A little bit confused about why my post was censored. If someone could PM me and explain that would be greatly appreciated 
Since we’re discussing athletic recruiting at Yale, I’ll share the experience one of my kids had there, in a minor sport where Yale’s team is relatively weak. We met with the coach; coach knew kid would be an impact performer; and kid had an AI at least ten points above the Yale average. The coach didn’t offer support, much less a “commitment”. Every other coach we met was enthusiastic in their support; the Yale coach acted as if he had no power to recruit prosp cts for his mediocre team.
Kid has since graduated from a different elite school as a successful student/athlete.
It is undisputed that Yale does not give as much institutional support to sports as other Ivy League schools, and far less than there is at the athletic powerhouse schools.
Yale’s decision to de-emphasize sports adds to, not lessens, my respect for the school.
The someone was me, as it indicates in your post. I will PM you.
Just to put numbers around this situation that some are determined to believe is a problem, if an average Ivy has 1,500 students in a class (I’m using round numbers to make it easy), of which 200 are recruited athletes, whose average AI (extrapolating from the NY Times article) is 210, for every athlete with an AI at the 176 “floor”, I calculate that there would need to be 3.4 athletes with AIs of 220. In other words, in that scenario, which assumes athletes have AIs of either 176 or 220, there would be ~45 athletes at the floor, or ~3% of the class, and ~155 athletes with substantially better than a 4.0 average and 1300 on the two-section version of the SAT.
Let’s try another scenario, in which all the athletes have an AI of either 215 or the 176 floor. In that case, only one out of 7.8 athletes could be at the floor, a total of ~26, or ~1.7% of the 1,500-person class, while ~174 would have better than a 4.0 GPA and 1300 SATs.
[By the way, this is not inconsistent with the numbers Yale discloses for the class as a whole (see the profile of this year’s freshmen here: https://admissions.yale.edu/sites/default/files/files/class_profile_2020_8-29.pdf). For enrolled students who submitted SAT scores (this was on the three-section version of the test), 2% of the class scored below 600 in CR, M or W. In each category, 80% or more were above 700. For enrolled students whose high schools report rank, 95% were in the top 10%.]
Alternatively, let’s assume that virtually every athlete has an AI of exactly 210, which, as noted, is prima facie evidence that they can do well academically at an Ivy. In that case, for every athlete at the floor, you would need just under one athlete with a perfect 240 AI. Such a person, of course, would be academically strong enough to be at or near the top of the entire 1,500-person class.
This gets to the heart of the issue, and what prevents it from ever getting out of hand. In Yale’s most recent Common Data Set (here: https://oir.yale.edu/sites/default/files/cds2015_2016_0.pdf), the 25th and 75th percentiles for the class of 2019 on the three SAT sections were 720-710-710 and 800-800-790 (the ACT composite equivalents were 31 and 35). In other words, for every enrolled student with SATs below 2140, there needs to be at least one at 2400 to keep the 25th/75th percentiles - which are widely marketed and important measures of relative selectivity - from slipping, because Yale doesn’t want to look like it’s becoming less selective relative to its competitors.
I would guess that at Yale and its peers the vast majority of the recruited athletes have AIs distributed between 200 and 220, with tails tapering to very small numbers at the upper and lower ends. I don’t think that’s a problem at all - but, as noted, it makes very little difference what I think. It’s for the schools - private institutions with no obligation to justify themselves to anyone outside their communities - to decide how they run themselves, including who they admit and why.
http://www.si.com/campus-rush/2017/best-schools-for-sports-lovers
Getting on this list without compromising standards! Go Bulldogs!
@tonymom that is an interesting list. I actually went back to re-read how they came to the schools and why they were ranked that way. Mostly because I got a kick out of how Yale was higher than UCONN. Or that UCONN was even on the list at all when I read the criteria for a second time. Yay for Connecticut!
