<p>Hoedown…Having a particular talent can certainly help a student gain admissions at a highly selective school, but he/she will not get any SAT dispensation.</p>
<p>afan,
In further follow-up to your earlier posts about graduation rates for athletes at these top colleges, I think you may be underselling how effectively some colleges perform. I think you will also find that the quality of the athletic recruits in the Ivy League does not differ dramatically from these other elite universities, particularly the private ones. </p>
<p>For the Division I scholarship-awarding colleges, some graduation rates are actually very close to the overall school graduation rate and probably even better if you consider that transfers out are more common for athletes than other classes of students and thus the better comparison might be of those athletes who have exhausted their eligibility. Here are some numbers drawn from that NCAA website you linked to:</p>
<p>Stanford (6-year Graduation rate for school = 95%)
NCAA Student-Athlete Grad Rate for all student-athletes = 89%
NCAA Student-Athlete Grad Rate for those exhausting eligibility = 93%</p>
<p>Duke (6-year Graduation rate for school = 94%)
NCAA Student-Athlete Grad Rate for all student-athletes = 91%
NCAA Student-Athlete Grad Rate for those exhausting eligibility= 97%</p>
<p>Northwestern (6-year Graduation rate for school = 93%)
NCAA Student-Athlete Grad Rate for all student-athletes = 90%
NCAA Student-Athlete Grad Rate for those exhausting eligibility = 96%</p>
<p>Rice (6-year Graduation rate for school = 93%)
NCAA Student-Athlete Grad Rate for all student-athletes = 69%
NCAA Student-Athlete Grad Rate for those exhausting eligibility = 91%</p>
<p>Vanderbilt (6-year Graduation rate for school = 89%)
NCAA Student-Athlete Grad Rate for all student-athletes = 80%
NCAA Student-Athlete Grad Rate for those exhausting eligibility = 93%</p>
<p>Notre Dame (6-year Graduation rate for school = 96%)
NCAA Student-Athlete Grad Rate for all student-athletes = 86%
NCAA Student-Athlete Grad Rate for those exhausting eligibility = 98%</p>
<p>USC (6-year Graduation rate for school = 84%)
NCAA Student-Athlete Grad Rate for all student-athletes = 60%
NCAA Student-Athlete Grad Rate for those exhausting eligibility = 66%</p>
<p>Wake Forest (6-year Graduation rate for school = 88%)
NCAA Student-Athlete Grad Rate for all student-athletes = 74%
NCAA Student-Athlete Grad Rate for those exhausting eligibility = 93%</p>
<p>PUBLIC UNIVERSITIES</p>
<p>UC Berkeley (6-year Graduation rate for school = 89%)
NCAA Student-Athlete Grad Rate for all student-athletes = 69%
NCAA Student-Athlete Grad Rate for those exhausting eligibility = 73%</p>
<p>U Virginia (6-year Graduation rate for school = 92%)
NCAA Student-Athlete Grad Rate for all student-athletes = 74%
NCAA Student-Athlete Grad Rate for those exhausting eligibility = 84%</p>
<p>UCLA (6-year Graduation rate for school = 89%)
NCAA Student-Athlete Grad Rate for all student-athletes = 74%
NCAA Student-Athlete Grad Rate for those exhausting eligibility = 71%</p>
<p>U Michigan (6-year Graduation rate for school = 87%)
NCAA Student-Athlete Grad Rate for all student-athletes = 78%
NCAA Student-Athlete Grad Rate for those exhausting eligibility = 87%</p>
<p>U North Carolina (6-year Graduation rate for school = 84%)
NCAA Student-Athlete Grad Rate for all student-athletes = 73%
NCAA Student-Athlete Grad Rate for those exhausting eligibility = 81%</p>
<p>BTW, I was not able to find comparable numbers for the Ivies and the Division III colleges. </p>
<p>Beyond the arguments above, the numbers pretty clearly indicate that there are many non-athletes at these colleges in that group of students that scored well below the school average. Hoedown makes a good point about other special talents that are not sensitive to standardized test scores or class rank and are being ignored here, eg, art, music, dance, theater abilities and undergraduate schools devoted to these programs. At many of these colleges, it is quite possible that their numbers are even greater than the athletic admits who might arrive with less than stellar statistical records.</p>
<p>
At college… nobody cares… in fact I’d probably get beaten up if I wanted to talk to a group of people about SAT scores, :p</p>
<p>I don’t think that athletics explain Stanford’s lower SATs compared to HYP, because there is a significant gap among enrolled students at the 75th percentile mark, most pronounced in Critical Reading.
