@makemesmart: But defining “academically superior school” in terms that work for everyone is difficult. If one looks at college as somewhat vocational — in that it prepares you for career…I could easily make the argument that attending Temple for a marketing degree is as good if not better than going to U Penn/Wharton. And I’m saying that as a Penn grad who works in marketing.
It’s a tough call, and a very personal one, IMO. I happen to be a big fan of the more selective non-Ivy D1 schools like Duke/Northwestern/Stanford/ND/Michigan/UNC etc. (yes, I realize that it’s a wide range of admit rates in that group). All/most of the perks of a P5 school with all/most of the “prestige” (quotes intentional, because gosh I hate that word) and rigor of the Ivies.
@bopper What’s wrong with wanting both? My kid is a Div 1 athlete and wanted to and now attending an Ivy powerhouse both in athletics and academics. I think for an athlete to become good enough, especially in a niche sport, to be recruited into an HYP Ivy school, he/she must have a passion for the sport to become the best. In the same token, academically they would also need to be equally as qualified to gain admissions into an Ivy. So using D1 as a way to get into an Ivy isn’t the same as saying a free pass. I know of many top athletes in my kid’s sport, some who ranked 1st in the nation with decent academics who were turned down by an Ivy because of his grades.
@cleoforshort For a banded recruit you’re right since the athletes in the first and second band would not be able to be admitted as a NARP. However for a non banded sports, there may be a slight leeway in the academics as a recruited athlete, but the same academic rigor is expected from the applicants as the NARP. Depending on the Ivy, the mandated AI differs between the schools. ie, a top athlete with near perfect board scores and almost perfect gpa was turned down by an HYP coach because the athlete had a C during his freshmen year. However, that same athlete was recruited by another Ivy other than HYP. Practically all of the athletes in my kid’s team had near perfect or perfect gpa, SAT and SAT 2 scores of above 750’s in every section. In a school where the admission rate is less than 6%, being a recruit would certainly bend the odds in your favor of admissions. However, it certainly will not bend anything if you do not have the grades.
@starwars1 Yes I agree to an extent, but non banded (non Title 9) sports usually do not have many pulls (sometimes just one pull per team) so the coach would probably pick the best athlete from those who were “admittable” since I imagine it’s in the coach’s job description to get the most talent per pull.
I think @starwars1 is overstating the academic qualifications needed to complete at an Ivy, at least in some of the non banded sports. All of those athletes as a group need to be one standard deviation from the student body ON AVERAGE. But the minimum AI for any individual athlete can be lower. I doubt if many sports at many Ivies will take someone with the absolute minimum. But I don’t think most teams will have almost every athlete with 750s across the board. I know of several athletes with ACT scores under 30, especially for high athletic recruits.
S had a C first semester in an AP class as a junior. The response he got from coaches was that it wasn’t a deal breaker but he should to try to get a B this semester. He does have an overall high GPA with a rigorous schedule. But one C isn’t necessarily a killer.
@cleoforshort my experience in talking to ivy coaches is that they have slots for every spot on the team. They have an average AI they need to hit, which isn’t necessarily the same target for the school overall. To hit that, there were also minimum standards admissions had, like minimum GPA, SAT/ACT, schedule rigor, etc. No team relied on any walk ons in S’s sport. Every spot was slotted with a recruit. This may not be the same for all sports But it was for every single Ivy in S’sport.
Since they are looking at an average to hit, there is a difference on each athlete’s individual target. 4 year starter Power 5 level athlete near minimum scores. Developmental recruit who may never play much needs near perfect scores.
@dadof4kids In my D’s sport there is one pull per year on the Ivy teams she looked at. She was more than Ivy qualified academically but not athletically for that one spot. I’m pretty comfortable saying that the kid who got the pull was probably a lot better at the sport but there is a small chance she was as academically gifted. Coaches, even Ivy coaches will recruit the best athlete they can get away with academically because that’s what their jobs depend on - winning. D hit the sweet spot as far as choosing a school, great academics and a strong team that she was able to compete with. D was actually deciding between two sports and was told by at least four coaches for her two sports that they wanted her but couldn’t use their pull, however if she got in the school she would be on the team and compete. Once she made her choice she was contacted by a service academy coach to see if she would change her mind and go there. She said “no thank you.”
