Fence your way past low admission rates?

Data10
Thu, 27 Oct 2022 01:37:54 +0000

ucbalumnus:

Would a small school with lots of sports teams (e.g. NESCAC LACs) privilege athletic ECs over other ECs (among the non-recruited applicants) in order to provide a better pool of generally athletic students as potential walk-on athletes?

As noted in my post above, this seems to be the case at Amherst, with nearly 90% of athletes flagged by coaches during admissions and few in the category called “walk-ons.” Other NESCAC colleges with comparably successful programs probably also favor more athletes than just the ~2 per team “athletic factor” admits specified under NESCAC conference rules.

However, there are also small colleges with different degrees of preference for athletes. For example Caltech basketball once went on a 26-year losing streak in conference games. The movie Quantum Hoops discusses the losing streak and unique challenges the team faced, such as having several players on team who did not have any high school basketball experience. Caltech basketball and other sports have had more success over the past few years, so they may have changed things, Last year, they won 6/15 conference games.