<p>Hi. I’m a high school senior with a 3.75 GPA (upward trend) and 2260 SAT scores. I am a musician and play both in my school’s orchestra and regionally. I do not play an unusual instrument. (Sorry for being so vague.) My biggest complaint about high school is the glorification of athletes. My problem is that with the exception of Reed, all the colleges I’m considering recruit. I don’t want to go to a college that recruits and/or glorifies athletes. I have not visited Reed, so I cannot commit. What are my choices of schools on par with Reed if I only want to go to a school that does not recruit? I want a LAC, and I have not decided on a major.</p>
<p>No snarky comments, please. No comments about how I should be open minded and accepting of everyone, including athletes who are favored in college admissions.</p>
<p>Almost all colleges and universities recruit athletes to some degree. Without recruiting, a varsity team would be comprised solely of walk-ons–essentially guaranting that the team is pretty poor. This is not good for school spirit, alumni relations, or for the athletes themselves (it is no fun to be on a lousy team).</p>
<p>But there is a world of difference between the recruiting done at a NCAA Div. I school (with athletic scholarships) and a Div. III school (no athletic scholarships). In the latter, coaches have only a modest ability to influence admissions. You will find some very well known research universities among Div III schools (e.g., MIT, U Chicago, Johns Hopkins [except for lacrosse which is Div. I] etc.). Most but not all SLAC’s are Div III (the exceptions include the Patriot League schools such as Colgate, Lehigh, Lafayette, etc.). As a general matter, athletes at Div. III schools are truly “scholar athletes”–playing for the love of the game. You don’t go on to become a professional athlete from a Div. III school. Most importantly, Div. III schools derive no income from Div. III sports so athletics exists at those schools for all the right reasons.</p>
<p>Finally, Ivy League schools are Div. I but they do not have athletic scholarships. They do heavily recruit athletes, but the rules of the Ivy League put severe limits on each school’s ability to admit athletes who are not also pretty good students.</p>
<p>There are a few well known Div. III schools which are known to recruit heavily (Williams comes to mind) but most do not. It is pretty easy to ignore the athletic programs at most Div. III school if you are so inclined.</p>
<p>However, note that at smaller schools, the percentage of students who are also athletes may be quite high. In contrast, at a larger school, the sports may have a high profile, but the percentage of students who are athletes is low.</p>
<p>A big school in NCAA Division III or NAIA may have the lowest profile sports and athletes. Some non- or low-selectivity schools catering primarily to commuter and non-traditional students may have no sports at all (although some of them may be for-profit universities of dubious reputation).</p>
<p>Although it was a long time ago, I felt exactly the same way. Weekly pep rallies and tons of articles in the school newspaper about the athletes, yet no recognition for academic achievement other than senior awards night. Some things never change! I went to a Div III (NESCAC league) university and loved it. I went to one football game, and there was hardly anybody there watching, compared to my high school games. Nobody cared if you were an athlete at all.
Although my son did play a high school sport, he too looked for colleges where athletes are not considered special. There are lots of schools like that. You just need to look carefully. You can’t find what you are looking for by avoiding all schools that recruit athletes, that isn’t a good strategy. We found lots of them, though it might have helped that he was looking at STEM schools (where nerds rule!).</p>
<p>Division 3 schools are the way to go. Yes, they have sports, but they are SCHOLAR-athletes and not just athletes. Imagine the non-football sports in highschool…that is as much attention as they get. Division 3 schools cannot offer athletic scholarships to athletes.</p>
<p>Bonanza is spot on. Please look at the D-III schools. For example, in Calif., the Claremont Colleges (Harvey Mudd, Claremont McKenna, etc.), and Chapman University are D-III and I can guarantee you those kids are there first for the academics.</p>
<p>Even among the CTCL schools, very few are so geeky that they don’t even have DIII sports.
