^^^ How else would elite schools meet their URM quota if it weren’t for sports? In fact, it is increasingly even used to boost white enrollment over Asians. White males who are not legacy or development have virtually no chance of getting into these schools unless they excel in sports, because all the academic admits go to the Asians.
This alone makes me take extra introspection at what you say. You ever look at the roster of any Ivy ice hockey roster (or about 25-30 players), nary a person of color. Further, as an AA with a daughter as a recruited athlete at an Ivy, but also who graduated number 2 out of about her 400 member graduating class, and about a 2200 SAT score, I take great offense, at not so much your comments, but implicitly provocative platitudes…
@cmsjmt, I agree with you about teenagers working at least in the summer. In our area, athletics, extracurricular and volunteer work is deemed much more important than work. Scholarships are given out for it and graduation level is determined by it. In my neighborhood, there are kids that have graduated from college but have never held a job but have traveled the world. They are now having a hard time finding a job because a lack of work experience ie. internships and are considering graduate or law school.
It sounds like your HS isn’t average since the vast majority of Stanford admits are not recruited athletes. I also wouldn’t assume that the admit is a recruited athlete if the only evidence is less than top stats on Naviance. Stanford has a history of focusing on more than stats, and as such making admission decisions that don’t follow the persons in the HS class that have the pinnacle of highest stats. For example, among the Stanford applicants from my HS class, I fell towards the bottom of the Naviance stats among the group. Yet I was the only one admitted, and was not a HS athlete or hook.
A graph of the age 16-19 workforce participation rate is at https://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/LNU01300012 . It looks like a rate of ~33% in the school year and a rate of ~41% in the summer. This is down quite a bit from the 80s and 90s. Nevertheless, a good portion of teens still work. This fits with my personal experiences as well. I live less than hour from the Mexican border yet waiters/waitresses, cashiers/coffee-shop, fast food workers, grocery workers, and similar min skilled jobs in my town are still often done by teens. I see a far lower rate of someone who looks like they may be an illegal immigrant in any of these positions. Gardeners, housekeepers, handymen, nannies, or similar position you’d hire from Craigslist and pay in cash is a different story.
Also note that working is considered a positive from a holistic admission standpoint, but more so for a job with impressive accomplishments or unique experiences than a generic fast food worker type position. Most of the holistic selective colleges we discuss on here, rank work experience to be at the same importance level as volunteer work in their CDS, both of which are less than academic criteria.
I think the number of minority players in the Ivy league is pretty low, probably lower than the percentage of minorities asa whole. Hockey, lacrosse, swimming teams have a lack of color. My daughter at her division 2 school, is the only minority on her team, whIle the scool has a high min or its presence. When she was in 5th grade at a state all star tournament, she was the only minority out of 60 kids. There are not suddenly a lot of minorities playing a sport who didn’t start young. Other daughter plays hockey and over the years there have been a few minority players on her teams. A few.
Crew is different than other sports. For men it is not an NCAA sport, but there are scholarships at some schools. It doesn’t really matter which division the school is in because teams from all divisions compete at the same events. For hockey, there are only two divisions and they usually play in a conference that is different than their other sports. Big 10 teams played in WCHA for many years.
Volunteer jobs are not taking jobs away from the general work population. My husband runs a non-profit and has many student volunteers. The “jobs” they are doing were never designed to be paying positions.
And the experience these kids get from feeding the hungry at a soup kitchen or helping amputees row on the water is invaluable.
And yes more kids should get paying, part-time jobs. Both experiences are important.
@Data10 We don’t have Naviance so I’m going by what the counselor told me. In our school the only kids who go to elite schools are either direct athletic recruits or kids with high athletic involvement - state/regional/national champions or strong enough to be walk-ons, plus an IB diploma if they are aiming for the Ivies. I suspect this is quite typical of schools in major metropolitan areas in the west coast or northeast where competition is keen.
In high density coastal cities it is more and more common to see fast food places and convenience stores staffed with immigrant workers, many barely speak any English, as they are attracted by the higher pay. In our area you hardly see any teenager working anymore after school. I sometimes think we are the only family that make our kids mow the lawn and help clean the house. All other families outsource theirs, mostly to immigrants who barely speak any English.
It’s not “quite typical” among the HS’s forum members attend, which is obviously a biased sample. As an example, a thread in which posters list where the valedictorian of their HS was accepted is at http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/college-admissions/62953-to-which-schools-did-your-school-valedictorian-get-accepted-p1.html . Note that they typically get an acceptance to a highly selective college. If you mean lower income, less desirable public urban HSs, part of the issue may be self selection. For example, the study at http://www.brookings.edu/~/media/projects/bpea/spring-2013/2013a_hoxby.pdf found the vast majority of high achieving lower income students do not apply to any selective colleges, instead favoring local ones. However, the minority that did apply to selective colleges were often accepted.