Princeton 800, Harvard 800, Yale 790, Stanford 760.
These numbers are from The College Board.</p>
<p>You can’t find “athlete” numbers for the Ivies and DIII on the ncaa site because “athlete” means “on scholarship”. So places that do not offer scholarships have no one in that category.</p>
<p>I suppose it is a matter of interpretation. I look at that list and I see lower grad rates for the scholarship athletes at every institution. In some cases dramatically lower, 20 percent lower or more at some places (Rice, Berkeley). </p>
<p>The list for people exhausting eligibility is misleading. It includes only those who remained enrolled long enough to use up their eligibility. Thus, it excludes those who flunked out. Many universities have rules that require a certain level of academic performance to remain in good standing. Often this means “making normal progress toward a degree.” A student who falls below this level may be suspended or dismissed. Thus, the exhausted eligibility statistic excludes all the worst performing student-athletes. If one were to create a comparable statistic for the rest of the student population- i.e. grad rate for those who were making normal progress towards their degrees and remained there for 6 years, the grad rates would be near 100%. People who got that far and did not graduate would include only those who died, dropped out, or flunked out after they finished the last year of their “sport”. Just the way the rules are constructed.</p>
<p>Since there is no comparable data for non athletes for the GSR or exhausted eligibility, the only fair comparison is grad rate for students as a whole to grad rate for athletes. This shows those figures to be very different at these scholarship schools, even those with overall very high academic standards. The athletes are simply in a world of their own.</p>
<p>The talent-based admissions are definitely a different pool. At Carnegie-Mellon, which has astronomical SAT’s for its School of Computer Science and CIT, SAT’s are not required at all for its even more competitive programs in performance fields</p>
<p>“SAT Subject Tests are not required for Drama, Design, Art, or Music applicants. All other students/applicants must take appropriate tests, preferably by December, but no later than January.”</p>
<p>Other colleges with similar programs might use the SAT’s to make sure the students can hack the academic side, but focus much more on talent and artistic ability than academic potential. Even RISD, perhaps the top art school in the country, uses the SAT, but there are plenty of people at Caltech who would never get in RISD.</p>
<p>Was recently raised from 169 to 171. impact varies from sport to sport and Ivy to Ivy.</p>
<p>“All through your life, people will ask you what your SAT score was”…</p>
<p>-haha thats a laugh. I don’t think most adults even remember what their SAT score was. Once you get into college it doesn’t matter anymore. A good score doesn’t make you smarter than anybody.</p>
<p>But Stanford’s lower SAT score simply means that they find the SAT less important and focus on other factors.</p>
<p>Okay, what factors? My original question quite a while back.</p>
<p>“All through your life, people will ask you what your SAT score was”…</p>
<p>That is, without a doubt, the silliest thing I’ve read on these boards…I really hope you were jesting. It did make me laugh BTW.</p>
<p>People, those who wrote those threads about SATs following you the rest of your life meant them to be funny. You don’t think they are meant to be absurd?</p>
<p>afan,
We’ll never know the “truth” behind those numbers as we don’t know what the experiences were of those students who “failed” to graduate. They may have flunked out, but I would suspect that the transfer rate is higher among athletes than the student body as a whole and that would certainly affect the numbers. Perhaps someone who has access to more data can provide some insight.</p>
<p>I think your point about graduation weakness has greater validity as applied to the public universities and to Rice and USC which really are outliers among the privates listed. U Michigan should be recognized as the only one of the top 5 publics where the % graduated did not differ from the overall student body to those student-athletes who had exhausted their eligibility.</p>
<p>For those making comparisons between the Ivy colleges and the other top schools which award scholarships, please recognize what scores are needed by prospective Ivy athletes to reach the 171 Academic Index level. Using the CC AI calculator, a student can reach the 171 level with the following numbers:</p>
