MIT recruitment is not as sure a thing as Ivy slots/likely letters.
One case I am personally aware of in a sport at MIT other than crew:
Recruiter was asked how many recruits would be highlighted to Admissions and how many roster spots he was seeking to fill. Answer was 21 recruits being highlighted with the objective of filling 9 roster spots. (he ended up getting 9 recruits).
One way to look at that is the overall MIT admit rate is 7-8% and the admit rate that year for that sport was about 43%.
DISCLAIMER: Anecdotes are not facts
In any case, you can do your own research by going to the MIT webpage for any sport you are interested in and reading the short bios of the team members. High school awards and achievements are usually listed.
In NESCAC, there are both slots and tips, which vary to some decree by sport and year. But generally, there are a total of 14 slots for football, for example. In contrast, the Ivies issue likely letters. Between the two, a likely letter creates a far better certainty of admissions, although some NESCAC coaches, like E.J. Mills at Amherst, have a very strong track record in admitting athletes given slots.
MIT has neither, although coaches’ support is taken into account. I know of 1 academic high-performer, who played both football and Lacrosse, who was admitted to MIT, while a similarly situated applicant was rejected.
If you want the best of both worlds (D3 sport and Ivy engineering decree), try Bard, which has a joint 5-year program with Columbia, where you graduate with an undergraduate decree from Bard as well as an engineering degree from Columbia.
The two kids I know at MIT were both stellar students. I am talking top couple kids in the class for GPA and test scores at two different well respected high schools, meaning 2300 ish SATs and 4.0 type unweighted gpas. I know one was a national merit semi finalist. I don’t believe either had any national or international awards. One kid had qualified and rowed in a two man at nationals the year (or two) before his senior year.
I don’t have the granular details about recruiting at MIT that @fenwaypark does, other than to say that reputationally crew seems to be one of the few sports where the coaches have some regular pull with admissions. Even in that case, one of the two kids I know there is one of my son’s best friends, and I know he was sweating it out before the ED results date. I know his recruiter had repeatedly told him that they had done what they could, but admissions always has the final word.
Others have disagreed with me, but this is the way it has been explained at an Ivy sports camp.
Each coach has a certain number of slots. The recruits who are granted these slots may or may not get a likely letter. LLs are up to the Admissions Office, coaches often plead for them in cases where recruits are also being courted by athletic scholarship schools. Coaches realize LLs are coveted because of the comfort they provide.
If a coach’s list of recruits has more names than the number of slots allocated, an eyebrow or two may be raised in the Admissions Office, just before the Admissions Office calls the coach to get the number right. (This is my opinion, they did not say this at the camp). For those who do not get a slot, their athletic achievements are a nice EC.
^ I agree with that. The number of slots, or ‘LL eligible’ recruits is tightly controlled by the league and the admin of each school. These supported athletes are the ones that are counted toward the Academic Index that must meet the standards dictated by the league.
Whether or not admissions decides to send the actual Likely Letter seems to be sport/school dependent. I know some schools/sports that automatically send the LL to all supported recruits. Others seem to want some indication that the recruit is weighing a scholarship offer before issuing. Why admissions doesn’t just send the letter to all supported recruits is beyond me.
A second tier of “soft-support”, not included as part of the formal number of supported athletes would really undermine the whole process. As fenwaypark said, it can be a strong EC that might help a highly qualified applicant. I have heard of Ivy coaches writing rec letters to go along with a student’s ap, and some of those students were admitted. But IMO, that is not a supported athlete, that’s a kid with a good EC to go along with a very strong application.
@novicemom26, if you peruse the first couple pages of this thread, there are links and citations to the Ivy common agreement which sets out what the conference policy is on support for recruits. It is a complicated system, but basically every year each school is permitted to offer a certain number of athletes support through admissions (what @fenwaypark is referring to as a slot and what others of us refer to as likely letters). Each athlete who is supported is eligible to receive a “probalistic communication”’ or what is more commonly called a likely letter. In that sense, it is probably most accurate to talk about support meaning that a recruit is “likely letter eligible”, because there are always going to be situations like those laid out by @Swimkidsdad where the timing of the recruiting process just doesn’t allow for the issuance of a letter before the “real” admissions cycle begins. In addition, it appears from what is reported here that in certain sports certain schools don’t always issue likely letters, even though their supported recruits are eligible to receive one by league rule. By contrast, in my son’s sport, football, likely letters are issued as a matter of course. So it appears that the issuance of a physical letter is dependent in part on the idiosyncrasies of the individual admissions offices.
All that said, the idea that there is some intermediate level of support available, what you refer to as “softer coach support”, is directly contrary to the express language in the Ivy Common Agreement and would undercut the whole AI/likely letter system.
@Ohiodad51, hmm. Looking at this process, it looks like an Ivy team could undercut the system if an adcom is willing to admit what are essentially a bunch of walk-ons.
