with a clear conscience allow it to guide my hiring.
I think student athletes have demonstrated an ability to manage their time, but so have financially disadvantaged kids whose families depended on them to work outside the home and contribute, or watch their siblings so that a parent could go to work. So have chess champions. So have any number of other kids, involved in any number of other activities.
I’m not, at all, trying to diminish the achievements of athletes. I just think that we might over-value them and under-value other activities that demonstrate grit, time management skills, energy, enthusiasm. commitment, etc.
ETA: My two younger kids played competitive sports, for many hours every week, and I am convinced that it had an effect on them. That said, it was only one influence.
As a parent of two academically strong recruited athletes who’ve been through the process, my views are based on facts, not stereotypes, speculation, or hearsay.
These facts include:
- By agreement, the Ivy conference sets minimum academic standards for recruited athletes. No such restrictions exist for non-athletes.
- These restrictions vary based on the "Academic Index" at each college and, as such, Harvard, Yale, and Princeton's athletic recruits are held to a higher standard than recruits at the other Ivy League colleges.
- Yale is the least ambitious recruiter in the Ivy League.
- Football, basketball, and hockey have the loosest academic standards. For all other sports the minimums for HYP are generally 700+ on all SAT sections and Subject Tests (or comparable ACT) and a 3.8+ UW GPA with a rigorous course load.
@DryMango - while what you say is a HUGE generalization, you do understand that Yale (and Ivy League) athletes do not get athletic scholarships so yes, they are as smart as, or smarter than the student body as a whole. As a Yale alum and current parent, I can tell you for a fact that there is no slack for the athletes. I can also tell you that those of us who go to Ivies know we will never have a Final 4 or Rose Bowl team. We can live with that.
This is a logical tautology. Hence meaningless. It is equivalent to saying “Everyone is qualified to attend Yale if they were admitted to Yale, because Yale only admits qualified applicants.”
@DeepBlue86 Most of your post makes sense. But I can’t reconcile one thing. Why would Yale coaches go around giving/accepting “verbal commitments” to athletes that haven’t yet received any grades or test scores in High school? It is pretty difficult to choose kids that will have 3.9 and 35 ACT’s with only 8th grade data.
It makes no sense, if the focus is on academics being a key part of holistic admissions, to give “verbal offers” and accept commitments from athletes in 8th/9th grade.
Because the verbal commitments as an 8th grader mean nothing. It’s a “hey you’re a talented kid and I will check back with you late junior year to see if your academics meet our standards AND you are still phenom athlete”…it’s really not that difficult to understand.
I’m telling you, the kids say they are going to that college, where they have committed, and from prior observation, I’ve seen them indeed attend the college to which they had a verbal commitment. And, as I linked earlier in this thread, these “commits” are being published.
Wouldn’t you agree that publishing “commitments” is over the top, given how loose these “commitments” are, according to you?
The “commitments” are being published by these scouting websites and are often self reported. My son was on one for his sport and anyone could claim anything…
Here’s a thought…maybe some of those kids were also promising students in 8th grade and had already demonstrated they were on track…AND, when the coaches returned to their “possible recruit list” and contacted these students after the July 1st mandated date they were “actionable” recruits.
Again pretty straight forward.
As I’ve said, I work at a middle school and while many kids can, academically speaking, fall off track in HS and some improve most highly achieving students can be identified in middle school.
I think the concept of “early commitments” is all about maximizing the enrollment at the summer camps that allow college coaches to supplement their college salaries.
Non-binding, pre-academic milestone, “commitment to the process” rhetoric is nothing but strong marketing for expensive camps. What parent with financial resources is not going to give their child a chance to be “recruited”?
While sometimes these early commitments work out, I am sure many times they do not.
Parents and their students often believe what they want to believe, however with regards to athletic recruiting, it is important to be cautious.
Especially at the Ivies. without a positive academic pre-read and a LL:, nothing is a lock before July 1st.
It isn’t tautological, @foosondaughter. I’ll rephrase: there’s a baseline level of academic qualifications that Yale and its peers require in order to admit an applicant, because it does no one any good for a student to struggle and flunk out. I can’t tell you what it is at any given school, because they never disclose it, but it’s based on the student’s grades, courseload, standardized test scores and recommendations, all viewed in the context of the high school they attend. Think of it as a screen, a necessary but not sufficient condition for admission.