<p>540 Critical Reading
540 Math</p>
<p>540 SAT II # 1
540 SAT II # 2
540 SAT II # 3</p>
<p>3.0 GPA in a graduating class of 300</p>
<p>As anyone can see, these Ivy League levels are not especially demanding. I would suspect that the vast majority of the student-athletes at the other top colleges (particularly the privates) have scores at this level or higher.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Are you certain of that? Do Peabody students have the same test score profile as other Hopkins students?</p>
<p>I don’t know how many athletes flunk out of each of these institutions. However, those who do flunk out will not be included in the “exhausted eligibility” figures. So this is not a particularly useful metric for this question. The only direct comparison is grad rate overall to athlete grad rate.</p>
<p>hawkette–</p>
<ol>
<li><p>While it is possible that Ivy athletes could have SATs below 600 and be recruited, very few of them actually have SATs that low. In fact, as you yourself have pointed out in a previous thread, the percentages of students with below 600 in CR and/or Math at most of the Ivies is extremely low (Princeton/Harvard/Yale/Columbia, Dartmouth and Brown are under 8% in CR and considerably lower in the number of students with a math score under 600). </p></li>
<li><p>I think that afan is correct and that the graduation rates for those exhausting eligibility excludes people who flunked out earlier. The idea that hordes of these athletes transferred out doesn’t make much sense, and I can’t help but think that you have come up with this idea because otherwise some of the schools you have championed (i.e. Wake Forest, Notre Dame) would clearly have significantly lower graduation rates for athletes.</p></li>
<li><p>Big-time sports are great but sometimes big-time sports go along with letting in students who are not as academically qualified. That’s the dark side of the sports programs at many schools (but not necessarily at the Ivies).</p></li>
</ol>
<p>midatlmom,
Your comments reflect a view that the Ivy athletes are automatically statistically stronger than the Division I scholarship athletes and that somehow the Ivy athletes are purer because they do not have scholarships. You may be right or you may be wrong, but I don’t think we can conclusively know as, to my knowledge, there is no publicly available data to make this judgment. I don’t share your view as I believe that the student-athletes at both the Ivies and the top Division I academic colleges are not greatly different.</p>
<p>It does disappoint me that those supporting the Ivy perspective are so unwilling to cede credit to the student-athletes at these other top academic colleges which offer scholarships. Frankly, I don’t think that the athletes at places like Stanford, Duke, Northwestern, Rice, Vanderbilt, Notre Dame, etc. ended up at these schools because they could not reach the 171 Academic Index level of the Ivy League. The reality is more likely that the vast majority of those scholarship athletes at the Division I colleges could have gone to nearly any Ivy they wanted, but chose not to because they preferred another college or they viewed the Ivy athletic competition as too inferior to that available in leagues like the Pac-10, the ACC, the Big Ten, the SEC, etc.</p>
<p>Someone noted,“All through your life, people will ask you what your SAT score was”</p>
<p>Response: I laughed at this one. As an adult, if anyone started spouting off their SATs without prior prompting from someone, I, and most other folks, would consider that person an anti-social jerk. To this day, I don’t have a clue of the SAt scores of almost everyone I have met. It just isn’t polite to discuss or even mention unless we were talking about requirements to get into a specific school.</p>
<p>As for being in the top 10% or having lower SATs that seem to be skewed, remember private school do have a leg up in geting their kids into most top schools. The thinking is that parents of private school kids won’t need financial aid! There is a thread on this that was publised about a year or two ago. Search the forums for this topic.</p>
<p>Are you certain of that? Do Peabody students have the same test score profile as other Hopkins students?</p>
<p>Hoedown, Peabody students apply separately to Peabody, have to audition, see the details here:
<a href=“http://www.peabody.jhu.edu/2047[/url]”>http://www.peabody.jhu.edu/2047</a></p>
<p>From the Peabody website:</p>
<p>What GPA do you require for acceptance?
