@ohiodad51 “I know a kid playing at Northwestern who scored below 20 on the ACT.”
I am not surprised that a student like that was admitted for football. However, I am surprised that this student can pass his classes. Northwestern students work hard and a 20 on the ACT is a long way from the average Northwestern student.
@Ohiodad51, isn’t that the case with Ivy football recruiting as well, where a coach can guarantee a recruit a spot so long as he meets certain test score and GPA standards? Granted, the standards for various slots may be different, but I can tell you that recruits have been rejected for not meeting NU admission’s standards.
@Much2learn, test scores aren’t everything. As a few other people have noted, some other metrics are a better predictor of whether a student-athlete will graduate than test scores. Will someone with a 20 ACT be in the top decile academically? Likely not. But that doesn’t mean they will have trouble graduating.
@purpletitan I am not saying that test scores are everything, but a 20 ACT score is a student who is really not college ready, in my opinion. It would seem to be almost insurmountable disadvantage at Northwestern. Especially with a sport too. Maybe he takes PE classes?
@Much2learn, a 20 ACT is 50th percentile.
With the majority of graduating seniors pursuing higher education of some sort, I don’t think you can safely say that that score by itself indicates someone isn’t college-ready.
Wisconsin is another school that requires more than the NCAA minimums for athletes. The reason the football coach left last year is because junior college players weren’t granted admissions with a minimum gpa. Also one highly recruited player, who had the NCAA minimums, was denied admissions.
It is up to the schools how they want to handle admissions. I do think it is ridiculous that basketball players are going for one year and dropping out because they don’t want to go to college at allbut several schools are okay with that.
I really don’t think the gpa of most college athletes is all that different than the class as a whole. There are some athletes who reire extra help, who are redshirted until they can make the grade, but the majority of athletes are good students and continue to be good students in college.
I’m always wary of judging a school’s admissions policies by anecdotal data, i.e., “There’s a kid from my child’s school who…” In many, many cases the information being passed around is faulty.
If you were to look at my own kids’ admissions from this perspective you would assume my D, whose stats were on the low side for her school, got in because she was a recruited athlete. What she didn’t tell people was that although she was being recruited for her sport she chose not to go the coach’s support route because she wasn’t sure she wanted to play in college. IOW, sports had nothing to do with her acceptance.
S had traits that I’m certain boosted his admissions chances but of which most people at his school were unaware. For instance, his senior year advisor warned us that he needed to get in 40 hours of community service before graduation, not realizing that he had over a thousand hours and had received awards for his work with a local group with which he had been working for 8 years. He also had a specialized EC which would have put him at one in two million for his age group. He now has a professional license in his field. His academics were solid but unspectacular, so his acceptance to a very competitive school might have puzzled some people and I can see people trying to explain it with whatever limited information they had about him.
IOW, how do we know that kid with the sub-20 ACT did’t take it again, or didn’t submit his 2000 SAT, or doesn’t have a exemplary academic record but an anxiety disorder that makes him underperform on standardized testing?
“@northwesty, isn’t the whole point of holistic admissions that schools give more or less weight to different attributes of each applicant and not just admit based on some formulaic interpretation of the numbers? I get how that is different than the situation of a recruit at Florida, or even in the Ivy League (because of the band system and likely letter process), but I don’t get how that is different than what I understand of athletic recruiting at places like Swarthmore.”
Ohio – it is really not the same as holistic admissions. Sure the elite schools don’t just hand out admission slots to the highest SAT scores. But the schools don’t cut violinists slack on their academics. Violinists have to have the academic goods first. Then being a state champion violinist is what gets them picked from the bucket of other full on academic kids.
Unlike the violinist, the athletes do get a break on the academics stats at the Ivies and elite LACs. The studies like Espenshade’s show that being a recruited athlete is worth hundreds of extra SAT points. The athlete boost is way more than the legacy boost. Better than being a Hispanic. But not quite as strong as being an AA.
This is hard to prove precisely at the LACs since it all happens behind the curtain of the admissions office. But the studies prove how it works.