Every admitted student (and probably most of the applicants - certainly many more than can be admitted) has to have cleared this bar, because if the admissions office doesn’t think you can graduate, you’re not getting in. As noted, many applicants who are denied also clear it - sometimes by a greater margin than some of those who were admitted. So, as you said: everyone is qualified to attend Yale if they were admitted to Yale, because Yale only admits qualified applicants. The margin by which admitted students clear the bar varies, but they all cleared it, and because they did, the rest of their attributes were assessed and judged sufficiently desirable in the context of the overall applicant pool and Yale’s institutional needs for them to be offered admission. I recommend you read the New Yorker article if this is still not making sense to you.
@sunnyschool: as @tonymom is saying, those commitments aren’t real commitments, and students publishing them don’t make them any more real, because if a student gets to senior year and the admissions office isn’t convinced they can hack it at Yale - or their earlier athletic promise has faded- they’re not going to Yale. Based on their experience, and their interactions with these kids, their families and schools, the coaches may have very good hunches that it’s going to work out, but it’s not done until the kids get their admit letters.
@DeepBlue86 I’m not referring to the recruited athletes who get in with 34’s or 35’s.
Personally, and while this proves nothing (I stand by what I say…anecdotes prove nothing about the larger picture), every Ivy athlete I know is admitted with extraordinarily lower standards. I.e. 2050, 28 on the ACT. This is, according to my research, much more common than the star athlete with a 35 and national awards.
@Tperry1982 the fact that Ivies don’t give merit scholarships means LITERALLY NOTHING in regards to academic based admissions.
No one is claiming that athletes are recruited financially. The appeal of a top tier school is the factor that draws athletes in, and those athletes are subsequently admitted with lower academic standards. I’m not against student athletes, I just think that those of you who think that they undergo the same admissions process are wearing rose colored glasses.
Anyways, the financial aid policies of top schools make it so that most student athletes who need the money get the money they need.
@DryMango: as it happens, I’ve known a great many Ivy League athletes over the years, because my work has involved recruiting them. I’ve hired plenty with very high academic stats, and they were overrepresented among the top performers. Many have achieved great success in their careers, and are doing a lot for their alma maters today.
I’m fully aware that most Ivy League athletes don’t have stats at that level, and have never said otherwise. My point is that the statements you and others are making here aren’t all that different from comments on other threads about how all or most URMs, say, who are admitted to Ivies have lower stats than whites or Asians. We could debate whether those statements are accurate (they’re often demonstrably false), but they eliminate people’s individuality and therefore are at the very least unfair. If you wouldn’t talk about other groups that way, why is it OK to do so about athletes?
@IxnayBob I agree that preferential treatment should not be given to athletes over other important attributes. I am all for programs like Questbridge that market to and assist students that wouldn’t ordinarily consider these high academic schools. What I think bothers most scholar athletes is that it is assumed they are two-dimensional beings -athletics and academics. My son’s teammates include Intel winners, opera singers, Natl AP Scholars, and oddly enough-lots of musicians. Unfortunately, when they get to college, the time commitment of the sport necessitates dropping some of these extracurriculars.
@DryMango - perhaps you are latching on to anecdotal evidence. When people hear of one kid getting in with a 28/29, many assume all the athletes got in with those same standards. In fact, most of the kids scored in the 32+ range, have always placed academics> sports, and were heavily involved in other activities in high school. Additionally, many of these student athletes stop taking the test early in junior year when they reach that “threshold” score and are sitting on multiple college offers. Last year, I heard many people talking about a football player that was admitted to ND with an unusually low score. However, that score was his first score, and he managed to get that score up 7 points.
A sample size of n=a small number is statistically meaningless, as is any blanket statement made based upon those results. FWIW (and my sample size is also statistically meaningless 
), I attend an Ivy League college, and while I do not know or care what a student-athletes SAT/ACT scores were, I will say that I know many recruited athletes, and all have been quite capable of handling the academic workload here. No Ivy League school is going to admit an athletic recruit, whatever his/her athletic stats happen to be, if s/he cannot perform in the classroom.
There really is no need to discuss sample sizes and anecdotal evidence with me when I acknowledged in my own comment, without hesitation, that that is the case. “I stand by what I say…anecdotes prove nothing about the larger picture” and “this proves nothing.” I’m not looking for an argument. I agree with most of you and I’m tired of this back and forth. Whether or not a student can perform academically does not indicate that he or she deserves a coveted spot.