The kind of attitudes on the part of non-varsity athletes that JustOneDad mentions are unfortunate . . . both for those students, who miss out on getting to know some really interesting people who happen to play college sports, and for the student athletes. Admittedly there is some self-segregation on the part of some athletes also, which is natural as they are spending a lot of time with their teammates, but is also unfortunate if taken too far.
Those parents mentioned are also misguided on purely utilitarian grounds, assuming their objective is for their kids to meet classmates who are likely to be successful in career terms. Aside from the work of Bowen and colleagues on career outcomes for college athletes, which I mentioned in an earlier post, it should be readily apparent to anyone looking at building names on the Stanford campus that there are some really successful ex-college athletes out there . . . like John Arrillaga (basketball), Phil Knight (track), and the late David Packard (football, basketball).