Davidson does (I know not D3 but similar), Vassar does, Wesleyan has an athletics advantage program - sorry I don’t really have specifics since I don’t have an athlete I just hear from parents. Was surprised when I first started hearing about it a few years ago at Davidson.
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Yes I meant this my comment not to rile up any athletes or parents but to explain these schools want to help all their students and even if they don’t have special programs they know how to help students access alums, etc. I suspect both schools have excellent career centers since the OP mentioned career placement.
She said:
While the statement may jump from strength in econ to athletic experience, I think it’s pretty clear she wants to hear about the athletic experience from people in a position to know about that, and separately wants to hear about relative strength in econ - from anyone who knows.
As to your view about employment prospects at these schools, I think you may be taking a bit of a simplistic view and overly reliant on big data scoops that don’t really tell the whole story. Lots of kids at each of these schools purposefully (not because they can’t do anything else) seek to pursue PhD studies. That has an effect on the data because PhD students aren’t paid well. Wesleyan sends a lot of kids into fields, like entertainment, that require one to pay their dues early on. Mike White and Michael Bay probably didn’t have big salaries right out of school but I’m comfortable in assuming they made up for it later. Middlebury is widely known for excellence in foreign languages. People who attend for that reason are often not chasing big salaries after college. Just two examples. Neither college has an engineering program, which tends to inflate early career numbers for schools that do. So there’s that.
What I can tell you, and for the OP’s benefit, is that they both send kids into professional life and do so in healthy numbers. I think Middlebury has built a better pipeline into investment banking while Wesleyan tends to show up heavy in consulting, especially economic consulting, but both send kids into both. I don’t know if Wesleyan or Middlebury are hiding anything - I tend to doubt it - but the idea that they have a dirty little secret of underemployment for their graduates belies a true understanding of each school’s ability to place kids. They both do very well and many top firms interview at each campus. You just need to understand that both schools attract a lot of kids who want to do many and varied things and many graduates are not chasing the brass ring. Nothing wrong with that other than it skews the data.
On the question of athletes and advantage, Wesleyan had an unofficial practice of former athletes coming back with employment opportunities that the AD would push out to the individual coaches who would push them out to the athletes. And, no, not for sales. Often, these were banking opportunities. I think that practice has now been formalized a bit. I’m sure Middlebury has a similar practice. In my experience, professional service providers do in fact like athletes and IMO for good reasons.
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