Since no one has contributed information corresponding to the existence of this district, it’s not clear which NESCACs have performed impressively within it.
I understand the point about excluding women from the award representing an inequity and puts into context, for example, Wellesley’s, Smith’s and Mount Holyoke’s smaller numbers relative to what one would expect from those institutions. It’s less clear to me what was inequitable about awarding by state vs. by district. I also understand that results are distorted because there are states with drastically differing levels of competition. As far as the NESCAC goes, I suppose it helped to not be in a state with an Ivy League or similar caliber school.
Anyway, notwithstanding the lack of ideal conditions for comparability, the number of Rhodes scholars among the NESCAC schools and other esteemed LACs impressed me, especially considering their enrollments compared to larger R1s.
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Kudos to the student reporters at the Amherst Student for this well-researched and balanced in-depth article about athletic recruiting at the college. As the parent of a non-athlete recent grad of a NESCAC, I learned a ton and gained a new understanding of the complexities and pressures of the process.
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Some, but not all colleges in the geographic district. The list includes all college and universities which had at least one Rhodes scholar (though I may have missed one or two).
First, the ones with a large number of scholars:
Harvard University - 399 (that includes grad schools and Radcliffe)
Brown - 59
MIT -58
UVM - 10
Fewer than 10:
BU - 8
Wellesley - 8
U. Maine - 3
Wheaton - 3
WPI - 2
BC -2
Brandeis - 2
Mt Holyoake - 2
Regis - 2
Northeastern - 2
Smith - 1
U Rhode Island - 1
In this district there are also another three dozen or so accredited Baccalaureate colleges, masters universities, Doctoral universities, R2s, and R1s with no recorded Rhodes scholars.
So I would say that within this district, the NESCACs are still pretty impressive.
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Agree. Super well done and informative.
One thing to call out - the piece mentions athletic stereotyping of athletes among the student body. I myself didn’t feel any sense of suspicion or stereotyping of athletes as a general matter during our time in the NESCAC other than the male helmet sports, where I think people tended to assume there was more help in admissions for those athletes. Not saying I agree or that it’s fair but that is what I picked up on.
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Tufts has no Rhodes??
Four. Just an oversight, I’m sure. The list is posted above if you’re interested.
My list does not include any of the NESCACs, only the other colleges in the same region for comparison.
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I’d say they’re all up against some stiff competition. Just going to the big names, district 2 will include Yale, Princeton and Dartmouth, which collectively represent 550 Rhodes Scholarships, and district 4 will include Penn and Cornell, which surprisingly haven’t won as many as their Ivy League counterparts, as well as Swarthmore and Haverford, the latter two of which have won 48 between them, also darn impressive.
Back to district 1, Harvard at 399 and MIT at 58 surprised me in their skewed distribution. BU and BC don’t have many, and Brown adds another 59. Adding the LACs in the district who win them at a good clip and, yes, this is a tough draw. I didn’t see any UMass entries for district 1 and for district 4 I didn’t see any SUNY entries.
All in all, our favorite collection of LACs do pretty well considering the other schools generating candidates for district committee consideration.
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I guess one thing that I wish they had written about in more detail is the following topic:
Following the Supreme Court’s decision in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard (SFFA), which overturned affirmative action, the college has revised its system for ranking potential recruits. According to President Michael Elliott, the college used to categorize athletes by A-band, B-band, and C-band, with the most academically qualified applicants being in the A-band. Each team had a cap on the number of B-band and C-band applicants it could support.
Now, athletic candidates are evaluated during pre-reads using the same 15-point holistic system utilized to assess non-athletes in the general admissions process, a move that McGann said aims “to ensure that our recruited student athletes are indeed reflective, academically and otherwise, of the rest of the student body.”
Thinking about it some more, I’m unclear about what the SFFA case, which is focused on using race in admissions, has to do with athletic recruiting but perhaps I am missing something. I’m also unclear why that case inspired Amherst to drop the band system and assert that athletes are now admitted exactly how unhooked athletes are admitted. Even with the 15-point holistic system, athletic ability can be used as a criteria. Right? The way the piece is written, it sounds like the band system was dropped because of SFFA and that the 15-point system is somehow more compliant with its holding. But does that mean that athletic recruitment isn’t factored? If not, and I suspect/assume not, then what’s the point in highlighting the shift?
I think all NESCACs have always used a holistic review to evaluate athletic recruits and then used the band system to budget how many kids were going to get a big boost, a moderate boost or no boost in said holistic review. This feels like a ‘the more things change the more they stay the same’ thing.
I am not a fan of the recruiting process because recruiting is one of those things that people don’t like to be direct and clear about and you’re forced to have to cut through the crap and get to the essence of the thing. But for God’s sake just say that there are kids who are admitted whose athletic ability was a significant factor in the decision to admit them. We all know it to be true. Just be up front about it.