@PurpleTitan - Precisely. Which is why I think most of us doubt it happens. Several schools have had pretty well publicized issues with admissions/the powers that be not utilizing the league allotment of likely letter eligible slots in the smaller sports (Yale and Brown recently). Can you imagine the stink those schools would raise if other schools were not only using their allowed allotment, but exceeding it?
I am curious to know what that issue with Brown was.
Brown made an institutional decision a few years ago to move from 225 slots to 205 slots. That objective has been achieved. Each year the total number of slots is allocated among teams according to factors such as how many roster spots need to be filled as a result of graduation/attrition, W-L record, post-season play, and fundraising.
Brown uses the term “slots” because every admit, athlete or not, is “likely-letter eligible”, and only recruited athletes are granted slots.
I agree with Ohiodad51 that Ivy League sports programs are lucky if admissions will allow them the league quota of recruits, and if anything schools will tend to under the allowable number.
Here’s an article about Yale which estimates that school only recruits about 180 athletes a year. It could have gone up since as the new president seems more sports-friendly but still is likely to be well under what the league allows. The Yale dean of admissions says no Ivy League school uses the full number.
Both Brown and Yale made an institutional decision to issue fewer athletic likely letters, or in your terms use less slots, for recruits than the number allowed by the league. This has lead to at least a perception that in some of the smaller sports Brown and Yale have operated at a competitive disadvantage to other members of the league. Whether this is true, I don’t know. I do recall reading an article or two to that effect in the Brown and Yale papers. Don’t know if others have done the same, as I never looked to hard for this info. It was not really an issue in my son’s sport because football (along with men’s basketball and hockey) operate under slightly different rules and have identified numbers of supportable recruits.
Also, FWIW, I try not to use the term slot with reference to the Ivy League for two reasons. One, in my son’s sport all of the schools talk in terms of likely letters, not slots. More importantly though, there is a great deal of emphasis on the terms tips and slots on this board with regard to NESCAC recruiting, and I think there is the potential to confuse people who are maybe not quite as versed in this process, something I think that should be avoided.
@bluewater2015, thank you for that article. I was trying to find the figure for the hard cap on slots or “student athlete seats”–these are the terms used in the article–and there it is! 230.
PS. If the article is correct in quoting an expert as saying that Harvard and Princeton are estimated to be offering 200-205 slots per year, then that would put Brown in the same ballpark. Also, looking at the timing of the article, 2013, and the fact that Brown’s move from 225 to 205 slots was part of the 2014-19 five year plan, it seems that Brown was catching up rather than leading on this issue.
One last point. To the best of my knowledge, the total number of athletes who can be supported through admissions is dependent on the number of sports sponsored by the particular school. Since some of the schools offer fewer sports than others (Some have sprint football, some have lightweight crew, some have equestrian, Dartmouth has sailing and Nordic skiing, etc.). I therefore do not believe it is accurate to say that all Ivy schools can support 230 athletes. This is another reason why men’s hockey is an anomaly. Those Ivy schools who do play varsity hockey, Brown, Cornell, Dartmouth, Harvard, Princeton and Yale, actually play in the ECAC, not the Ivy League.
Varsity men’s volleyball is another sport that is played by some Ivies (Harvard and Princeton) but in the EIVA rather than the Ivy League conference. That’s a good question of how the Ivy League regulates numbers of recruited athletes in sports that are not Ivy League sports.
c. These rules apply to
(1) Every varsity, freshman and sub-varsity athlete and team (whether or not in a sport that is an Ivy round-robin sport) engaged in intercollegiate sports and officially sponsored by more than one Ivy institution or listed as a championship or emerging sport by the NCAA; [Council, spring 2010] and,
(2) Every other Ivy athlete or team participating in Ivy round-robin or championship competition officially sponsored by the Group.
So the rules clearly cover ECAC hockey, and skiing, for example.
In fact, the Ivy Manual lists the varsity sports offered by more than one Ivy instituition as of 2011-2012 as follows:
The following sports are offered at the varsity level by at least one Ivy institution during the 2011-2012 academic year:
Archery
Baseball
Basketball
Cross Country
Diving
Equestrian
Fencing
Field Hockey
Football
Golf
Gymnastics
Ice Hockey
Lacrosse
Polo
Rowing
Sailing
Skiing
Soccer
Softball
Squash
Swimming
Tennis
Track & Field
Volleyball
Water Polo
Wrestling
Hockey has specific rules relating to amateurism for athletes who have played Canadian Junior A or B. But otherwise, hockey, which is not an Ivy Championship sport (and skiing) is subject to the Ivy rules for Ivy varsity sports
While not a new article, this piece on sprint football seems to support the notion that Ivy athletics slots are capped, to include the non NCAA/Ivy sports: