<p>Thanks for the work this is very intersesting. The under 600 percentages were not that surprising but I am quite surprised at the high percentages under 700.</p>
<p>The Game of Life went into the issue of academic standards for recruited athletes. Among the conclusions:</p>
<p>At the major D1 programs the admissions standards for recruited athletes were much lower than those for students as a whole.</p>
<p>The NUMBER of recruited athletes and the PERCENT of such athletes in the overall student population were both quite low. These tend to be large universities with surprisingly small athletic programs. Many of the CFA universities have only a dozen or so D1 teams.</p>
<p>Therefore, although these athletes had very low SAT scores, compared to the rest of the student body, they had little impact on overall averages.</p>
<p>These athletes had much lower academic performance in college and were much less likely to graduate.</p>
<p>The rare people who were both top students, by SAT, and good enough to be recruited by the leading athletic universities got the kinds of grades in college and had the graduation rates that their SAT scores would have predicted. </p>
<p>There are very few people who are both Harvard level students and Michigan level football players.</p>
<p>At the top athletic universities the recruited athletes are essentially professionals hired to represent the college on the court or the field. The entire focus of the program is on winning games, and the education of the athletes is secondary at best. Having a top program requires that the students approach their sports as full time jobs and not let academics interfere with the reason they are in college.</p>
<p>Places with built-in academic requirements for athletes, like the Ivies, had very high graduation rates, but the recruited athletes still had poorer academic performance than did students as a whole.</p>
<p>The Ivies tend to have large numbers of teams, and athletes and recruited athletes represent a larger portion of the student body. Therefore, their SAT scores have more effect on the overall SAT profile of the college. However, since Ivy rules limit the gap between recruits and students as a whole, the athletes do not drag the averages down that far.</p>
<p>The overall high SAT scores of Ivy students means that even allowing for the gap from the student body as a whole, the recruited athletes are in fact excellent students, just not quite up to the standards of their classmates on SAT. In fact, at the high end of these elite colleges, one can be 1 SD below the student mean and still in the top quartile at many highly competitive colleges. </p>
<p>Not from the Game of Life, but well supported by other research:</p>
<p>Although SAT is an excellent overall predictor of academic level of a student body, it is only one predictor. </p>
<p>These elite colleges use holistic admissions and they take into account the totality of a student’s record. Therefore the SAT 1300 student who is admitted to Harvard is likely to be a far better student than the SAT score would imply. The admissions office is saying, in effect, “most 1300 SAT students would struggle here, but the rest of the application shows that this particular student is well prepared for academic success”</p>
<p>Tufts is a small school and has (if I’m not mistaken) a very high 25th percentile and that’s why it is ‘top 10’ here.</p>
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<p>Not enough to skew the stats significantly. Many of the athletes in the non revenue generating sports at a school like Stanford could get in on their own academic merits. Being an athlete is an additional hook that tilts admission in their favor considerably.</p>
<p>“All through your life, people will ask you what your SAT score was”…</p>
<p>This is certainly not my experience. After the first semester of college- the interest in my SAT scores has been zero. Really. Well, my husband asked me once when we were dating, but not one other person in the last 25 years has inquired. Grad schools don’t care. Employers don’t care. Friends don’t care. It doesn’t come up, really, ever again after the admissions process is over.</p>
<p>As important as the test is as 17, I can assure you that at 41 it is utterly meaningless.</p>
<p>“Many of the athletes in the non revenue generating sports at a school like Stanford could get in on their own academic merits.”</p>
<p>Madville:</p>
<p>Are you claiming that these athlete’s would be admitted if they were, say, equally accomplished bassoon players. To put it bluntly, I don’t believe it. What is the data that supports this claim.</p>
<p>Well, I work for a Fortune 100 company and we take our SAT scores seriously. </p>
<p>On your first day of work, your SAT score is encoded on your company badge. This way people can just take a look at your badge and know how smart you are. Smart employees get the perks. If you are in the 75 percentile, you get the key to the executive elevator. Those who are between 25% and 75% take the staff elevators. If you are below 25 percentile, you take the stairs.</p>
<p>In September, if your school moves up in the USNWR ranking, you get a bonus; and if it goes down, your salary get docked by the same percentage.</p>
<p>And there is the mandatory 5% rule: if your SAT score is consistently among the bottom 5% in your department, you’ve just been replaced by smarter people.</p>
<p>afan,
Many thanks for your informative post. I have not read The Game of Life so not sure how encompassing it is and how it should be applied to the schools that are the subject of this thread, ie, the USNWR Top 20-30 national universities. From looking at the data, it appears to me that there is not a great difference between the number of low scoring students at these highly ranked colleges. However, I think that the arguments/conclusions of The Game of Life may have more merit as applied to the larger state universities (which also happen to be much more successful and prominent at football than the Stanford/Duke/Northwestern/Vanderbilt (and now Notre Dame) group. Still, I suspect that the Top 30 publics like UC Berkeley, U Virginia, UCLA, U Michigan and U North Carolina have a higher student-athlete graduation rate than nearly all of the colleges reviewed in The Game of Life and that the quality of their student-athletes is a notch or two higher in statistical terms than their less academically acclaimed public school brethren.</p>
<p>"Well, I work for a Fortune 100 company and we take our SAT scores seriously.</p>
