Gifted article on how college admissions skew youth sports in the US, unlike other places.
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This thread is crazy. People really donât understand why colleges may want leaders and athletes and extroverts over those with simply the highest test scores.
Colleges should want people who are successful in life, not just ones that can get high GPAs and have great discipline. What percentage of graduates of any school go on to do really uniquely great things?
EQ is extremely valuable.
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I took several days to read through this thread and havenât seen my pet peeve on admissions on here. It does dovetail with some of the concepts of âable to do the workâ vs âadmissibleâ, but I would like to see a revamp of the marketing by schools.
Buying names off CollegeBoard and other websites and then essentially recruiting to reject is very problematic and increases the âwhy not meâ phenomenon.
Imagine if every email sent to a student had a banner at the top which said:
This is an advertisement. University purchased your email from CollegeBoard/name of other entity. This is not an individual recruitment message. University has not evaluated your admissibility and the receipt of this communication does not imply you are admissible to University
I think it would help students truly understand that University of Chicago isnât ârecruiting them hardâ. University of Chicago doesnât give two licks about you - they just want your application.
Universities could continue to send all the communication they want, but kids could tell the bulk from the non bulk (if there even is any non bulk communication).
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For a thread nominally about on college admissions, it has a turn to focus on sports.
There is an argument that has been made somewhere that, for the revenue sports, we should admit what is true â that college football and basketball are farm teams for the pros and we should treat the players as pros and not students. There are a few schools where they actually are students (and they are largely the focus of this tangent). We should drop the pretense that these are student-athletes and just have a second category of hired warriors.
I would have guessed that the Ivies probably are not making money from even the revenue sports. (I could be wrong here, so correct me). And, Iâd be stunned if the D3 schools make money from the revenue sports. And none of them make money overall as they have to support hockey, crew, fencing and soccer etc.
But, I suspect that they believe alumni donations are tied to having the sports team and doing well enough.
It does seriously distort admissions at small LACs like Amherst and Williams that field the full array of sports teams with small student bodies. It means that a substantial portion of the student body (32% or 33% for Amherst and Williams respectively).
Whether this distortion is a good idea or a bad one is a different question. The answer follows from organizational strategy, fund-raising needs, etc. I donât know enough to form a strong opinion.
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IMO and just from what I see in my small neck of the woods, the âGiftedâ program is broken. When I first started teaching it was truly, more or less, the top 2%. Those kids were very smart, but often needed support because they were quirky, struggled with perfectionism, etc.
Now it has morphed into every early reader whose parents will pay a private psychologist to officially label their kid special. Most of them were early readers because they had a home life to support that. By 3rd of 4th grade, the other kids catch up. I have high school students who are labeled gifted and do not want to do anything. The schools are on board because gifted kids are considered ESE and generate more funding.
On the athletics and admission, we had a few kids from my sonâs school who were told they had spots on the team at some rather selective schools. They had the âsigning dayâ and everything. Then they did not get it. It was devastating for the kids and families. It was also really shady because these kids committed and stopped looking at other options because they were led to believe the coach who was recruiting them was being straightforward when really he was trying to âholdâ players.
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With the first kid, we got all excited by the mailers. By the second, they went straight to recycling.
Thanks for sharing your experiences with gifted programsâŠseems dysfunctional!
Generally coaches arenât shady (itâs a small world)âŠverbal commits are not binding, on either party. So things donât always work out admissions wise. Not to mention, some students misunderstand what the coach actually said. Even with NLIs, things can go bad. Athletic recruiting is difficult, takes years, and outcomes are uncertainâŠitâs stressful for all involved, until an admission is in hand.
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One in particular, I think the coach should be fired. I know the family and they went through the process with an older child. They werenât wishful thinking or naive.
College football players only need to have completed 3 years to be draft eligible - I think that was a change implemented a few years ago. In any case, at most âeliteâ schools - apart from a handful of places like Stanford and Notre Dame - itâs a moot point. Their players arenât going to be headed to the NFL anyway.
Many schools have data that support this. Additionally, in the past several years we have seen Brown, Dartmouth, and Stanford eliminate some sports only to reinstate them after significant alumni uproar. And uproar is an understatement.
Generally, the highly rejective schools spend every dollar of their athletic revenues. Once can see the nitty gritty (revenues and costs by sport at a given schools, coaches salaries, etc) at the Equity in Athletics site: Equity in Athletics Most recent Harvard athletic dept data is ~$33M in revenues, ~$33M in expenses.
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Nerdier, more academic, kids often donât like âbroâ culture that still exists in a lot of finance, PE, etc. where TONS of $$ goesâŠThey also are more likely to go in to academia and not think $ is the end goal
I was just looking up a small PE firm for work purposes and happened to look at staff. 100% male except the EA. Yes, really. (And I didnât look closely but I bet they all went to same 3-4 schools). I knew some one (admittedly 15 years ago) that worked in PE and 100% of staff went to Penn.
To me this shows low emotional / social intelligence - These folks often only want to be around people with same educational background and gender 
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I doubt this is the case. Iâve worked in places like this⊠it reflects the amount of resources (time, money, staff) that an organization is prepared to put into hiring and retention. Itâs a LOT cheaper to refer âfriends of friendsâ than it is to create and support a professional recruiting team which casts a wide net, focuses specifically on under-represented populations, creates learning and development programs to maintain high performance, etc. Just a dollar and cents calculation.
Iâm not defending it-- but it isnât about low social intelligence- itâs about having profits flow back to the investors and partners, not reinvested in infrastructure.
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Not UC specifically, but we did apply to a few schools because of their mailer, and a app fee waiver. Figure if they needed S24âs stats to do whatever, as long as itâs free to us, weâll play.
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Colleges should want people who are positive contributors in life, not just the ones likely to make oodles of money so they can in turn donate back to their alma matter.
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Who is more successful- the person who invented the stent, the person who skillfully does 500 stent procedures a year, the nurse who took the patientâs vitals during a routine exam and flagged the cardiac activity as problematic, the person who designed the operating room where the procedure is done, the patient who recovers from the procedure and goes on to write their fourth best-selling novel? Arenât all of these successful people???
Colleges want the people who fit with their own mission, as THEY have defined it. Liberty looks for different things than Julliard which looks for different things than BYU. You want to be the person telling a college their mission stinks? Go for it.
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As I mentioned in my first post in this thread, itâs hard to generalize on this.
There are the kinds of places out there that recruit this very type very heavily.
The hardcore math/CS kids who would be shoe-ins for the very top graduate programs.
Iâve seen some of them tout the number of IMO and IOI winners they have on staff in their recruitment materials.
âWork where your mind mattersâ is one of the recruitment slogans you could see, and this ethos permeates the field.
Itâs a whole different world. The opposite of bro culture.
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The hospitalâs CEO. Duh! 
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I said often occurs, not always. Of course there is a variety of companies, but the bro culture definitely sill exists, and that skews things IME. AND these surveys are of people that are NOW adults and older so really that is retrospective so may look different in 10 years (I sure hope it does!).
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can you elaborate on âbroâ culture?
Success comes in all forms. Thatâs why I think diversity of students is underrated on here. IQ, EQ, leaders, musicians, athletes, whatever. Kids are not just GPAs and SATs.
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