At the end of the day, this thread won’t impact top tier admissions. I am glad we were able to engage in discourse about the topic, but it won’t change the fact that some student athletes will be admitted because they meet a threshold and prove an asset to a coach…not because they have the intellectual vitality, inner drive, etc. that makes a school a better place. 
"but it won’t change the fact that some student athletes will be admitted because they meet a threshold and prove an asset to a coach…not because they have the intellectual vitality, inner drive, etc. that makes a school a better place. "
@drymango, you sound very young.
From your posting history, congratulations on your EA acceptance to Notre Dame.
As far as you are aware, does ND have any preferential admissions treatment for student athletes?
The fact that the atlhetes were chosen for “commitments” in the summer between 8th-9th grade sets up the process for lower hurdles…there is no way they can predict that those athletes will have the grades, test scores etc of the typical Ivy admit. Statistically, it is much more “likely” that they can clear a lower hurdle. Btw this is more common, I think, in the northeast to middle atlantic, where Lax is most competitive. And the schools also cater to those kids with Ivy commits, esp private schools, because students going to Ivy League looks good for them too.
@DeepBlue86 , it’s not just the kids/parents publishing the commits. It’s the journalists - check the links posted earlier in the thread with long lists of Lax recruits.
I suspect some who are highly critical of student athletes are folks who were not admitted to some institutions and feel some affront. Student athletes are a convenient target as are URM and sometimes legacies.
Apparently no amount of evidence will convince here so I respectfully bow out knowing those Ivy athletes I am familiar with are exactly where they belong and deserve to be.
@DryMango
At the same time, students will be admitted because they play the violin, started a non-profit, were first in their families to go to college, blah blah blah. They may or may not have more inner drive or intellectual vitality than the rest of the student body. They had a hook. It’s simply a value judgement that athletics don’t make a school a better place but acting, singing and playing the violin does. And from personal experience, student athletes at top academic institutions have inner drive or they would not be there. Another reason they are highly recruited and often very successful in the real world.
What @dansmoaustin said, and I’ll add:
On threads like this I often see posts reflecting an attitude that these schools aren’t living up to their ideals and that the posters are calling them out or holding them to account. Such people fail to recognize that all of these schools: (i) have many constituencies and social objectives to satisfy, which makes the admissions process and the allocation of spots much more of an art than a science; and (ii) have developed processes and standards over many years to produce a mix of students that they judge to be in the schools’ best interest - a decision that’s entirely the schools’ call, since they’re private institutions and can accept whomever they want.
Fundamentally, the kinds of posts I’m describing reflect a conscious or unconscious attitude of entitlement: the posters presume to know what the formula for admission is or should be, and feel that if they comply with it, they’ve earned the right to be admitted, and to feel cheated if they aren’t. And this tends to manifest itself in the stigmatizing of groups the poster feels to be less worthy but whose members supposedly are allowed to jump to the head of the line.
The reality is: no one - no one - is owed an admit by an elite college. And, if someone isn’t admitted, their spot wasn’t taken by this athlete, or that URM, or the legacy over there, or a first-gen, or anyone else in particular. What they had to offer - their whole package - in the context of the applicant pool and the school’s many institutional needs, wasn’t considered valuable enough to the school for them to be offered one of the school’s limited spots. Maybe they didn’t meet the minimum standards, maybe their unique attributes were considered nice to have but not essential, maybe the school thought there was a better version of the applicant that they admitted instead, maybe the applicant messed up in some way that they’ll never know, or maybe the school made a mistake - who knows. It could have been for any reason or no reason, and the school doesn’t owe any applicant an explanation.
Agree with all you say @DeepBlue86 and enjoyed the New Yorker article.
I only questioned the 8th/9th grade “commits” to Ivy - ie before academic records for HS are established. Even the Ivy coaches are uncomfortable with it, as even though they are doing it, they are asking NCAA to look at this issue.
Oh, I agree, @sunnyschool - and I, like the Ivy coaches, am not comfortable with the increasing professionalization of college athletics. As the Ivies “raise their game”, so to speak, in certain sports by improving the quality of their athletic teams, they’ll increasingly compete for talent with schools that are less academically selective, and will feel pressure to make compromises. They’d much prefer the arms race to be dialed back everywhere.
@DryMango - as an African American alum, we can just agree to disagree on what groups get “special treatment” in admissions. I have always been told that I “took a more deserving student’s spot” because I was supposedly admitted under “affirmative action”. Not sure what that means, but if that makes some student that was not admitted feel better, then so be it. Also not sure who this mythical, “more deserving” student is. As I prepare for my 35th reunion, I guess some things still have not changed and at this point I couldn’t care less. Especially in today’s climate, I am out of the business of trying to change people’s minds when they are stuck on a certain view.
@Tperry1982 “I am out of the business of trying to change people’s minds when they are stuck on a certain view.”
Right back atcha, bud 
@superdomestique I suspect based on the number of recruited athletes at ND and the common data set of the school, there is a huge discrepancy between the academic performance of admitted student athletes and the majority of the student body.
