@moscott it’s your choice whether you choose to see it or not. If the kid is a good enough player, they’ll take them any way they can. And it happens.
If it were true that there are just an amazing amount of great athletes at your hs with poor grades then every D3 school and Ivy league is automatically eliminated as vying for any spot vs a 4.0 might be seeking.
@twoinanddone Not to mention 14 of the last 19 Presidents played sports in college.
@moscott obviously not every athlete has poor grades. But a lot of them slack in that area. Regardless, we’re moving away from the point of the original post which is that athletes are treated differently/better than normal students.
To counter “only athletes recieve perks”-
There’s an undergraduate program at UC Santa Barbara that gives research-focused students the ability to skip prerequisite classes, additional opportunity to research, access to graduate student courses and graduate student perks. And, the zinger- These students are graded non conventionally and can drop a class up until the very last day.
What say you? I feel like those are incredible perks and are an example of special treatment for academic students. As a research fanatic, I’m seriously considering applying there. How is that program any different than the special treatment that you suggest athletes get? Why would I want any less perks for my athletic classmates? After all, we’re all at school to excel in what we’re passionate about.
@stacynicolex3
@devtighe - I would love to hear more from you beyond your original post.
@newkidnewtrix that is absolutely brilliant of UC Santa Barbara to do, but perks like these are few and far between. As I stated before, I don’t think athletes are less than academically inclined students. I’m saying everyone should have the same perks/opportunities that athletes do. Not take away from them. Just give the same to everyone else.
@stacynicolex3 Very reasonable- I agree that there should be more programs like it. Kudos for defending your opinion well on this thread!
Ugh…total misconception. But let’s play your game. Over 37,000 high schools in the USA. Each with a Valedictorian(many time athletes) and a great majority with the top 5% getting a 3.9- 4.0. So we are talking 50 million high school students in total. So super conservatively say 500,000(1%) get a 3.9 4.0 top academic students. Who knows how many of them are athletes as well. Now there are what are considered 300 of the top athletes in say football that will get full ride offers contingent on them making their grades. Now which of these 2 sets are much more unique in their talents?
@moscott I agree. This website does not have the best grasp on what makes an applicant “unique”.
@moscott said it once I’ll say it again. I don’t think either talent is better/less than the other. I don’t think we should take away from our athletes. I just believe we should give everyone else the same treatment as we give them. I want a free tutor if I’m struggling. I want free massages. I want my prescriptions filled by my school for free. (Yes, my good friend, a football player, gets all of this and much more actually) I just want what they get. I don’t want more, I don’t want them to have less. Just equal.
@newkidnewtrix same to you!
The kid who was Val at our high school missed graduation (and gave his speech by video) because he was running in the state track meet. He turned down Harvard and Stanford to play soccer at Santa Clara. I have no idea if he took a scholarship or not because his family was extremely wealthy so he was lucky not to have to base his college decision on finances.
The high school I went to pumps out top academic kids and top athletes, and often they are the same kids. Many head to Stanford, Harvard, service academies, big public schools. They are getting in on academic merit, but athletics usually adds to their options and gets them into schools that are a reach for everyone - Duke, BC, UCLA, Cal.
I’m helping the mother of one athlete who is getting to go to college just because of his athletics, and he’s the type of student OP talks about. No athletics, no college. He is not a top student at this^ school, but this ‘super school’ is the one closest to his home. It produces dozens of NMF, kids with 4.8 gpa, kids who have taken 20 AP classes (the school offers more than 30), have been on Model UN teams that won the whole thing, on Destination Imagination teams, debate, choirs that have traveled to Europe, who have taken 3 languages, taken college level calculus AT the high school (no need to go to the community college for DE, almost every teacher at this school has a phd, and it offers courses that are better than the community college). He’s a high school student, learning at a high school level, getting B’s, yet competing against these high academic kids for college money, kids who have 50+ college credits before they even leave high school. Is that fair? I’d guess that a student with a 3.7 would not be in the top 1/3 of the class.