And the Ivy banding system is totally up front about how they do it. What does it tell you if the Ivies create such a detailed system for athletics but don’t have such a system for violinists, poets and student journalists.
I also think your distinction about whether the coach or the admissions office make the decisions is one that makes no diffference. The coaches in all cases have very significant influence on who gets admitted. They know the standards and their budget and they are pretty good at figuring out who they can get in. Again, I don’t think the Music Department gets to submit a list of recruited cello players for the orchestra to the admissions office. That’s only for coaches.
The kid at Northwestern is actually pretty smart. It was simply that he committed as a junior and was told to “just stay eligible” so he didn’t really take his testing seriously. In other words, he acted like a teenager. I am pretty confident he was embarrassed by his score. I know he loves being at Northwestern btw.
In my experience, very few kids who are not relatively strong academically consider Northwestern Duke or Vandy for that matter because the biggest factor distinguishing those schools is the academics, if you are just looking to play in the Big Ten, ACC or SEC and have offers from Northwestern, Duke or Vandy it is likely that there are other schools at a similar athletic level but more normal academics which would attract a non academic kid. None of those three have unusually nice facilities, or are consistently at the top of the conference, etc. ND and Stanford are a bit different in that respect because they are both at a higher profile athletically.
@purpletitan, yes in the broadest sense each school from Alabama to MIT has admission standards for athletes that may to a greater or lesser extent vary from the standards for a kid who is not an athlete. So in that sense, they are the same. The distinction I am trying to highlight is between schools who cede control over certain admissions slots to the AD, and schools that do not. Personally speaking, it makes for a very different recruiting experience. Again, in this respect Stanford is the outlier. I can’t speak to what Wisconsin does, as I don’t personally know anyone playing there and off the top of my head don’t know anyone well who was heavily recruited by them.
Also, it is hard to talk about the Ivys in this context, because you are generally talking about a lower level athletic kid, with a whole different recruiting environment. Yes, there are kids in the Ivy with offers from Northwestern or Duke. But for the most part, those offers would be at the top of the Ivy kid’s offer list which is for the most part going to be made up of service academies and other Ivys, The kid who ends up at Northwestern probably has an offer from Nebraska, or Maryland let’s say. The schools are just swimming in different pools, and competing for different kids. It is hard to explain, but the recruiting experience my kid had was very different than his teammates who went “regular” D1, even at those schools where there was cross over interest. I remember my son being psyched when the Duke coach came to see him junior year while a teammate didn’t even want to meet with the coach because he didn’t want to be at a basketball school.
@Ohiodad51 That’s not how recruitment for Football, Basketball or Baseball works at Northwestern, Duke or Vandy. These schools are going for the same athletics as the other Power five conference teams. The difference is they are usually not competitive for 5 (and most 4) star athletics, and mainly recruit 3 star (who are still very good) athletics. They also have slightly higher academic standards for athletics which removes some students (those with the worse grades) from the pool of potential recruits.
Otherwise it’s the same group of 3 start athletics that the other SEC/ACC/BIG10… schools are recruiting. Many of these students would have wanted to go to (as an example) Tennessee, but they don’t get offered a scholarship, so they take the one offered at Vandy. How strong academically the student is, doesn’t play much of a roll in getting recruited at these 3 schools (other than meeting the minimum requirements).
Now, sometimes the 5 and 4 star athletics are a bust, and sometimes the 3 Star athletics over-perform (and make it into the NBA/NFL/MLB), and those are the years when Northwestern, Duke and Vandy end up competitive.
EDIT: Of course, Basketball at Duke, Baseball at Vandy, are all exceptions!! In this case, these schools are VERY competitive. 
@Ohiodad51, true, the recruiting environment is different, but the Ivies also cede control of certain slots to coaches—the football coach just has to bring in a recruiting class that meets a certain distribution of stats. That’s probably the system at Northwestern as well (obviously the distribution of stats required would look pretty different).
