Is The College Admissions Process Broken?

Well, they get in preferentially, but the athletic standards are much higher and the admissions effect much smaller when 200 athletes are admitted in a class of 10k versus a class of 1000 or less.

I know someone who claims that too. Its nonsense

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Doesn’t that already exist with the Harvard Extension School?

Edited to add: someone already beat me to this reveal! :wink:

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The percentage of athletes relative to the whole isn’t really the point, is it? @Thorsmom66 said sports is the biggest hook, which is true. And at large publics, who are D1, it is a much greater hook than it is at Ivies, NESCAC and the like. P5 admissions is very, very forgiving of academic readiness. That’s about the only way I know that a kid with a 3.4 non-rigorous GPA and comparable test score can get into Stanford. The other schools with larger percentages of athletes don’t go down nearly as far. And that’s Stanford, which is a unique school among the P5.

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Tier 1 EC right there.

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Recruited athlete.

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But as others note, athlete winnowing already occurred. 500k might play high school soccer senior year. 100 or fewer might play for the Ivies plus the next year.

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Nonsense meaning its touted as a degree as if the person got a full degree from Harvard. Thats the nonsense

eta- the person I know posted all over the place that they’d “finally reached the academic pinnacle with a degree from Harvard”. Come on


"Extension is Harvard University’s part-time, open-enrollment program, "

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And Yale did add 2 new residential colleges which opened in 2017 at a cost of between $500 to $600 million, kicked started by a $250 million gift. These 2 colleges only added a little over 200 students per class, a drop in the bucket vs the number of high quality applicants.

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Yep, exactly. One of my kids was offered a job at the architecture firm that won the contract to build one of them. My s went in a different direction and didn’t take the job.

And perhaps half are foreign.

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The University of Chicago has more than doubled its undergraduate enrollment over the past several decades. If it can do it in an urban area of Chicago, the Ivies and others could do so as well.

I think it is. We were talking (Up thread) about instate kids knowing or not knowing if they’ll get into their flagship and someone said the athletes get the biggest hook. I don’t think so. At U Texas, for example, the 6% at the top of their hs classes get in, and that’s how many out of 7500 freshmen? Is it way more than the 300 or so instate freshmen athletes? I think so (and some of those athletes can also be part of the 6%).

At the Ivies athletes have to be within 1 standard deviation of the other students so they may let in one or two with a low gpa, but not the whole team. Christian McCaffrey got into Stanford with a 3.4 but from a very competitive private school, and he was also a double legacy, so which hook did they use? (and while he didn’t graduate, I don’t think Stanford considers it a failure that they admitted him).

IMO the athletes at public schools, even at elite ones like Michigan and Texas and Florida, are not bringing the freshman averages down that much, or at all. They might be 100 out of 7500 freshman, 100 or the 500 admitted athletes with lower gpas; many athletes are at the top of their classes in hs, have top test scores, and would have been admitted anyway.

Doubling from a smaller base (apprx 3700 to 7500) is not the same as doubling from 5,500+. Having a model where only 60% of undergrads live on campus vs 80% is a different challenge as well. Plus at least for HY, where the residential college/house system is a core part of the college, we are not just adding beds, but also dining halls, libraries, music rooms, seminar rooms, etc


So even if you could find the land, and somehow kept the construction costs at $250mm/college, you are spending $3.5 billion just for 14 new residential colleges (God knows how much more for classroom, infrastructure, faculty) to accomodate 2,200 new students, still a drop. You could spend less on residential colleges or eliminate that model, but then it wouldn’t be Yale or Harvard.

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Dont blame Princeton. They are increasing class size by up to 200.

This is the real reason they won’t expand classes. They could add thousands of virtual seats, and I am confident there would be plenty of demand for a 100% virtual HYP degree.

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It’s a bit more complicated than that. I think @marlowe1 understands the story better, but I heard that the university had an enrollment dip a few decades ago.

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UT Austin sets the automatic admission threshold to try to fill about 3/4 of the class with automatic admits.

I see. I didn’t appreciate the context. My fault. I still agree with who said “biggest hook”. Usually when they say that, they mean the most powerful in terms of how much uplift you get from it. If the context is % of the student body who get it, then that almost goes without saying. If it’s about how powerful the hook, it is its most powerful in the P5 setting.

McCaffrey doesn’t represent the low bar at Stanford. They’ve admitted kids from my circles who didn’t have legacy or competitive private school with similar GPAs. But 4*WR recruits don’t grow on trees.

It’s not your opinion, it’s math. And, of course they aren’t because it’s like pouring a pint of bleach into an Olympic sized swimming pool. Also, at P5 schools, the top of the class, top test score kid would be the exception to the rule and really depends on the school you’re talking about. I doubt there is a school in the AP T 25 whose football or basketball team more than a smattering, if any. “Admitted anyway” is a lower standard, and still in many of the sports many more would not have been admitted. It’s a different animal.

If the overall point is that we shouldn’t blame sports for in-state kids not having access to their flagship, then yes, I’d agree there are other reasons more worthy of consideration.

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My older kids did not like the TV show as much as my youngest (probably because they had read the books long before watching the show), but I thought the TV series was also clever and well-done
 Loved Kate & her bucket!

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