He was ‘player of the year’ for the entire state in his sport. He is an athletic superstar. He is also multi-racial, from a family that suffered a job loss and in lower income, and first generation for college. His brother has learning disabilities and needs extra services. Isn’t this the type of student we want to go to college? He can’t get into Harvard or Stanford, wouldn’t get a merit scholarship to the state public schools or Alabama. For him, it’s athletics or nothing. He does not have a full scholarship even though he was HIGHLY recruited. His grades aren’t good enough to go to Duke or ND or BC even though his talent is that good. He needed to drop down athletically to get the right academic level. He’s not taking anyone’s spot at the school. He’ll be paying the school more than $20k per year, and that’s $20k the school wouldn’t get if it didn’t offer him the rest in a scholarship.
The OP is correct that very few college athletic programs are profitable. Most D1 programs bleed money. It’s an older text, but Andrew Zimalist lays it the finances in his book Unpaid Professionals. However, it’s not the cost of athletic scholarships that puts programs in the red. It’s the cost of facilities and coaches and trainers, etc.
Football, for example, is a head count sport, so all the D1 athletes on scholarship are on full scholarship. Seriously, that’s 80ish scholarships. At a school large enough to support D1 teams, do you really think the athletic scholarships for football are even a drop in the bucket compared to what goes out in merit money, talent awards, diversity grants, etc? And as pointed out, most sports are not head count sports, so majority of those athletes are on partial scholarship.
Eliminating athletic money would not result in a massive increase in the funds available for academic merit.
Schools are allowed to give dollars for what they value. So what if they value being able to slam dunk a basketball in addition to having great grades or musical ability?
I realize it’s anecdotal, but my experience doesn’t match the premise of the OP’s post. I’ve got two kids—one was an athlete, the other focused on academics. My son was a Rivals four-star ranked football player (equivalent to the top 250-300 players out of approximately 250,000 graduating seniors who played football to provide context). He was a good athlete but an average student. My daughter was an excellent student, high test scores and good grades, probably in the top 3% at her high school. My non-athlete was offered much more substantial scholarships than the athlete was. Moreover, the number of kids getting academic scholarships at her school was much, much higher than that of students earning athletic scholarships, by probably ten-fold.
Moreover, when they went to school, my kids were treated pretty much the same, even though one was on the football team and the other was on an academic scholarship. The stories of luxurious athlete villages tend toward the hyperbolic and are typically limited to a few programs in a handful of schools. At most schools and in most sports, athletes live pretty much like everybody else. Except they have much more demanding extracurricular responsibilities.
My take on it is that athletic scholarships get lots of press. But graduation rates suggest that the academic pay-off may be more questionable. Academic scholarships, on the other hand, tend to translate into degrees. And that’s really what counts, in my opinion.
@stacynicolex3 I WISH my son got all those perks you want too. He’s a D1 recruited athlete in an equivalency sport. These athletes don’t get the same treatment as say a football or basketball athlete but they sure do put in as many hours of training and travel without the fancy extras. He (like many others) do their sport because they LOVE it and can’t imagine life without it.
But to address your point, equal access to all the athletic perks for ALL students…now I think that’s silly and unrealistic. What a school does with the money for their athletic program is up to them. To be forced into equalizing the perks it uses to recruit top talent is absurd. That’s not how real life works. Executives in companies have certain perks only afforded to them because of the level of work they do. It’s accepted that a secretary or mailroom worker will not have access to those same perks. The utopia you’re looking for doesn’t exist and never will on this earth.
OP seems unaware that universities see evidence of pretty good ROI from successful sports programs. Increased applications and enrollment (especially among highly coveted out of state, full pay students) and institutional giving, to name a few. Those things create opportunities for increasing merit and need based aid. You don’t have to love sports but at many schools they are seen as a path to a sustainable financial model. You should at least be aware of this before diving into this topic–those athletes are often doing more for the university than the university is doing for them. (I’m not sure why the free ice baths weren’t mentioned as they’re pretty common among athletes).