Part of the trick of having a child play a college sport (if they truly want to play and not just use the sport to get into a school) is to find a team where they will actually get playing time. If you are passionate about your sport then you want to be in a place where you will compete
We consider D very lucky since she started the sport she’s currently playing during her Sophomore year in HS and never participated outside of school or took lessons, and she went to the NCAAs this year as a Freshman - after a big surgery in August and rehabbing until February.
Relevant to the question of how many likely letter slots or pulls or whatever in the Ivy, the league limits itself to a max of 230 per year, per school, according to published reports. This number is derived from taking the travel rosters in each “Ivy championship” sport that the school sponsors and multiplying by 1.4, then dividing by 4 (which iirc comes from the Ivy Common Agreement, the governing document for the conference). If a school does not sponsor all Ivy championship sports (I believe there are 33), then their max number is reduced accordingly. That said, the available public reporting tells us that no Ivy regularly uses all of the available likely letter slots, with Brown and Yale being the most stingy over the last several years. Within that max number, each school can allocate the available likely letter slots as it sees fit, with the exception of football where each school is limited to (and virtually always uses) 30 per year, which is more than the number suggested by the formula, 21.7. So right off the bat, an AD has to make up 8 slots from other sports, even if the school would be willing to allocate the maximum number allowed. When you add that to the fact that each school is going to favor different sports in its allocation (Cornell wrestling, Columbia baseball, etc) then it is not hard to see how the discrepancy between @cleoforshort’s one slot per team and @dadof4kids slot for each spot on the team develops.
The same phenomenon accounts for the widely divergent stats we see posted as necessary to be recruited in the Ivy. You have to remember that outside of football, basketball and men’s hockey, all of the remaining likely letter recruits are dropped in the same academic bucket. If a particular school wants to take a bunch of relatively dumb tennis players it can do that, but it needs to limit itself to only taking really smart track guys or golfers, for example. It is just how the system is set up.
Also, fwiw, “banded recruits” I think refers to football recruits. All recruits are Title IX recruits, as Title IX applies independent of the NCAA or the Ivy Common Agreement.
@starwars1 Of course you can do both…the original post was “Being treated like a rock star athlete” vs “athlete at Ivy”…so really it is what is important to you…I would imagine in the long run (unless you are NFL/NBAetc caliber athlete) that the education is better in the long run.
But I think we have to consider that the OP was talking about Michigan…which I think most people would consider a very good school…#28 on current UNWR list. So how much of a compromise (in terms of education) are we talking about?
We were at a meeting recently for running and the Ivy coach said they like to average 700’s on SAT and subject tests and want kids with A- and up grades. This person coached a certain type of runner and he said he got 3 slots a year, to be included with the larger recruiting class for that year, so he got 3 slots out of 15 man team or whatever. They try to balance out the whole team so they have that average I guess, but mostly kids with the stats above were OK with admissions.
My son is considering a mix of schools of various levels of selectivity and sports levels at the moment. It’s an interesting process.
“You have to remember that outside of football, basketball and men’s hockey, all of the remaining likely letter recruits are dropped in the same academic bucket. If a particular school wants to take a bunch of relatively dumb tennis players it can do that, but it needs to limit itself to only taking really smart track guys or golfers, for example. It is just how the system is set up.”
I do not believe this is correct. There is a target AI for each team. If a particular school wants to take a relatively dumb tennis player then they will have to simultaneously recruit a high-stats tennis player to compensate.
By the way, Ivy tennis is weak relative to the top D1s (except maybe for Columbia men).
@tanbiko, yes, each team is presumed by most of us to be given a team AI target by the AD’s office. But outside of football, basketball and men’s hockey those targets are set by the individual school/AD. So Brown, for example can set a relatively low AI for tennis recruits, but then would have to offset that with a higher target AI for other sports. That’s the point.