Recruited athletes go through a largely different process. Athletes are typically prescreened, so athletes who are unlikely to be admitted do not officially apply and do not appear in the admit rate stats. I’m surprised it’s as low as a 70% admit rate, with the prescreen (the stats I see list it as 80%, not 70%). This does not mean it’s open admission for any academic 4 (mediocre stat) athlete who does apply. It instead means that athletes have a selective admission process, but that selection is largely done earlier, before the official application.
The Ivy League conference permits athletes to have average AI stats 1 SD lower than the average for rest of the class, and in the Harvard sample athletes did indeed have AI stats ~1 SD lower than the rest of the class. This translates to roughly 1 lower academic score. For example 15% of admitted athletes had 4 academic, and 18% of non-ALDC admits had a 3 academic. The admit rate is not important for conference rules. What is important is the distribution of AI stats across matriculating students.
I think Duke (ACC), Northwestern (Big 10), Vanderbilt (SEC), and Notre Dame would disagree.
Johns Hopkins has national athletes for both its men’s and women’s D1 lacrosse teams.
Rice plays D1 FBS football against quality teams like Tulane, FAU, UCF, and Cincinnati (alma mater of the Kelce brothers). It’s even played in bowl games in the past 2 seasons. Rice baseball has also made 23 straight NCAA tournament appearances with 3 College World Series tournament appearances and 1 national championship.
One can argue that 8 USNWR top-20 schools (UC Berkeley, UCLA, Stanford, Duke, Northwestern, Vanderbilt, Notre Dame, and Rice) prioritize sports with nationally recognized teams more than the 8 Ivy League schools. The Ivy League schools prioritize sports more than MIT, Cal Tech, U Chicago, and possibly Johns Hopkins.
The average can be 1 SD lower. A minority of non-athletes are technically allowed to have lower stats than athletes, so long as the average is higher. However, the result is that the lowest stat kids are overwhelming athletes. In the Harvard sample,
The bottom 2% academic of the admitted class had an academic 4 or worse. Of that bottom 2%, 89% were athletes
The bottom 25% academic of the admitted class had an academic 3 or worse. Of that bottom 25%, 32% were athletes
The remaining 75% of the class had 1-2 academic. 3% were athletes.
Athletes had a median score of 3. Non-athletes had a median score of 2.
He didn’t write the Atlantic article, he just quoted from it grabbing something that is a good looking sound bite but lacks nuance. His comments and recommendations show little to no understanding of what is required to craft a competitive athletic team but his exception for “NCAA D1 football, basketball, and track” does show an understanding of the impact on schools if they tried to eliminate avenues often used as paths to improve URM representation. After all, those sports skew disproportionately African American. Changing the process for those sports would be a hard no in this environment as he well understands by including track and field, a large rostered non-revenue sport along with football and basketball.
His solution is poorly thought out as the net effects of his suggestions would negatively impact African Americans, remove a unifying structure within the school, and possibly reduce alumni engagement while ignoring the fact that athletics have been important to many of these schools for 150 years and are seen as foundational parts of the character of many of the elite schools which we all love to discuss on CC. The Atlantic article actually mentions and acknowledges this fact as well as pointing out that “athletes at elite schools are far from brain-dead jocks—they work long, grueling hours to balance their academic workload with games, practices, and travel, and have to maintain a certain grade point average to stay eligible to play their sport.”
The same author wrote an interesting article arguing that Math beyond trigonometry should also be eliminated from admissions decisions for anyone not a STEM major. That would surely drive some interesting changes in the admissions process and composition of MIT classes if implemented.
Athletics at all of these schools do not affect admits in any meaningful manner and this has been pointed out many times. Typically, the stats of athletes is not markedly different that the class as a whole (a few sports excepted).
Admissions challenges at all of these schools are driven by application numbers, not the admittance of URMs or any ALDC preferences. Eliminate all preferences at Harvard and the acceptance rate will go up maybe a point from 4% to 5%, that is not a disproportionate effect on anything involving any typical applicants chances of getting into Harvard. They still aren’t getting in. The same holds for any of the schools that we are talking about here on CC.
Most people think of sports strength in terms of the revenue sports they are familiar with such as football and basketball. Highly selective colleges tend to do better in the revenue losing sports. These sports tend to be more popular among wealthy high schools.
The Director’s Cup scores colleges based on a ranking across ~20 sports, including non-revenue sports. A 1st place (won Div I national championship) is worth 100 points, 2nd place is 90 points, 3rd place is ~82 points, etc. The final rankings among all Div I colleges last year were as follows. Stanford is in a class by itself, but plenty of other highly selective college also did quite well.
