There is nothing back door about it. They are hooked (recruited athletes). Some will have stats comparable to the rest of the admitted class, some will have slightly lower stats. Admissions won’t let people in who clearly can’t do the work. But they accept people all the time for reasons that aren’t just purely for academic grades and scores. Meet the minimum bar, and then they are asking, “What else have you got?”
Of all the sports that get benefits in admissions, I’m surprised that you singled out rowing. I joined the rowing team at Stanford without any previous rowing experience. It was probably easier to walk on to the rowing team than any other team at Stanford, and as such rowers stats were largely similar to the overall student body. The majority of the team was composed of engineering majors, a notably larger portion than the overall student body. A good portion of the rowing team at many of the Ivies are also walk-ons. .For example the Harvard Crimson article at https://www.harvardindependent.com/2015/10/walking-onto-crew/ writes,
While Ivy League colleges as whole do very well in rowing, they do not always win, particularly on the women’s side. For example, last year most Ivy League colleges failed to qualify for women’s nationals, and no Ivy Leagues scored among the top 6. . Stanford scored above all the Ivies, in spite of the team being mostly walk-ons.
It think the posts are starting to deviate away from the OP’s original question:
“To boil it down, my main question is; is it possible to be a strong athlete and use that to get into an Ivy? (sport in question is rowing) Can you use sports to cover up a lower GPA/SAT than would normally be accepted?”
For certain sports, the ones with the banded system, such as football, certain recruits who are “superstars” will be recruited with a lower academic stats than the general student body. However, the non revenue sports such as rowing, squash, fencing, etc, one may get recruited, but not admitted if the academic stats are low. I’m sure you know about the academic index (AI). It is the average score of a formula consisting of GPA/SATs of the past four admitted class for the particular Ivy. HYP has the highest AI, the other slightly lower. Within each team, the average of the team AI has to be within 1 standard deviation of the AI. Therefore, if the athlete is superstar, but with slightly lower AI, the coach will recruit another athlete with a much higher AI to average out the team AI. But the bottom line is that if a particular athlete has a very low AI, no matter how good of an athlete he/she may be, they will not get admitted.
Which is why certain superstar athletes go to many non Ivy powerhouse schools, where the academic requirements may be a little lax.
The Ivies are looking for kids who meet the minimum AI for their sport and can help them win Ivy League titles immediately. You need a decent SAT score, decent SAT II scores, and decent GPA. You don’t need to be a super genius, but if you are a super genius the coach may want you on his roster to balance out recruits he has selected with lower AI,SAT,GPA scores.
A coach can find a few great standout athletes with less than perfect AI’s and then add a few to top academic performers that might not see a lot of play time to create an average AI team score that is sufficient for the admissions department.
It also helps if you are a URM or other desired “hooked” applicant because then you have what I call the trifecta- great athlete, decent student, some sort of hook. ( geographic diversity, URM, first gen, etc.)
To answer your final question, can you use your sport to cover up a lower GPA/SAT and get into an Ivy? The answer is yes, the scores needed for most athletes that a coach wants you can have a lower GPA/SAT score as compared to the rest of the student body. A kid with the tippy top test scores and GPA ( maybe not a top athletic prospect) can also use sport recruitment to give himself a little edge in admissions because the coach needs a few high stats kids on his team to pull up up the cumulative weight of the team.
I know several kids going through the Ivy recruiting process and it’s been interesting to learn how it works.
Can you use a sport (rowing) to make up for lower GPA and SAT scores. I would say maybe. Yes, scores may be lower for athletes. At the same time, you have to remember there are thousands of kids with both rowing AND good grades so all it takes is someone with a bit higher score in each category to knock you out of the running. IF you are stellar in rowing and can beat nearly everyone they are going to overlook scores more than if you are just top 1%. But then you are going to be at a disadvantage keeping up academically. Why would you do that to yourself?
