<p>“When one adds to the 15 percent of recruited athletes at many elite institutions, the equally large number of affirmative action admits, and throws in another 5-15 percent of legacy students, one gets a sense of the substantial proportion of matriculants at these institutions who have been admitted under compromised academic standards.”</p>
<p>Also, “athletes”, “minorities”, and “legacies” are hardly mutually exclusive categories. I know of a couple kids at Harvard who were all three, and there are lots of two-fers.</p>
<p>On the other hand, I doubt the athletic recruits account for only 15% of the freshman class for Harvard or Stanford. Harvard has more than 20 varsity teams. Stanford probably has even more athletic recruits.</p>
<p>Harvard actually fields 41 varsity teams - the most of any D1 college. About 20% of the undergrads participate. They aren’t all recruited, though. 15% is probably pretty accurate for recruited athletes. And to build upon what T26E4 and Dwight said, the athletes generally need to be within one standard deviation of the mean student body academic index (gpa and test scores). So, yeah, the athletes, legacies and minorities tend to be pretty bright, too.</p>
<p>15% of a Harvard (or Stanford) class is 240+ people/year. Apart from football and maybe men’s and women’s hockey and soccer, I doubt all those teams get more than 3-4 actual recruits per year, on average. So 15% of the class seems high to me. Not grossly so, but somewhat.</p>
<p>Colleges admissions offices vary in how much of an exception will be made for athletes. Within colleges this varies wildly from sport to sport. A basketball player at Duke will not be required to have near the stats that a cross country runner will need for admission, same thing for Stanford with football & basketball. Non revenue / visability sports will generally get a limited number of “exceptions”.</p>
<p>Ivy League operates a little differently than Duke or Stanford. An "academic index’ is calculated for each potential recruit based on SAT, class rank and SAT II. An athlete is “unrecruitable” unless they meet a certain AI. Further, the team AI must fall within 1 standard deviation of the mean AI for the entire student body on campus. Except football, which has 4 “bands” of AI.</p>
<p>Track and field and crew may have large rosters, but I don’t think they have large rosters of recruits, certainly not of recruits with sub-standard applications. (Since plenty of kids with top-notch applications get rejected, I’m sure it’s a big help to be a kid with a top-notch application and to be on the track coach’s list, but you’re not going to get anything like a free pass in with less than Olympic-level ability.)</p>
<p>None of the recruits have substandard applications. That’s the whole point of the Academic Index. The applications of supported athletes, and by ‘supported’ I mean issued a Likely Letter from the admissions office prior to the regular admission notification date, look very similar to the typical Harvard applicant (SAT sections over 700, top 10% rank, etc). Last year H supported about 200 athletes through Likely Letters.</p>
<p>…as a qualifier I should probably mention that in a ‘priority sport’, basketball at H, hockey at Cornell, etc - a big time prospect can be admitted with scores significantly lower than the general standards I mentioned above. They do, however, still need to meet the minimum AI standard.</p>
<p>You would think there would be a major decline in the academic profile of the institution if 50% of freshman admits are accepted because they fall into one of the categories listed by the OP. And likewise for the ±225 freshmen enrolled at CalTech. I would expect to see a significant increase in SAT if merit is the only factor in admissions.</p>
<p>Have you read any of this thread? There would certainly not be a “major decline” since to be accepted as any one of these categories requires strong academic stats.</p>
<p>Would there be a minor decline in SAT scores? Probably. But no one has ever said SAT scores are the sole factor in admissions. It’s interesting that you define “merit” as “stats.”</p>
<p>Yes, I read the thread, and I agree with your statement. I was referring to the attached article. Under the section ‘Toward a Pure Meritocracy’ which reads:</p>
<p>‘What this means is that at Caltech, there are no dumb jocks, dumb legacies, or dumb affirmative action students. It is clear from its published statistics that the non-academic criteria that preoccupy admissions committees at all other elite universities count for little at this beacon of pure meritocracy’ <end quote=“”>…</end></p>
<p>…as if ‘dumb jocks, dumb legacies, and dumb affirmative action students’ are accepted at Harvard, and comprises 50% of the student population.</p>