1 . Stanford – 1412 points (1st in men’s gymnastics, 1st women’s rowing, 1st women’s WP)
10. USC – 1048 points (1st in beach VB. 2nd in men’s WP, 2nd women’s golf)
14. UCLA – 1000 points (1st in women’s soccer, 1st in men’s VB, 2nd in beach VB)
16. Duke – 978 points (2nd in men’s lacrosse)
20. Notre Dame – 884 points (1st in men’s lacrosse, 1st in fencing)
22. Berkeley – 833 points (1st in men’s WP)
26. Princeton – 799 points (2nd in fencing, 3rd in women’s rowing, 3rd in women’s WP)
30. Northwestern – 705 points (1st in women’s lacrosse, 2nd in women’s FH)
41. Harvard – 579 points (4th in fencing)
MIT has the largest athletics program in D3, and their teams have won over 20 national championships. Athletics seems to bring alot to MIT without negatively impacting the school or its admissions.
D3 is also heavy with highly selective schools with JHU in a league of its own this past year.
JHU
Middlebury
NYU
Tufts
Emory
Williams
Amherst
MIT
WashU
Chicago
CMS
Carleton
All in the top 20. Sports are very important to these schools and they have no difficulty maintaining their academic standards along with their sports programs.
Basically, no one attending these schools fails to graduate. So it’s almost a guarantee that anyone including athletes will be able to successfully maintain their academic standards once they are admitted.
Catching up on this thread after a few days, but I had to highlight this, because this sentiment is not just wrong, BUT CAN ALSO BE INCREDIBLY DAMAGING.
One of my children was not remotely challenged in elementary and middle school. This was not us parents pushing him. It was him needing to suck up knowledge at a crazy pace and us bewildered parents trying to accommodate it. Examples include giving him money at age 7 for a book fair, expecting him to buy a cartoon book, and him coming home with Algebra for Dummies. We laughed of course, but were shocked a few weeks later when he showed us he could solve multiple equations with multiple unknowns. And the following year when he discovered his own proof of the Pythagorean theorem.
As an attempt to keep his mind fed, we ended up at a Davidson Institute weekend retreat. Davidson was created to target enrichment programs for students in the top 0.1% of ability, because the founder believed that these kids often weren’t served well in their local school system. Looking at it in terms of a bell curve, these are kids that are at least +3SD above the norm.
And that weekend at Davidson was eye opening for us. We live in an upper-middle income town with a very good public school system. The average SAT score, even before test optional, was above 1300. Let’s call that a +2SD school, for reasons I will explain later.
In contrast, because the Davidson programs are highly subsidized due to the founder’s generosity, most of the families there attending there were relatively poor, and their kids attended underperforming schools throughout the nation. These were +3SD kids who were attending schools where it was likely that nobody else was remotely close to their ability.
Were these bright kids the superstars in their school system? Often, no. Because they were constantly bored and had few friends, they often underperformed in their school system. Some had behavioral issues. It was an incredible waste of talent.
What we found during that weekend retreat were dozens of families who had attended for many years, where the children were the closest of friends despite only seeing each other for a weekend a year, because it was the first set of intellectual peers they had met, where they could interact with others at their pace.
I still remember during a parent breakout session that a mom, whose child was attending the first time, broke down in tears because it was the first time she had seen her son happy and interacting well with others.
I have a hypothesis that students can only really thrive when they are within 2SD of the class mean. If a child is +2SD (or -2SD for that matter) of the class mean, then a few percent of students are likely to be intellectual and social peers. The Davidson students we met didn’t have that at all.
My child and I both came away with a renewed appreciation of what we had. Because my child attended a +2SD school system, he was within 2SD of the school mean, and there were some very bright students in his class that challenged each other. And socially, he did fine as well.
This was a long post, but I hope it conveyed that bright kids don’t automatically “do just fine” without having a peer group.
I understand what you’re saying here. When my daughter was young, she was placed in some counseling group with kids who had attention issues. I was so pissed off, I went to her school and had a word with her teacher. After meeting me, the teacher realized she misidentified my daughter and she was immediately removed from the group. It turned out she wasn’t being challenged in her classes. She had already caught on to concepts the kids were trying to pick up on. So it caused her to talk a lot and not pay attention to the teacher. Once the teacher realized this, she gave my daughter extra things to keep her challenged. Thank goodness I went to school and advocated for her.