Agree with other posters that rowing tends to have more walk ons than other sports. Many tall athletic kids take it up in college. And it is a high end sport so if a wealthy well educated parent sees some talent in their kid, they definitely have the means and will to develop it so their kid has a hook.
In terms of colleges and athletics, most students see the value of an Ivy league education as having more worth than a national title and most parents do too. No one will care that you won X or Y game in 20 years but they will care that you have a degree from Princeton. Not to mention career ending injuries. My kiddos club team had a presentation yesterday from an athlete who blew out his/her knee in Junior year. S/he said she was thankful mom had given this advice “Go for your education first and the team second” My kiddo accepts this premise. You are one step away from a menicus tear but no one can take away your education.
Look in this subforum http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/athletic-recruits/
Rowing is probably not the best example here. A disproportianate number of recruited rowers are international; you’ll see a heavier-than-average representation from Australia and the UK, as examples. Additionally as mentioned earlier, rowing, at least for the Ivy Leagues and peers, offers a better-than-average walk-on opportunity.
However, my issue is that there is no way that all the most elite rowers who are going to the Ivies have the smarts to make it in. There has to be some backdoor way they are getting these dudes.
I don’t think they don’t “have the smarts”. I think they are very smart, good students. Would they normally get into an Ivy without rowing? Probably not, but neither would 95% of the kids applying. I don’t think your going to see a world class rower get into Princeton with a 900 SAT and an 80 GPA (as I’ve seen football players get into D1 schools). But will a kid with a 94 GPA, some honors/AP classes and a 1400 who is 6’5" and a highly recruited rower get in? Probably.
For many, Ivy league equals access to elite professions like IB and consulting. For the non- professional sport enthusiasts, rowing, squash, etc. makes it easier to gain admission to Ivy league. Many rowers attend private high schools (not a typical sport at most publics) so there’s a degree of pedigree going in. So you combine the pedigree, rowing, IVY funnel into Wall Street or MBB and you use whatever edge you can.
Interesting question for your rowers out there: Would you rather attend a good school and row for a national championship (non Ivy - don’t know if that even exists) or simply row for Harvard and all that world brings? I think most would row for Harvard. The MD at Goldman Sachs will be excited to talk to him about that…
@Data10 there’s a reason for the weaker women’s side. Women’s rowing is an NCAA sport, with a lot of money available for the sport in other colleges. There is no wonder that the top women rowers would rather go to a school giving them money than an Ivy.
More now than when Jim was playing. Of the top 5 men’s freshmen this year, 3 are minorities. Two are at Albany (home of the Thompsons) and one at High Point (known for its preppy student body). The top scorer for Duke in the finals was another freshman, an African American from Texas.
As Bob Dylan would say, Times they are a changin’.
@skieurope – “Rowing is probably not the best example here” – Yes, but that’s what the OP is asking about.
There are few hooks available to wealthy white families other than legacy (not commenting on whether this is right or wrong, it just is.) So if I were a person that desperately wanted my wealthy, white reasonably intelligent children to be admitted to Ivy League colleges, I’d be strongly encouraging them into rowing, sailing or lacrosse. Which would be kind of funny because I’m not sure I even really know what lacrosse is.
Wish I could find it, but the Wall Street Journal had an excellent article a few years ago listing the sports that had the highest percent chance of being recruited by Ivy League schools. Sailing, rowing and lacrosse were at or near the top; I only remember them because I know many kids in those sports but there were a couple more I don’t remember. The very common sports like baseball, soccer and football were at the bottom of the list with the lowest chance of being recruited. Guessing that’s not because the Ivies don’t need/want those athletes, but simply because there are so many thousands of students doing those sports that the population of those athletes is so much greater.
So if a family is playing the odds and their kids are amenable, it would make sense to steer them into rowing, sailing or lacrosse if they want their kid to have a higher chance of Ivy admission. I’m not concerned with getting my kids into Ivys, so if even I know that based on casual reading there’s a pretty good bet it’s not a secret and that other parents who are not as laid back as I am are aware of this as well.