<p>On your first day of work, your SAT score is encoded on your company badge. This way people can just take a look at your badge and know how smart you are. Smart employees get the perks. If you are in the 75 percentile, you get the key to the executive elevator. Those who are between 25% and 75% take the staff elevators. If you are below 25 percentile, you take the stairs.</p>
<p>In September, if your school moves up in the USNWR ranking, you get a bonus; and if it goes down, your salary get docked by the same percentage.</p>
<p>And there is the mandatory 5% rule: if your SAT score is consistently among the bottom 5% in your department, you’ve just been replaced by smarter people."</p>
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<li>:)</li>
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<p>“At the top athletic universities the recruited athletes are essentially professionals hired to represent the college on the court or the field. The entire focus of the program is on winning games, and the education of the athletes is secondary at best. Having a top program requires that the students approach their sports as full time jobs and not let academics interfere with the reason they are in college.”</p>
<p>This statement unfairly tars all top athletic programs with the same brush. Without question, mid-high DI programs require very large time commitments from their athletes One can only admire the participants in those programs who also excel in the college classroom. Moreover, SOME of these programs fit the profile that afan describes But many of the programs are also committed to helping their athletes get an education. It varies a great deal from school to school and program to program.</p>
<p>Hawkette: You are not correct when it comes to DI schools, other than the ivies. SAT scores can and do deviate wildly from the norm. Outstanding athletes have gone to Duke with several hundreds of points lower than its average SAT score. What the schools, including the ivies, try to do, is to balance out the overall score of the various teams. So, if the school wants to recruit a student with, for example, an 1100, they will attempt to balance this out with other recruits having higher scores, to bring the team average up to meet a certain required standard. At the Ivies, there is a specific team formula from which their rules do not let them deviate. That is why the boy from my children’s school was required by Princeton to continue retaking SATs until he could reach the number that they required of him…In his case, 1300.</p>
<p>Another interesting point. Sometimes kids with very high scores do not get recruited, but rather supported by a coach. What this means is that the student has the general gpa and SATs needed for admission without the recruitment help of the coach. The coach will, however, lend his support in the admissions committee for a very talented player. The reason that this is done is because the coaches from different sports divisions have a limited number of students they are allowed to recruit, per team, each year. So, if a coach can get a particularly talented player with a 1300, and this is someone who would never get into the school without recruitment, the coach will put this athlete on his recruit list, hoping that the student with the scores to get in on his own will be accepted by the committee by dint of his grades and scores, and a little push from the coach.</p>
<p>This business of recruiting and building sports teams is far from simplistic, and really rather tricky. But at all schools, many recruits are accepted with considerably lower SAT scores, some varying more widely than others, depending on the rules that they must follow. This happens regardless of scholarship money, which is not given at top DIII schools, or the ivies. Other DI sports/schools give plenty in scholarship money, and as I said, far lower SATs deviating from the midpoint are acceptable at these schools/for these sports.</p>
<p>gabriellah,
I hear where you are coming from for the large majority of Division I athletic programs. However, I reach a different conclusion re the academic merit of the highly ranked privates and publics (which was the focus of this thread) and I believe that the numbers that have been posted so far support that point. As documented above, there are not great differences in the numbers among the USNWR Top 20 privates-athletic scholarship and non-scholarship alike. Furthermore, I suspect that the graduation rates of the student-athletes at the Div I scholarship school in the USNWR Top 30 aren’t much different than those for the Ivies and other top privates. Perhaps you have some different information that will lead to another conclusion, but there was data about this in another thread and it pretty clearly showed that the student-athletes at these top ranked scholarship colleges in most cases actually graduated at a higher rate than the overall student body and at a rate commensurate with the non-scholarship schools. If you want to look, there is data from the NCAA about graduation rates at various colleges. Also, I have some familiarity as well with some of the Division I athletic programs and it is a fact that some of the coaches are paid a significant bonus based on the graduation rate of their student-athletes. I don’t know how broadly this is practiced, but what I take away from this is that the student-athletes at these Top 20-30 colleges are not the run-of-the-mill and I would suggest that you not paint them near as many of them as academically underqualified.</p>
<p>gabriellah,</p>
<p>First, I think that we should all get on the same page regarding terminology. All athlete’s who are supported by coaches in the admissions process are generally referred to as recruited–that is, the coach is actively trying to convince the athlete to attend the coach’s school and to play on the coach’s team. The question is how much the coach helps the recruited player in the admissions process.</p>
<p>From personal knowledge, I can say that outside niche sports, the vast majority of the athletes recruited to play at the most selective schools need more than just a “little push” from the coach. They are students who would have very little chance to be admitted simply on the basis of their academic records. This reality is not so much a reflection on the academic achievements of the students (who by most standards have good to excellent high school academic records) but rather a byproduct of the extraordinarily high academic quality of the applicant pool for these schools.</p>
