Fence your way past low admission rates?

thealternative
Fri, 21 Oct 2022 15:47:14 +0000

Yes, very true. But it’s the same thing for many top STEM applicants. There are a lot of first-gen students of foreign tech dual-income parents who are in the math clubs, robotics, Olympiads, etc. They are encouraged to do advanced course work at a young age. Have the parental hookups for the international non-profit/advanced lab work/research paper ECs that are common to such applicants. So, high academic/EC achievements and thus strong candidates for low admission-rate schools.

However, not all knowledge is academic. My kid had to choose a path between more STEM interests and sport interests and is YOLO-ing it with sports. For them, it’s a more authentic experience.

@cinnamon1212 raises an excellent point in that the sport path is not easy - the hours of hard work, rejection and failure, self-doubt, financial compromises that happens ALL happens before the application cycle. And that’s before you even start to look at schools! (For athletes that do high-level non-recruitable sports, it really is a genuine passion. Almost no ROI in practical terms.)

But yeah, schools really need to dig deeper into their own endowments or do specific funding for sports, IMHO.