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@gotham_mom , when did your child graduate? If it’s been a little bit and they have had some time and space to look back at their Williams experience with a little clarity, I’m curious to know how they feel about it? Would they do it again? Anything in particular that stood out for them or for you?
They graduated in June and had a terrific experience. I am sure that they would do it again. The relationships they built with professors, the resources available to students, and the incredible friends that they made added up to an excellent four years. They worked very hard, but was able to be involved in ECs. As an art history major, they were able to intern at the College’s museum and take graduate classes at the Clark. When they were job hunting, the Williams “art mafia” was very helpful.
The first semester, fall 2021, was challenging because the college had strict COVID protocols in place. They didn’t seem happy when we visited. I was concerned that they had made the wrong choice–picking prestige over fit. (We hadn’t visited the college since fall of junior year.) They had been admitted to another SLAC that seemed like a better fit, but they wanted to go to a school that was different from their funky NYC high school. Things improved second semester when they found their people.
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Glad to hear it! And, yes, I can’t think of a better place to study art history. Fantastic and congratulations!
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Interesting observations and questions. To be clear, I have no special knowledge. But I strongly suspect that the changes are a work around to allow them to intentionally recruit diverse students under the guise of recruiting athletes, not students of color. In the wake of SFFA, race is no longer a valid criteria, on its own, for building a class. But athletic need/talent is.
Per the NY Times maybe five years ago, Amherst already had decided (pre SFFA) to intentionally use athletic recruiting to try to increase their campus diversity. So without knowing the inner workings of the admissions office, I suspect this is designed to make it easier to recruit athletes that allow them to maintain campus diversity, while staying in compliance with SFFA.
Sounds like the first year post SFFA they didn’t get it right, but this year things bounced back.
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Not sure athletics are a work around. In the past, most people thought athletic preferences favored certain groups because many of the supported sports were not diverse. For any sport, unless the kid has crazy natural talent, it takes a fair amount of resources in terms of coaching, equipment and club teams to get on coaches’ radar screens. If schools want to impact diversity through athletics, the simplest way is to change supported pars – more spots for track/X country, football, basketball, less spots for golf, swimming, squash, tennis.
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Agree. This article seems to imply that athletic preferences are making it worse from a diversity standpoint.
Plus a recent conversation with a dear friend who is going through the recruiting process uncovered the fact that a plurality of the track and XC recruits for the NESCACs seem to be public school kids from wealthy NJ, CT and MA suburbs and prep schools.
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That has been a standard criticism leveled at highly selective liberal arts colleges that maintain a wide array of varsity sports programs. I think when people think of elite, private liberal arts college sports, the image that comes to mind is lacrosse, and I think the first image that comes to mind for many when they think of lacrosse is wealthy suburban white kids.
Sports that have, in my experience, a socio-economic barrier to entry for being noticed at the college level include soccer, tennis, lacrosse, field hockey, golf and crew, even though there are good people out there across the country trying to make these sports more accessible to lower income kids. Sports that do not have, in my experience, much if any socio-economic barrier to entry include football, basketball, track & field, & cross country. Baseball, again in my experience, lies somewhere in the middle. It is conceivable to me that you can get recruited playing only school ball, which is low cost. Without a lot of natural talent, though, you need to play a lot of baseball to get good at baseball, which often means playing summer and fall ball, and that requires club baseball, which is usually travel baseball.
Hockey, I think it depends on where in the country you live. Here in the PNW, it seems to be a creature of club sports and requires a lot of travel and private coaching. And it goes without saying that super niche sports like squash or fencing are going to be high cost and often not even physically accessible to many people. I think all the fencing academies in Washington are in the Seattle area, so if you don’t live here you’re SOL for that sport unless your parents can haul you in from a long distance. Can’t imagine squash is any better.
Anyway, the more high roster number low barrier sports, the better the diversity outcome will be.
Here’s a question: if one to three sports are doing all the diversity work, is that ok? Or should the athletic department itself be striving to be more diverse?
Baseball and softball are very hard to be recruitable at low cost. The HS and college seasons overlap, so unless you are the “known” lefty that throws 95, most serious looks are done at the various showcases and tournaments held in the summer and fall. The times I noticed college scouts at HS games, they were either from local juco’s or Bobby Witt Jr. was on the other team (then we had pro scouts in the stands).
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I don’t think this is true. At my student’s elite LAC, there are students of color playing squash, golf, tennis, etc, and many of them came from elite boarding schools. The track team is less diverse than my student’s public high school.
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This raises an interesting question: will the WWE/DOE eventually come after the boarding schools for their admissions policies in the same way they have the elite colleges? Probably not. So few Federal dollars go to BSs.
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