<p>So dontno, where did u go undergrad and what grad school at P. Only ask because I’m trying to figure out where you’re coming from instead of studying for my APs/</p>
<p>@dontno:
these recruited athletes have probably been passionate about their sports, playing since they were very young and practicing very hard to get good enough to be recruited, so they deserve the prestigious acceptances
plus, to be recruited at a top school such as Princeton, they must be academically qualified anyway</p>
<p>back to the point of this thread… :D</p>
<p>i chose princeton over mit, georgia tech, rice, and columbia. turning down columbia was nearly impossible and i’m still not sure i made the right decision.</p>
<p>@ Flare12345:</p>
<p>Did you read anything that I wrote? They’re not “academically qualified.” It’s quite common knowledge that they’re significantly below all academic standards.</p>
<p>I also am quite aware that they’re extremely passionate about their sport and I do respect that. I also starting playing a sport when I was 4 years old, but I don’t expect that passion to win me acceptance to Princeton.</p>
<p>^ Ditto.</p>
<p>The passion or experience of being on a team or all the other qualities that are used to justify most recruited athletes’ low academic performance in admission can be said for virtually any other HS varsity athlete who applies.</p>
<p>I do see that A) colleges want the revenue and national attention that athletic excellence brings and B) athletics do very much contribute to campus culture and pride, but it is simply ridiculous to suggest that there is not a lowered standard for recruited athletes in admission. This is fact and should be separate from the debate of the merits or ethics of having said lower standards.</p>
<p>I’m actually a Princeton alum., so let me chime in:</p>
<p>Many people claim that athletes are “qualified” for Princeton, because Princeton supposedly wouldn’t admit dumb people. Qualified is not a really objective word–on average, athletes in baseball, football, and basketball, on average, have grades, SAT’s, and GPA’s below those of other students. Their grades are also below the grades of MANY students who were rejected. So, based on numbers alone, athletes are not AS qualified as other applicants.</p>
<p>Now, we move on to the subjective factors, like essays. There is no evidence that the essays of athletes were significantly better than those of other applicants. Based on my experience (purely anecdotal, mind you), most athletes in baseball/basketball/fb did not perform as well in the humanities classes that I have taken. Additionally, the fact that they have lower objective statistics would hint that the quality of their essays was equal to those of other applicants at best.</p>
<p>EC’s: athletics do take a big time commitment, so many may make the valid case that athletes have “better” or “more demanding” EC’s. But, remember that there are high school “Varsity” musicians, thespians, etc. And, I would argue that those students did not get “as much” of a leg up as athletes. </p>
<p>Also, most athletes at Princeton can’t be compared to the world-class dancers, musicians, and political activists who we have here. Most of the “elite” athletes in football, basketball, baseball went to large state-schools with the intention of playing professionally. Princeton, has had fewer football players enter the NFL than, say, UT, Ohio State, Florida, etc. On the other, proportionally, many more statesmen have come from Princeton than from most state schools.</p>
<p>Princeton does not give the same benefits to actors/actresses, musicians, and political activists that it gives to athletes. The reasons are many:</p>
<p>A) Athletes can show their talent to the public earlier, so athletes are “cash-cows.” They bring in money from alumni.
B) Athletics have historically been seen in a higher light than other EC’s: note that Cecil Rhodes wanted a mandatory component of the Rhodes scholarship to be athletic ability…but to me, this was indicative of the days before meritocracy, where only “certain sports” were considered athletics, and those sports were dominated by the rich.</p>
<p>From my perspective, MANY, though not all, football players, baseball players, and basketball players padded the bottom portion of the grade distribution. So, if you have been admitted, be glad that there are some athletes. They bring in money for your experiments. Many (though not all) pad the bottom of the grade distribution. And it is a win-win…when they go to jobs on Wall Street with relatively low GPA’s, you can enter a more meritocratic institution such as Med School or Law School or Grad School, which heavily weigh your GPA.</p>
<p>This is a response mostly to echang:</p>
<p>A) Collegiate athletics are covered extensively by the media, especially basketball and football. Thus, there is a certain notoriety and exposure connected to this coverage. However, Princeton, being an Ivy League school, gets almost no exposure and benefits neglibly in this department. Let’s do a quick thought experiment. First, how have you heard of Gonzaga? Basically everyone in the country will answer because of their basketball team. Second, how have you heard of Princeton? Their national championship quality lax program? You heard of Yale because they’ve won the most college football championships? Of course not. You’ve heard of elite academic colleges solely b/c of their academic prestige. They don’t need sports to bolster their reputation and get their name out to the masses.</p>
<p>B) Athletics contribute to campus pride? I somewhat agree with this. My hometown college won a national championship a few years ago and I got incredibly excited. I also got excited when my alma mater (an Ivy) went far in the lax tourney. But does it enliven the culture enough to make lowering the standard acceptable? I’d say no. Not when people start working from 7th grade to go to Princeton or Harvard. People won’t go into a social funk because the women’s basketball team or the golf team sucks this year.</p>
<p>Dontno, athletics bring in more money than other things, because alumni come to them (campus pride usually equals alumni pride here at princeton). it is the nature of sports…you can watch in large groups and talk. so it is an economic thing…as i said, based on this argument, athletes are “cash-cows” or “spectacles” (or…athletes).</p>
<p>I chose Princeton over UPenn, Duke, Northwestern, and others.</p>
<p>(lol, thought I’d mix it up by answering the question)</p>
<p>I will say this again…S is a recruited athlete, #1 in class, 35 ACT, NMSF, etc.
Did his sport help him to get accepted…probably. Is he qualified? ABSOLUTELY!! I don’t know about f/b, bb, bb, but I do know that you are making generalizations that aren’t true…how smart is that???</p>
<p>Nobody is arguing that all athletes are under-qualified compared to other students: they’re saying that many athletes are, and I am not sure how you can deny the fact that academically, recruited athletes tend to perform at a lower level than other students. This is why you see the students with surprisingly low SAT scores and GPAs at Princeton. The disagreement is over whether or not recruited athletes receive an appropriate boost over comparatively higher-qualified academic students.</p>
<p>Many athletes do achieve at a level quite comparable to the rest of the Princeton student body, but you can’t generalize that all athletes achieve at that level academically. And if you aren’t generalizing, then I’m not sure how your example of one academically qualified athlete can be representative of the entire athletic body and counter the previous arguments.</p>
<p>Fair enough. They do have to meet the academic index requirements and I think that some athletes may come in lower than others…those who truly excel at both are just as gifted as someone excelling in music…it is all about passion at Princeton. They don’t dictate what makes you passionate. This thread is no different than saying that all URMs do not have stellar academic credentials…way too broad a generalization.</p>
<p>“Fair enough. They do have to meet the academic index requirements and I think that some athletes may come in lower than others…”</p>
<p>I know many kids from my hs who were recruited at HYPS and other ivies, and their grades barely, in general, were barely enough to make them at top 25%. I know two kids with outrageously low SATs and GPAs who are at Harvard thru sports. One is in football, the other in baseball. The point is that there could be some numbers of athletes who are also smart as the normal Ivy peers, but this sample is far from being the majority.</p>
<p>chose P over B. recruited academic…how unfair is that?!</p>
<p>p.s. i mean no harm i’m just poking fun at the topic’s steady digression.</p>
<p>Columbia, Duke, MIT, CMU, Cornell, Brown</p>