Standing? Sorry…I didn’t realize I was the plaintiff in a legal case. But FWIW, CC does hold me as a Junior Member in good standing. And I did stay in at a Holiday Inn Express last night.
I should correct a couple of minor mistakes in my post #124 above, which I noticed when I re-read it but which don’t affect the post’s conclusions.
My second scenario had a typo: rather than “one out of 7.8 athletes” could be at the floor, I should have said either “one for 7.8 athletes” or “one out of 8.8 athletes”; the numbers are otherwise correct.
In my discussion of the Common Data Set, although the 25th/75th percentile levels cited are correct, it’s not strictly accurate that “for every enrolled student with SATs below 2140, there needs to be at least one at 2400”. This is because those scores are averages across the entire class, and don’t necessarily reflect the performance of a single person. It would have been more accurate for me to preface the relevant sentence with “On average”.
Or not…rechecked calcs and my first “correction” shouldn’t have been made - the original “one out of 7.8 athletes” was correct. Moral of the story: don’t post after your glass of wine with dinner, and stay at the Holiday Inn Express whenever possible…
@DeepBlue86, my understanding is that GPAs and SAT scores are used to generate an AI which is then used in a couple of ways. Averages are taken across all recruited athletes, and then compared to the rest of the student body…presumably the difference can’t be too great as noted upthread. But importantly the Ivy League also uses the AI averages of all recruited athletes at each school to compare each Ivy program to all the other programs. This is how they achieve a certain amount of parity with each other. If one school really wants a winning hockey team, it can allow its hockey recruits to have a lower AI than its other teams. Likewise, if a school wants a good football team, it can lower its standards somewhat for football. But no Ivy school can lower its standards across all its teams.
What does this mean for at least half the athletes? It means that their AI has to be all the greater to bring up the overall athlete. I think you said as much above. But I want to add that many athletes have to bring to the school a high GPA and SAT score in order to bring up the average of their team AND of their entire athletic program. So if your kid is in a non-headline generating sport, the fact is that they are held to a much higher standard. My kid was told by an Ivy League coach that my kid’s unweighted 4.0 high school GPA with tons of AP/honors classes is a real plus. In a non-headline sport the academic standards are very high indeed.
I am not sure why we all cannot agree that HYP, with the highest athletic standards among the Ivies and among D1 schools, should not be commended for what it does in producing true student athletes. I don’t understand why a few people refuse to acknowledge the value of the hard work put in by all athletes, no matter the sport. I think the Ivy concept of sports is positive. I would not mind seeing the number of hours that teams are allowed to practice be reduced somewhat. The practice is fine, but adding things like “captain’s practices” to get in extra unsupervised work should be scrutinized closely. The Ivy League could clamp down on ways, like this, that some teams get around time limits that are meant to provide for ample study time. Room for improvement, sure. But no need to fault the student athletes that are just doing what they are told to do.
I agree with all that, @Sam-I-Am. I would just note, though, in fairness, that some of those “non-headline” sports skew toward kids from high-socioeconomic-status backgrounds (I’m not going to point fingers, but go to, for example, the Yale athletics page, look under “Sports” to see the teams, and you can make some educated guesses - it’s here: http://yalebulldogs.com/landing/index). Many of the recruited athletes for those teams went to elite private schools or high-quality publics; accordingly, they’re likely to have high AIs and therefore to be able to meet the increased standards for those teams, which pull up the overall recruited athlete averages to the benefit of the school.
People often point out the relatively unimpressive grades and test scores it takes to hit the AI floor of 176, but playing around with an AI calculator yields other surprising results as well.
For instance, if someone posted a “chance me” thread with a 2250 SAT, two Subject Tests of 800 and 780, and a 3.2 UW GPA, they’d surely be told their chances for Yale were negligible. But those stats yield an AI of 223, which is actually higher than Yale’s overall average.
Go figure.