Reed is one. Hampshire and St. John’s are the only 2 others I’m finding. Even Guilford and Earlham (“Fighting Quakers”?) have DIII sports.</p>
<p>Eugene Lang College has been Princeton Review’s #1 school in both the “Dodgeball Targets” and “Intercollegiate Sports Unpopular Or Nonexistent” categories. That’s probably a good sign … and you do want to be able to yell “We’re number one!” about something, don’t you?</p>
<p>My son is looking to play DIII lacrosse. We have found that DIII coaches recruit like fiends. They attend multiple recruiting camps and many actually host the camps. I would be surprised if lacrosse is the only DIII sport that is heavily recruited.</p>
<p>I think the OP’s concerns may be misguided and based on the ridiculous situations that often happen in high school - where the jocks “rule the school” and everyone else bows down to them. Jocks have too much power, they can be mean to others, etc. </p>
<p>+1 on DIII recruiting. 3 of our former seniors are at one DIII school, 2 are at another, and 2 are at yet another. This is for lacrosse. We aren’t even a feeder school, our best player ever is a freshman at a non top 15 DI school.</p>
<p>I think you’re going about it backwards. Recruiting is not the issue: personality and character are what differentiates among LAC. If you think you’d like Reed in part because of the lack of emphasis on sports, then look at other LACs that are similar in character to Reed. Look at Swarthmore, Haverford, Wesleyan, Smith for example.</p>
<p>LACs commonly have 20+ varsity teams which add up to quite a few varsity athletes who depending on the size of the school can comprise a large percentage of the student body. This doesn’t mean that they are necessarily heavily sports-focused. It just means that they have the teams and recruit a reasonable number of players to keep them viable.</p>
<p>Although LACs don’t officially recruit musicians, artists and actors using the same kind of tip system as they do for athletes, they do consider artistic talent in admissions, some more so than others. If you’re looking for a college that has substantial funding for and interest in promoting music, you may be surprised as support music and other humanities is not mutually exclusive from support for athletics. In fact at a sports AND music focused college like Williams many athletes are also musicians.</p>
<p>This is not true for all Div. III schools. Some are heavily into intercollegiate sports and the coaches of favored teams have a great deal of sway with the admissions office. This is true of a number of the NESCAC schools, for example, which will bend their admissions standards to get the football, lacrosse, or hockey stars they want. Now, to be sure, their recruited athletes need to have credible academic credentials, but many star athletes are admitted whose stats are in the school’s bottom quartile and whose chances of admission would have been slim at best but for their athletic talent.</p>
<p>That said, there’s great variation from school to school in how much intercollegiate sports are emphasized. Schools like Williams, Amherst, and Middlebury have a pretty strong jock culture. Swarthmore does not; they compete in the Centennial Conference, but they no longer field a football team (football requires a lot of players, probably more than any other intercollegiate sport), and they’re perennially toward the bottom of the conference standings in many other sports, to the point that if you do a tour there, your tour guide is likely to make a self-deprecatory but good-humored reference to how bad their teams are. The culture surrounding intercollegiate sports is just very different at Swarthmore than at a place like Williams, where it’s a very big deal.</p>
<p>The OP might be gone, but I thought I’d speak up for Swarthmore athletics, baseball at least. The baseball team is respectable (22 and 16 last season) and Swarthmore baseball recruits nationally. An associate head coach will be in Jupiter, Florida recruiting at an academic oriented baseball showcase this weekend.</p>
<p>OP posted right after school yesterday, perhaps she had activities for the rest of the evening and is in school now. (But, yes, I hope she comes back to comment and elaborate)</p>
<p>If you like Reed for its general feel and not just its lack of sports, look at Hampshire as well. If you are just looking for a de-emphasized athletic program, look at D III schools, and evaluate them individually, because they have a different “feel.” Even among NESCAC schools, there is a variation in culture, some are more gung-ho than others. Back when I went to a NESCAC school, we did attend sporting events for fun sometimes, but I liked that it was balanced among sports, and most attendees were there to cheer on actual friends and classmates. (At a DI University, you will likely never cross paths with those “star” players) We were equally supportive of friends in dance, theater, music, etc. </p>
<p>You may also be interested in the Women’s Colleges, many of which do have excellent athletic programs, but do not have the Football/Basketball/Baseball pep rally culture that turns off many High School students like you. </p>
<p>St John’s is a pretty particular kind of place…if you like the idea of the Great Books curriculum, check it out. Although, be warned – while they don’t have intercollegiate sports per se, I understand they can get quite cutthroat about croquet. :)</p>
<p>Hi. I was going to post yesterday to thank everyone, but I was afraid if I did, I would stop the inflow of messages.</p>
<p>I appreciate the support most of you have given me.</p>
<p>I guess I need to carefully consider which schools have a strong jock culture. Im not a candidate for Williams or Swarthmore, and Id be wasting applications by applying. Davidson is a strong LAC that might want students from the northeast, but it has a very strong jock culture. Besides, its too conservative. I wrote it off months ago. I considered Vassar, but Vassar seems to bend over backwards to showcase its athletic program. I think they are afraid they cannot attract guys if they dont. That turns me off. </p>
<p>Right now, Im thinking of Reed, Barnard, Wellesley, Macalester, and a few others, including safeties like Bard. I dont want an all-womens college, but an urban all-womens college might be different. Id originally hoped to apply someplace ED, but Im not ready to make the decision. I think my next step will be to investigate the jock culture at each of the schools on my list.</p>
<p>Barnard may not have a jock culture but you’ll be living (after frosh year) and studying (all classes at both are open to both) with Columbia students there. While as I recall their football team had the longest losing streak of any Ivy, they do have one, and many more sports besides.</p>