We don’t exactly have a yes/no standard for grades or SAT scores. There are too many variables, like finding a low Verbal SAT from an international student who has only been in the U.S. for a year, and for whom English is a new language. In the admissions office, we don’t make judgments about academics. Instead, we route the application folders to appropriate administrators, depending on what we see. Here is how it works:
For undergraduates we look for a 3.0 GPA, and for SAT scores of 530 verbal, 480 math. Anything below that goes to the Dean of Academic Affairs for evaluation. In practice, we rarely reject anyone for purely academic reasons. However, we need to take care to reject students unlikely to do well in the academic side of their programs. Problems with math and/or science are not much of an issue for Peabody since it is not necessary to take those kinds of subjects to get a performance degree here. On the other hand, those who have had really bad problems with humanities courses (English, History, etc.) will likely be rejected since courses needing similar study skills are part of the curriculum. Attendance is considered part of the picture, as is the faculty assessment of your performance level. If the Dean of Academic Affairs feels the applicant should be rejected, the application is brought before the Admissions Committee for discussion before a final decision is made. This is a very serious business. Fortunately, we reject fewer than a dozen applicants a year for strictly academic reasons.
Admission to a Master of Music program requires an undergrad GPA of 3.0 exclusive of performance credits. Sometimes we let things slide a tenth of a point or two if we have an otherwise strong student and performer. If we hear a strong performer with a dismal undergraduate record, we might suggest the Graduate Performance Diploma program as an alternative.</p>
<p>As far as your SAT score following you through life…if you get married, the difference between your SAT score and your spouse’s will occasionally come up…</p>
<p>Hawkette, as usual, you have misread my comments and placed your own spin on things. </p>
<p>My first comment refuted your post #71 where you implied that Ivy league athletes need only meet the 171 Athletic Index, which would mean that they only needed a 540 CR and 540 Math SAT score. I was merely pointing out that (and your own posts agree) that very few of the Ivy athletes have scores so low. Do you agree? </p>
<p>My second comment was indicating that your view of the graduation rates for those who have exhausted eligibility was implausible and that afan is correct. Do you have any logical reason to think that your view is correct and that athletes graduate at an equal or even higher rate than other students at some of your favored schools (other than your general “we’'ll never know the truth” kind of comments when someone else has made a point you don’t want to acknowledge)? </p>
<p>My third comment was merely pointing out that there are schools where athletes are held to a much lower standard in the admissions process and schools where athletes graduate at lower rates (this is not exactly news by the way). While I believe that Ivy League recruited athletes are also held to a lower standard, because of the fact that the Ivy League graduation rates are so high and because of the fact that very few Ivy League students have low board scores, I think that the overall admissions standards for these athletes are fairly high. </p>
<p>You know, I think that athletes are terrific and do incredibly well in the world after college and I wish that my kids were talented enough in a sport to pursue it in college and afterwards. I actually have very little bias about Ivy League athletes vs. athletes at other top-notch schools such as Stanford and Duke. What does bother me are your attempts to smear the Ivies (such as your arch posts about why their football seasons don’t start earlier etc.). I applaud your views that there are many excellent schools out there and that a wider net should be cast by parents and students. I just don’t like your sometimes illogical and misleading statements and your attempts to create controversies where there are none.</p>
<p>midatlmom,
- Yes, I agree. </p>
<ol>
<li> I think it is logical and true that athletic transfers for competitive purposes are not rare in Division I athletics (eg, look at the ND quarterback just this past week). Very small numbers of athletic transfers significantly impact the graduation rates. Consider:</li>
</ol>
<p>Stanford’s overall graduation rate is 95%, student-athlete rate is 89%, difference of 6%.
Do you realize that that is equal to only 6 student-athletes in Stanford’s freshman class. </p>
<p>The same huge potential impact of athletic transfers holds true for the other top privates. </p>
<p>Duke (difference of 2% = 2 students)
Northwestern (difference of 3% = 3 students),
Vanderbilt (difference of 9% = 5 students)
Notre Dame (difference of 10% = 9 students) </p>
<p>Are you maybe being a little too quick or harsh in judging the relative graduation rates of student-athletes to the overall student populations at these schools? Frankly, given the nature of highest-level Division I athletics, I find it remarkable how well these schools retain and graduate their student-athletes.</p>
<ol>
<li> I don’t believe the admissions standards for Ivy athletes differ much from the standards applied at the top academic colleges that also offer Division I scholarships. Do you agree or do you really believe that the student-athletes at the top privates (Stanford, Duke, Northwestern, Rice, Vanderbilt, Notre Dame) are significantly different (ie, worse) than those of the non-HYP Ivies?</li>
</ol>