I can only go off of what I hear, but according to someone who has closer ties to the NU athletic department than me, both Northwestern and Stanford have academic requirements for athletes in the revenue sports that are above the NCAA minimum while Vandy and Duke(!) do not.
@purpletitan “With the majority of graduating seniors pursuing higher education of some sort, I don’t think you can safely say that that score by itself indicates someone isn’t college-ready.”
Well, it is possible that the student could be college-ready in one subject or maybe two, but not in reading, math, English, and science. College-ready is defined as having a 75% chance of getting a C or better, and a 50% chance of achieving a B.
Additionally, that is not factoring in that this is not talking about Northwestern University, where the students chances would be significantly lower. His courses would have to be “very carefully selected.”
@northwesty, it depends on the uni, but at some unis with music schools, it’s the music school who decides which music major applicants get admitted. Admissions may require the music school to have a certain stats distribution/profile, but the music school gets the final call on at least on some slots.
@Sue22, the point I am attempting to make is that the kid didn’t have to retake the ACTs or take the SATs because he was assured of admittance as long as his score met NCAA standards.
@northwesty and @purpletitan, I think we just disagree on the distinction between direct athletic admits and athletes who get a bump from admissions. Maybe it is splitting hairs, but I can just repeat that based on my direct experience, it gives a different flavor to recruiting.
@Gator88NE, I am not sure I understand where you are disagreeing with me. In my experience, a middle of the road ACC, Big Ten or SEC level recruit will be attracted to Vandy, Duke or Northwestern if they value the general academic rep of the school, while if they are more football focused they will likely gravitate to Nebraska, Maryland, Kentucky, NC State, etc. Other than the academics, there is little to distinguish those three from their middle of the pack conference peers, and in many ways (facilities, attendance, rivalries) they lag behind many of their conference mates.
Speaking of the band system in the Ivy, I think it is important to note that we are only talking about football. I don’t know that any of us can say that admissions at Penn let’s say view their top three or four swimmers in an applicant pool any differently than their top three or four string musicians, or thespians. Maybe they do, I just don’t know. One thing that does appear to be different is that if you happen to be one of the top swimmers you will likely know that before decisions are released, while you may not know if you are one of the top string musicians. And certainly that is a nice benefit. But I don’t know how much academic bump the top swimmer gets vis the top violinist.
Turning to football, and trying to be mindful of my own biases, I think the existence of the band system tells us a couple things. One, that the league wants to ensure people aren’t cheating by dumbelling recruits (bringing in a few low academic stars and a bunch of strong students who have no realistic chance to compete at that level). Two, that there is a recognition that the ability to compete in that sport at the Ivy level while still being at the very least a decent student is more rare than the good student who can write for the newspaper, or contribute to concert band. Maybe they shouldn’t do that. But I think it is important to recognize that at the very most we are talking about ten kids a year who are going to be true academic outliers, meaning scores below a single standard deviation of the academic index of the four preceding classes. Those kids are also going to be pretty unique athletes. To me then, the question is are there a handful of kids in each class who have academic stats between one and two standard deviations below the mean who are successfully published poets or trumpet players with the chops to be a session musician coming in? Again, I don’t know. But my suspicion is that there are.
@Much2learn, as other people have pointed out, someone could be very bright and will do well in classes but just isn’t good at standardized tests or didn’t put in the effort.
Again, a 20 ACT is 50th percentile. Do you believe that that majority of high school grads aren’t college-ready?
A bit more background, one of my good friends was an assistant fb coach at Yale, and I often visited him. I got to also know the HC pretty well, and from what I gather, recruitment/admission was always their biggest challenge. In more than a couple of instances, I know they had recruits, who would be prime anywhere else, ACT 27-29, or the mid 80 percentiles, but they would have to place the recruit in a 5th year prep school, to raise the score to 30. That tells me that on an admission basis, things were taken still very seriously…
My experience is with NESCAC and Ivy schools, so I’m only speaking here about that particular “apple.”
I’ll grant that college athletics often give prospective students a hook into those great colleges. Many college athletes have academic stats that are the same as their non-athletic peers; others don’t. How much does that matter in the long run?