But there’s no reason why they can’t form these small groups of bright children within a school. If they are forming groups with kids with attention issues, they can provide groups with kids that need to be academically challenged. To take an entire county of select high school kids and dump them in one high school is just very elitest.
I was in a gifted program myself, but we were part of a bigger school. Our school had 600 kids in my class, and 200 of us followed a special STEM program and 99% of us went Ivy or were college-bound. We we considered the brightest kids in our county. But the kids who werent in our program still got to experience the great teachers and resources we had in separate classes. I just dont like how TJ takes kids like me and puts them in entire school with only them being allowed certain resources especially since they are a public school. That is my main point.
Also, if this makes sense, why don’t they do it the other way. Test kids and put the worse scoring kids in one school. Because there’s something that sounds ethically wrong about this. But somehow, it’s not ethically wrong the other way. Anyway, I don’t want to belabor this point. It’s not something easy to discuss in person, let alone online.
By the way, I like your profile avatar. I use read stacks of Calvin and Hobbs when I was young.
These are all distinguished academic institutions that gave guaranteed admission to athletes I personally know. These were not top students at all. One I would describe as being on the border between regular and average excellent. Another of them struggled to crack 1,000 in the SAT (was told they had to crack it to get the guarantee.) The other test-prepped to get above 1100. These students did not take the most challenging classes either. One of these students (who went to Stanford) did not take a single class that wasn’t a regular class.
MIT requires its athletes to come in with an outstanding academic profile - they aren’t letting kids in with 1200 SATs and middling gpa’s (like I see with the Ivies and some other top schools). Any recruited athlete I know of to MIT is an outstanding student in addition to their athletic talent. But that isn’t true at some other top schools where they are admitting students that wouldn’t get a second look absent their sport (most would be on the auto reject pile). And that’s OK - they will all graduate and be successful - I just don’t like the pretense that the academic bar is the same because it isn’t.
Do you know that many schools have eliminated anything resembling gifted programs and/or break out groups for kids of different levels?
To say athletes have guaranteed admission is not accurate, see cinnamon1212’s post above. After several years of recruiting, pre-reads, and a highly competitive selection process, coaches (with approval from admissions) make verbal offers. Chris Guttentag at Duke personally vets and approves every single male and female basketball potential recruit (after some degree of winnowing by the coach). The ‘acceptance’ rate throughout this process is in the single digits at many of the popular schools…thousands of athletes are vying for each and every slot a coach has, every year. Once the athlete has a coach supported slot in hand, or NLI, admission rate is very high.
Again, ask yourself, why do the schools continue to support this process?
I agree. But I generally don’t see people on CC disagreeing with this.
I have a nephew attending UT Austin. He knew Maalik Muphy, the QB who just transferred from Texas to Duke. Maalik is a very bright young man with high school grades that made him a good fit at Texas. Based on what he told my nephew, he would not have been admitted to Duke as a regular student. It wouldn’t even be a conversation. However, he is 6’ 5" and 240 lbs, is in terrific shape and has NFL level arm talent, so he will get a Duke degree.
If he graduates. That wouldn’t be due to lack of any academic ability, but a lot of football and basketball players leave before graduation to enter the draft. Many basketball players are one and done - zero pretense of being a student athlete, they are hired guns.
Why is top 0.01% athletic talent less important than top 0.01% math talent? Or 0.01% English talent? etc, etc, etc?
If schools are supposed to look for the best of the best of the best, with honors - why wouldn’t schools that value well rounded educations (Liberal Arts, natch!) look to have a well rounded student body which contains the best of all areas of talent?
And why wouldn’t everyone want the most athletically talented students to also be able to take advantage of some of the best educational programs in the country?
True for basketball, but not football. Football players have to have used all of their college eligibility before the start of the next college season to enter the draft.
I won’t speak for blossom, but I don’t think anyone on this thread disagrees that some proportion of athletes wouldn’t have been accepted to their institution without the athletic hook.
IMO the far more serious issue is student-athletes who are in college who are basically illiterate. That should never happen. It doesn’t at the highly rejective schools, but is not uncommon elsewhere.
Most colleges are education-primary places. Academics are the reason for their existence, and what they claim to provide, hence a focus on academics for admission. Those with extraordinary musical ability are often encouraged to attend a conservatory for the same reason; those with extraordinary athletic ability may be able to join junior ( or regular) academies, such as soccer or baseball, if they wish to focus primarily on that. The purpose of most universities, even at a place like U Alabama, is not to create a football academy.