If the “strong enough to be walk-on” comment was directed at me, I did not do any athletics in HS or join any teams, so athletics had no positive impact on my admissions. I attended a basic, public HS in the northeast where a large portion of students failed basic state examinations. My high school had a good number of acceptances to Cornell, but few to other ivies… much fewer than typical among HSs described on CC. I’m only aware of a single ivy acceptance who may have been a recruited athlete. She was also salutatorian and had various other stellar academic achievements, so it’s not clear whether she would have been accepted without athletics.
In your earlier post, you wrote “illegal immigrants”. In this post, you wrote “immigrant workers.” That’s an important difference. I’m guessing you don’t know whether they are illegal or not, only that they did not look white and did not speak English well. The report at http://www.brookings.edu/~/media/research/files/papers/2012/3/15%20immigrant%20workers%20singer/0315_immigrant_workers_singer.pdf found 17% of food service employees were immigrants, and ~10% of general store sales employees. The only listed category with the majority being immigrants was “reinforcing iron and rebar workers.”
As I said earlier, national reports show a significant portion of teens are working, even if your neighbors kids aren’t mowing their lawns. No teens appear to mow lawns in my neighborhood either, and instead parents hire gardeners who are often Mexican. However, I still see teens employed in stores. The most common job I’ve seen is probably waiter/waitress/hostess/. Mall-type retail stores (particularly clothing) are also common.
My son was also a recruited swimmer like GTAustin’s D. He had practice 9 times a week during high schoo, kept all A’s and B’s in mostly honors classes and worked 25-30 hours a week in the summer (on top of swimming 9 times/ week) since he was 14. He, too, decided to not be a college athlete because of the things he would not be able to do. He has already been able to secure a pretty competitive leadership position in a University organization that I am sure his swimming successes helped in the interview process. Everyone needs to make their own choices on what they feel is best. Personally, I think the range of activities he will be able to participate in will trump swimming.
To the people who have made the comments about elite colleges, athletics and race, I think most the the people who get an academic break to attend elite colleges are white, not minorities. These colleges tend to have generous financial aid and affirmative action programs, so there is no need for minorities to “earn” their way to admission by playing sports. Meanwhile, there are plenty of affluent but slightly underqualified white kids who are willing to pay full tuition for the honor of playing football at an elite school.
Lacrosse, and women’s lacrosse especially, is a sport that is only offered at elite high schools or boarding schools. So it’s a great way for slightly below average white kids to get a hook that will gain them admission into an elite college. So let’s not pretend that elite college sports somehow gives an unfair boost to minorities, because that’s just not the case.
Now, these colleges may practice shameless reverse discrimination that far exceeds any benefit whites receive through the sports programs. And I’m a critic of all of the preferences given to minorities. I just think we need to be honest and accurate.
While that used to be the case, it’s no longer true in parts of the country. For instance in my state over half the public high schools field women’s lacrosse teams.
Lacrosse is the fastest growing sport in college, and in many areas oF the country. However, that doesn’t mean it is diverse. Still a pretty white sport. It’s expensive to be in it as a youth because you have to play club to really get better. It’s expensive to travel. The suburban and prep school teams still dominate. My daughter’s college team has a new to the sport player, who came from the soccer team. Great at running, makes great moves, can’t throw or catch. It takes years to develop stick skills, and when the suburban kids started at kindergarten, you’re behind if you don’t start until high school
Even at huge colleges the number of minority recruits doesn’t change the overall number of minorities at that school that much. Even if every one of the football players at Ohio state is an URM, it doesn’t put a dent in the population of the school. Coaches don’t care about race, they want the best athletes. The admissions office doesn’t tell the coaches " oh, we need four more black students and three more from Texas to round out our class for 2016." At the Ivys, if the student doesn’t meet the AI, the coach can’t get him in. The admissions office can admit the URM if it wants to, but the coach has no pull at that point.
The sports in which Ivies and other elite Northeastern colleges field varsity teams and for which they recruit athletes tend to skew pretty white. Here’s a list of Harvard’s men’s varsity sports: baseball, basketball, heavyweight crew, lightweight crew, cross country, fencing, football, golf, ice hockey, lacrosse, sailing, skiing, soccer, squash, swimming & diving, tennis, track & field, volleyball, water polo, wrestling.
Of these, only basketball, football, and possibly track & field are popular enough with URMs that URM communities would provide fertile recruiting ground, (Baseball is very popular in parts of Latin America but the top prospects in baseball-crazy countries like Venezuela, the Dominican Republic, and Cuba are singularly focused on advancing their professional baseball careers and would have as little interest in attending Harvard as Harvard would have in recruiting them). If anything, athletic recruiting in the Ivies and similar schools represents affirmative action for predominantly white New England prep school types—traditionally the core constituency for those colleges. Relationships between the Ivies and their traditional private feeder schools became strained in the late 1960s and 1970s when the colleges decided to become both more meritocratic and more diverse, squeezing out the less academically stellar prep school grads. This also rankled many Ivy alums and Trustees, who were largely products of both the prep schools and the Ivy colleges. Ivy athletics, IMO, operate in part to maintain those old feeder networks by providing a backdoor admissions preference for athletically gifted but academically merely competent (not stellar) prep school grads.