Agreed, @sherpa, but that sounds like an unusual combination of attributes (really high scores with generally disqualifying grades for Yale). How about this one, which my gut tells me is a pretty good proxy for a lot of Ivy athletes: 690s on every section of the SAT and both SAT IIs, top 10% of the class. Per the CC calculator, that’s a 205 AI - right down the middle of the fairway.
@sherpa. Well sure, you cite one perfect subject test score and one near-perfect test score. Those marks are awesome and would increase the AI.
@DeepBlue86, are you taking pot shots at particular sports now? To what end? Really, I believe I am done with this thread. I’ve lost interest. Not sure anyone is making sense here anymore.
Not at all, @Sam-I-Am - I’m agreeing with you, just noting a combination of two things that I believe are non-controversial: (i) certain sports (and note that I specifically avoided naming any) have a disproportionate number of high-SES players (because of the expensive, specialized equipment, facilities and training required, which means that they tend to be offered principally at prep/boarding schools and public schools in high-SES areas); and (ii) high SES status is associated with better test performance (and therefore higher AI), as is attending an elite high school. It would therefore make sense that a clustering of high-AI kids (who, as I observe, also are likely to be high-SES) in certain sports makes room for a greater number of lower-AI kids in others. I think that’s essentially the point you were making.
@DeepBlue86, it seems to me that the author of the Yale article that offended so many athletes, is making one attack on all athletes as being undeserving of admission because of presumed lower standards for athletes. When I make the point that not all athletes have low AI (and in fact there must be many with high AI to counteract any low AI’s), you next suggest that these high AI kids are coming from high SES. Probably true, since most competitive applicants to HYP (not all) have above average SES right up to upper crust SES. But I am wondering where the athlete gets any credit from anyone on this thread? There are those that complain that athletes have low AI. And now there is you stating that all the high AI athletes got that way due to SES. It seems to me that the student athlete is now being held up to unfair criticism from both directions. Either the student athlete is below average AI, or if not, the student athlete must have come from high SES. How about acknowledging that the typical HYP student athlete has accomplished a lot just getting where they are for who and what they are and not pre-judging them? And this truly applies to other athletes in the Ivies and elsewhere.
@Sam-I-Am - I think most readers of this thread would conclude that I’ve defended Ivy athletes - all Ivy athletes - pretty strongly on it. Just because some of them are high-SES, and therefore likelier than average to be high-AI, doesn’t lessen my respect for any Ivy athlete’s achievement. For the record, of the many successful Ivy-educated athletes I’ve known or had a role in hiring over the years, the majority did not grow up high-SES. The qualities that made them successful as Ivy athletes, in class and on the field, drove their success later in life.
I’m sorry to see you go, @Sam-I-Am. I’m enjoying the thread. I believe there’s a lot of truth to @DeepBlue86’s observation but there are often surprising outliers. For example, in fencing, which one would expect to be the ultimate “blue blood” sport, I know several world cup medalists attending Ivy League schools who are receiving very significant need based aid.
I would guess that the vast majority of the varsity sports teams at the Ivies contain athletes from a broad range of socioeconomic backgrounds. I’m in no way suggesting that any sport is the exclusive preserve of high-SES athletes (although such athletes are undeniably overrepresented in certain sports), or that all high-SES athletes have high AIs (although high-SES students are statistically more likely to have higher test scores, and therefore higher AIs, than low-SES students - for many reasons, of which the most obvious is the improved access to test prep that comes with being high-SES), or that all high-AI athletes are high-SES (which isn’t close to being true).
The following is from a Jack Kent Cooke Foundation report: http://www.jkcf.org/assets/1/7/JKCF_True_Merit_Report.pdf
"The New York Times reports that at Amherst College, for example, 75 of the 450 incoming freshman spaces are reserved for recruited athletes identified by coaches, quoting the admissions dean as saying, “athletic recruiting is the biggest form of affirmative action in American higher education, even at schools such as ours.”
Again, sports is an important part of college experience. However, according to the report (even some of its statements could be too strong), it appears that there is some degree of conflict between athlete recruiting and diversity.