Which is fine as long as you don’t happen to live in Montana. Long Island kids are playing as soon as they can walk, have brothers and neighbors and uncles who play and who play with them. They play club at age 7 and when they go to their high schools or prep schools, they are already skilled players. They are not starting the sport at age 14.
@milee30 XC/Track and Field has quite a large number of white kids from the burbs too. There are other sports like golf, squash,wrestling swimming and water polo too.
If you have a kid that doesn’t like to exercise maybe sailing, lol.
The thing of it is though is that the kid needs to be an exceptional performer in these events with some sort of credentials to prove it ( they love state and national champions) and then they have to be somewhat smart and a decent student. The kids really can’t be one dimensional or they have no chance with admissions even with coach’s pull.
Somehow reading this thread now reminds me of the recent Atlantic article “debunking” the famous marshmellow study, the belief that “kids who had the ability to wait for the second marshmellow would have better chance in life” turned out to be less meaningful than wether they are from good social economic status families or had moms with good education.
So if rowing/lax/sailing kids have higher chances of getting into tippy top schools, I guess it has less to do with the sports per se, more to do with the underlying SES these sports come with.
OP is a rower, s/he already won the ovarian lottery. 
“If you have a kid that doesn’t like to exercise maybe sailing, lol.”
You must not have ever raced single or double handed sailboats, lol. Requires a large amount of strength and stamina. You can be decent at the club level if you’re just a brilliant tactician but to place at a national level, you need real athletic skill.
For an example of how fit the sailors are, google Anna Tunnicliffe, one of the recent gold medalists in Laser (single handed) sailing.
Each year, Ivies accept a certain number of athletes that are one deviation from their average stats. That means many athletes fall into the “lower 25%” of accepted students. If you look at, say, Harvard, that means a 1540 SAT and a 4.1 GPA.
Could you define ‘close right now on recruiting numbers’? What are your actual erg times?
My experience when being recruited for rowing at Ivies was that coaches had some degree of pull with admissions but not a tremendous amount, and the amount they did have was used to push for the top top rowers they felt they needed to have. Even then, if a candidate’s stats are too low they aren’t getting in regardless of how fast their 2K is.
In my case I applied to 3 Ivies and had the necessary erg scores to be recruited as well as a 1540 SAT and a high GPA. One coach told me that they couldn’t do anything because I was also applying for a special program within the school that would override anything that the athletics department could do in regards to the application, One coach told me that they’d make sure admissions would give the application a second look but that they were only able to ‘push’ an application for one or two people a year and that my academic stats were strong enough they didn’t feel they needed to do that for me, and one coach said he would support the application but that it wouldn’t result in much of a bump with admissions.
That’s a long way of saying that unless you pull a 6:15 2K as a lightweight in high school or are sub 6 as a heavyweight and are the best stroke known to man I don’t think your stats are going to be enough to give you any degree of confidence that you’ll get in because of rowing.
Outside of sports like basketball, football, hockey (where Ivies are only sporadically competitive on the national stage) you may be surprised to find that Ivy athletes do in fact have better academic stats than you think. Most of the rowers on my team were not in cupcake majors and we had a significantly higher average GPA than the student body as a whole.
Speaking of rowing, here are the recent results:
NCAA Women’s Championships, May 25 - 27, 2018:
Division I - I Eights Grand Final (places 1-6)
- Cal-Berkeley
- Washington
- Texas
- Stanford
- Princeton
- Ohio State
Division I - Fours Grand Final (places 1-6)
- Cal-Berkeley
- Washington
- Ohio State
- Texas
- Michigan
- Yale
Men’s 2018 IRA National Championships, June 1 - June 3, 2018:
Varsity Eight Grand Final (places 1-6)
- Yale
- Washington
- Cal-Berkeley
- Harvard
- Princeton
- Brown
Varsity Four Grand Final (places 1-6)
- Washington
- Drexel
- Cal-Berkeley
- BU
- Princeton
- Holy Cross