<p>The mechanisms by which the coaches exert their influence vary widely. At the Ivy and NESCAC schools the process is very formal, while in the UAA the process is more informal. But the bottom line is no coach could field a competitive football or basketball team–even at the DIII level–if most of his recruits were required to 3.75+ averages with lots of AP courses and 2200 on the SATs.</p>
<p>I think a lot of kids who would not normally match the admitted students’ stats could do well in colleges. My son would not be competitive for admission to Harvard, based on the stats of the people they let in, but once there, I am confident he could excel. Same for many athletes. There are extreme examples on either side of the spectrum, but many athletes make it through schools for which they were not considered competitive. Also, one could argue that if we took the highest SAT/GPA students and made them work out 3-4 hours a day and travel 3-5 months a year (missing classes) that their average GPA and graduation rates might fall simply as a result of their participation, not as a result of their readiness or intellect. One way to ascertain the truth is to follow those schools with holistic admissions, Cal and UCLA come to mind, that admit minority and disadvantaged students who fall below the normal accepted stats and see how they do over the course of four or five years.</p>
<p>Emm1… I, too, have knowledge of the process, and there definitely is a difference between a recruited, and a supported athlete. Coaches do support athletes whom they believe can get admitted without using one of the coaches available recruiting spots. That way, the coach can potentially get the player who needs his help, and the player who might only need a nudge, because his stats make him a desireable candidate for admission, anyway. This tactic is especially practiced in the top DIII schools.</p>
<p>The rest of what you have to say, I know to be true.</p>
<p>Hawkette…Lots of those athletes are underqualified. But that does not mean that they cannot function well, academically, once admitted to the institution. The statement that you made about coaches being paid a bonus for high graduation rates is something that I cannot debunk, because I really don’t know. I never heard this before.</p>
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<p>A quick check on the ncaa graduation rate data shows this not to be true. The athletes (i.e. recipients of athletic scholarships) at the top scholarship private D1 colleges graduate at considerably lower rates than the students as a whole at these universities.</p>
<p><a href=“http://www2.ncaa.org/portal/academics_and_athletes/education_and_research/academic_reform/grad_rate/2006/d1_school_grad_rate_data.html[/url]”>http://www2.ncaa.org/portal/academics_and_athletes/education_and_research/academic_reform/grad_rate/2006/d1_school_grad_rate_data.html</a></p>
<p>Duke appears to be an exception. Notre Dame is not. Example all students 6 year grad rate~95%. Football players on athletic scholarships 81-84%. Good by national standards, but well below what one expects at the Ivies and other top privates.</p>
<p>The main point about athletes is that they account for only a small portion of the student body at the large D1 scholarship colleges. So they can have only a limited effect on the SAT ranges. They are far fewer than 25% of the student body at places like Berkeley or Michigan. Therefore, most of the low SAT students at these elite colleges are not athletes. </p>
<p>Some of the very lowest SAT students at the colleges that do not have other restrictions on recruiting may be athletes. Stanford could hire anyone who meets the NCAA minimum. What such a student would do for classes once they get to campus is another question entirely.</p>
<p>In Reclaiming the Game, the same authors looked in detail at the elite colleges, both universities and LAC’s. They found as I described, lower academic performance for recruited athletes, with the exception of those who were among the top students academically at admission. This, small, latter group did quite well. </p>
<p>Between Game of Life and Reclaiming the Game, they also found that the recruited athletes were less likely to graduate with honors, less likely to pursue advanced degrees, and therefore less likely to enter the professions than were students as a whole. At the elite colleges where graduate and professional degree attainment are the norm, the pattern persisted. The authors attributed this both to the time demands of the sport, and the message from the environment and coaches that athletics were more important than academics. </p>
<p>It is possible that the low SAT students at Yale and at Cal and two entirely different groups. At Yale, they are probably people for whom the SAT was judged to be not a good predictor of academic promise, and who were admitted on the basis of other achievements. Due to Ivy rules, the athletes cannot be that far below the students as a whole. Since Yale’s students are so high on SAT on average, this means the athletes must be high also.</p>
<p>At Cal, the low SAT students simply may be at the bottom of a much wider distribution, even without considering holistic admissions. The floor on SAT for NCAA eligibility is remarkably low, and some of these low SAT students might be athletes.</p>
<p>Overall Yale has a 96% graduation rate, so few admitted students fail to graduate. Cal has an 86-87% graduation rate overall, and 67-69% for athletes.</p>
<p>The Academic Index (AI) is the barometer that Ivy colleges use to make a judgment if the prospective student-athlete is sufficiently qualified. I recall hearing that the current level for prospective Ivy athletes is a minimum of 161, but I may be low in that number as I know that it changed in recent years. Does anyone have the current threshhold AI?</p>
<p>Perhaps someone else has already brought this up, but one must also consider the presence of programs with talent-based admissions criteria.</p>
<p>Art, music, dance, theatre, and other programs may be competitive–even highly competitive–but place little weight on test scores. Your audition and portfolio are far more important. Some of these schools enroll as many or more freshman in these programs as are recruited for the football team at D1s.</p>
<p>Similarly, and I know someone brought this up, some STEM programs may be pretty forgiving about CR scores as long as the Math scores are high.</p>