First, there’s no research out there that suggests that a standardized test score that is 100 points lower than that of the average admit (the average difference at these colleges) leads to less success as a student after the first year of college.
And as far as NESCAC and Ivies go, even opponents of college athletics concede that these student-athletes students fare as well or better in the workplace than the average graduate from the same college/university (some hypothesize because of the discipline and self-confidence instilled by the specific challenges of being a student athlete).
If that’s the case, what’s wrong with accepting a great athlete whose academic stats are good but not quite as good as the violinist’s? In other words, if the end result is an alum who does your college proud, why not consider athletic excellence as a factor up there with sterling SAT scores and GPAs? Maybe these colleges know what they’re doing.
No one is forcing non athletes to go to colleges that alter their admission standards for athletes, or minorities, or internationals, or legacies. If you don’t like the admissions practices, don’t play that game. Go to Caltech. Go to Berea.
After 100 posts, it’s clear many feel that the schools like athletes more than other applicants. Even a kid who is dumb as a rock has figured out a way to get into Harvard and NU and Stanford using a ball or a stick or an oar while high stats kids have to battle it out through the regular competitive lottery. Who is smarter, the kid who got into the elite school by being an athlete or the one who didn’t get in despite the perfect SAT score?
“dumb as a rock”-- well, that’s rather imprecise language. Most of the kids who play sports at H or S, you will find have higher test scores and grades than the average admitted students of their flagship universities–hardly dumb as a rock.
@PurpleTitan “Again, a 20 ACT is 50th percentile. Do you believe that that majority of high school grads aren’t college-ready?”
About 25% of high school students are college-ready based on the definition provided. The next 25% will need remedial, high-school level work in college. That is not to be ready to compete at Northwestern, but in basic college level courses at an average college.
“someone could be very bright and will do well in classes but just isn’t good at standardized tests or didn’t put in the effort.”
If the student is capable of a much higher score, but did not try then that is possible. Skill at test taking can account for a bit of score difference too, but not any where near the difference between an 20 ACT and a typical Northwestern student. The differences in basic reading and math skills are too large. In contrast, I would guess that a typical Northwestern student was probably capable of a 20 ACT score at some point during middle school.
In addition to the significant knowledge deficit, is the lack of experience in handling a large workload. Northwestern students are prepared and experienced to handle a huge amount of homework per week. I don’t think that many students with a 20 ACT score are experienced at managing that. Most of them would be overwhelmed immediately.
To be clear, the fact that a student with a 20 ACT score is not college-ready, is not the students fault in many cases. It is a direct indictment of the failure of K-12 public education for the majority of students. It does not mean that the student is not capable, but that they are not ready. They don’t have a level of reading, math, English and science skill that gives them a good chance of being successful and graduating at a typical college. For the student to be successful, the college is going to have to teach them those skills.
I don’t want to derail the discussion of who is college ready and who is not, but the kid with the sub 20 ACT referred to above graduated from a competitive, college preparatory high school. Both parents are professionals with advanced degrees. This is not an inner city kid from a poor home or educational environment. Could he have done better on the ACT if he tried at all? I am certain of it. Personally, I would have been less surprised if he had popped a 30 than the 19 or whatever it was he got. Realistically, he was smart enough to know he could probably meet NCAA eligibility standards by not really trying at all. Being 17, that is what he did. He and his buddies all thought it was funny. Now, after a few years have passed, I would bet the kid is embarrassed by his score if he thinks of it at all. As I said above, hearing second hand from other parents, he is loving his time in Evanston, and as far as I know is doing at least acceptably academically. My son is not in regular contact with him because he is a couple years older, and I know he redshirted one year but I believe he is on track to graduate this year or next.
And furthering @boolahi’s point, no one playing in the Ivy or the NESCAC is “dumb as a rock”. In fact, if you got a look at the average D1 weekly playsheet or scouting packet from even a hundred years ago when I played, you would realize that all of the kids playing at a high collegiate level at the very least have an exceptional ability to digest and process large amounts of data very quickly.