Evidence? Here’s the current roster for Harvard’s men’s lacrosse team, listing the HS for each player. As you will quickly see, it’s overwhelmingly dominated by prep school grads.
My son is not a prep school grad. He attended a predominantly Afro-American school (he is white) as a k-8th grader. As a HS student he took up crew (a new sport for him) and he excelled at it. Would I love for his sport to be more diverse? Yes!!! Are there folks working on that front? Absolutely! But did he get into his school because he is involved in a sport that is predominately white? No. He is academically competitive and could match any regular applicant.
@bclintonk, interesting point. I would agree it requires a certain amount of financial wherewithal to play many of these sports well. Whether Harvard et al maintains their squash team so that the kids at Exeter have a less competitive path to admission or whether it is simply that the Ivy never had to drop all of those sports when Title IX was promulgated, the effect is certainly that some small percentage of well heeled UMC kids will likely have a better shot at admission than the general population.
Which brings me to lax. I have been hearing for a decade that lax is the fastest growing sport, etc., etc. You would think with the concussion and other injury concerns in football, that lax would be an excellent “replacement” sport. But yet, much like soccer through much of my life, lax remains an emerging sport, one that is played primarily in socio economic if not geographic enclaves. I do wonder if this is because those sports operate under a club first system where the cost of admission is significant. I would bet that it is this system that keeps their appeal compartmentalized.
Those are good points, Ohiodad51. Many sports operate, sans high school supervision and two-thirds of the off-season, via the ever more dominant club system. All my Ds, played sports that required club almost year-round club participation. The cost was high in both dollars and the attendant time requirements. It’s an interesting situation, as the sports were involved in Vball, soccer and swimming, it most definitely assisted individual skills and team cohesiveness. However, on the other hand, some of this is fueled by parental aspiration and just plain hype. I say this, as I have seen many kids, later play the big college sports ( basketball and football) never having to been to a camp or the year club scene. As an old college coach told me, " you can’t coach up, size, agility and speed".
Hey, I have my JO volleyball merit badge, and I agree with you that probably half of that whole system is driven by parents jockeying their kids to ever more expensive and elite (strange how those two always go together) teams. Just crazy stuff. Happily, my daughter got off that train early in high school to focus on other things. I saw the same thing when I was coaching travel baseball, 12 year olds with $300 bats and pitching coaches, trips to Florida over x mas for tournaments and the Carolinas over spring break. Yet the guys playing in the majors grew up hitting rocks with sticks in Central America
@Ohiodad51, yup, I laugh my butt off, on the over top nature of everything. My best friend lives in a very upscale beach city in So Cal, both his Ds are my godchildren, and I often go to see their athletic events. Well, the 14-15 year old club soccer team, has all the appearance of, but moreover, all the affectations of a Junior Olympic Soccer Squad. However, they played a squad located right outside Bakersfield, mostly Latina squad, who had a mix match of jerseys, and a coach that did not look or dress like Pat Riley (if you get my drift) , but a rather squatty Mexican fellow, wearing an In-out Burger tshirt, as his sideline attire…long story short, they stop the game 5 mins into the second half…8-1, gals from Bakersfield.
“And I know a kid at Swarthmore who wouldn’t be there without baseball.”
And I know a kid at Dartmouth who wouldn’t be there without squash. And two kids at Pomona who wouldn’t be there without football and tennis. But I also know a track runner at Yale who had to get in without the coach.
The studies show that for the elite colleges, being a recruited athlete is way more advantageous than being a legacy. About as good as being a URM.
That single fact tells you that even the elite schools attach a very surprising amount of importance to sports. With sub-10% admit rates, the allocation of their precious seats indicates what’s important to them.
I’m obviously not saying the Pomona footballer and the Florida footballer are inter-changeable. One couldn’t get admitted at the other school. And the other couldn’t make the team at the other school. Duh.
But Pomona and Florida are both exactly the same in that they both value sports enough that they bend their admissions standards to populate their sports rosters. They don’t do that for the acapella group or the student newspaper or lots of other kinds of student activities…
Both schools have kids who wouldn’t be there without football.
The racial discussion above is completely bogus by the way. Just pull up a college’s athletics website and take a look at the team photos. Track and football are diverse sure. Baseball, swimming, rowing, squash, lacrosse, golf, tennis, softball, ice hockey etc. not so much.