As ND may be a more sports-centric school than Yale (or the other Ivies), I hope it is a good fit for you given your prejudice against recruited athletes
Please keep us posted if you get into any other schools.
@superdomestique I don’t know if you can see like history on this college confidential, but I have been liking everyone’s comments and I have said multiple times that I am not against recruited athletes.
There are thousands of candidates that are “deserving” of a place at elite institutions like Yale that don’t get a spot for the reasons that @DeepBlue86 has pointed out. Reasonable people can certainly have differences of opinion on how much weight should be given to all factors (or how many approximate spaces should be allocated to certain types of students to make up the ideal community), including the original topic of this thread, athletics. The objection that I have to the YDN piece and to some of the posts here is the position that somehow athletes as a group (or at least a majority/great many) are undeserving. The only objective non-anecdotal piece of data available to us to support the premise that athletes are held to lower standards in certain areas is that the average AI of recruited athletes must be within 1 standard deviation of the school average. Remember though that this is a floor, so at most the AI difference is 1 standard deviation, so the deviation is most likely less. I don’t doubt the average athletic recruit has a lower AI than the average student. I would be interested to see the differential in the median AI’s, which actually tells you how many classmates are above/below you versus using a mathematical average. I suspect the spread is smaller because I would think having 2 “225” athletes making up for the “180” athlete is easier than finding and recruiting a “240” athlete – same average, but very different median. Even when using the objective AI standard, as I pointed out in an earlier post, we are giving 67% weighting to standardized test scores. So because you are a very good test taker, naturally and/or by training makes you more deserving of a spot?
Here is an interesting article I came across. Being a relative newbie on this board, I am going to guess that this article has been posted and discussed before. I found it interesting when I first read it, and it certainly is topical to the larger issue of what type of student body is being assembled in the Ivies and other highly selective universities. I think it goes way overboard, but there are some painful grains of truth. https://newrepublic.com/article/118747/ivy-league-schools-are-overrated-send-your-kids-elsewhere.
Actually, they kind of do disclose it. As noted in the NY Times*:
“This summer, that floor was raised from an Academic Index of 171 to 176, which roughly translates to a B student (3.0 on a 4.0 scale) with a score of 1140 on the old two-part SAT.”
Well then…they raised the baseline. Good for them. And a 3.0 average and a 1140 SAT is perfectly respectable. In fact, a regular student with these stats would have a non-negligible chance (perhaps 8%) of gaining admission…to UConn. I’m sure many professors at Yale will agree with your assessment that such levels of academic achievement will enable these athletes to succeed in their studies at one of this nation’s premier institutions of scholarship.
*http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/25/sports/before-athletic-recruiting-in-the-ivy-league-some-math.html
^ yes, but let’s not neglect other salient points of the article:
“It is also important to note that a 176 A.I. score is the lowest allowed, and that the number of recruits in any year admitted at that level is not plentiful.It’s not nearly as many as people seem to think,” Harris said. “So no one should fixate on that number.”
“At the other end of the spectrum, virtually every coach interviewed had a story about a recruit with a 210 A.I. (a 4.0 student with roughly 1,300 on the two-part SAT) who was rejected for admission for various reasons — a poor interview, a sloppy essay, because the recruit had not taken chemistry since 10th grade or because the recruit’s transcript lacked enough Advanced Placement classes.”
“But in perspective, you have to realize we are dealing with a select group since Ivy League athletes are in the top 10 percent of all college applicants nationwide,” Goldberger said. “The average kid going to college across this country would have an A.I. of about 150.”
“Over all, there are hundreds of teams with A.I. averages well into the 200s. In a response to a commissioned report on Brown athletics issued this year, the university’s president, Ruth J. Simmons, said that for the four most recent admissions classes throughout the league, Brown had seven sports with average A.I.’s under 200; Dartmouth and Penn had 5; Columbia 3; Yale 1; and Harvard and Princeton none. Simmons did not mention Cornell in her written response.”
Am I the only one who finds that last line funny? Seems like a serious Cornell burn.
^Yup, and the worst part is its teams don’t come close to dominating the Ivies.
^^^^ don’t tell their LTWT men’s crew that…
@foosondaughter one thing I’m sure “many professors at Yale would agree” with is that it’s a good idea to read newspaper articles to the end before quoting them. If, in fact, as the article says, the Ivy League fields 280 teams in 35 sports, and “hundreds” of these teams have AI averages well over 200, and 210 is roughly equivalent to a 4.0 GPA and a 1300 on the two-part SAT, do you really have any doubt that the overwhelming majority of Ivy League athletes are obviously capable of “succeeding in their studies”?
As an aside, I don’t know that a 176 AI is the floor for all students, as opposed to just athletes - for all we know, some non-athletes might be admitted with lower numbers. Also, as the article points out, it’s not disclosed publicly exactly how AI is calculated (which further supports my statement, “kind of” contradicted by you, that the floor isn’t disclosed publicly). But who cares, really, and what’s your point? All you’re doing is exactly what I pointed out earlier in post #106: setting yourself up as the arbiter of what Yale and its peers should be looking for. In the absence of any evidence to the contrary, I don’t believe you have any standing to do that.