<p>Also @twoinanddone just because less people have heard of Stetson doesn’t mean it’s not a better school :)</p>
<p>My daddy is from Mississippi so I don’t need an examples of racism in the state. Still have relatives there, so I know it is alive an well. Not a fan of Ole Miss but they are no different than the other big name sport schools that use their players as chattel. The fact that they have over a C average is good. At many schools, the players don’t even graduate. As yes, it may be in a “soft major”, but heck, my D is a Literature major, so who am I to talk.</p>
<p>@Tperry1982 ah, I see. Fair enough. </p>
<p>Everyone carry on, that’s it from me in this thread. Sincere apologies if I came off as arrogant.</p>
<p>@Pizzagirl </p>
<p>Ole Miss isn’t that selective. The minimum NCAA academic requirements for a Div 1 athletic is higher than Ole Miss’s minimum requirements. The NCAA requires a 2.3 or better GPA, while Ole Miss (for Mississippi Residents) requires a 2.0 GPA and a minimum composite score of 18 on the ACT (or 860 on the SAT critical reading/mathematics).</p>
<p>Of course, being a 300+lb five star offensive lineman is a fairly decent hook. :)</p>
<p>Well, I don’t think anybody here is comparing Ole Miss to the Ivies–not for academics OR football.</p>
<p>But don’t kid yourself, plenty of Ivy football players had no prayer of being admitted based on their grades/scores alone. (And there’s nothing wrong with that, if fielding a successful football program is a priority, as it is in most of the Ivies, which after all was originally an ATHLETIC conference.) </p>
<p>It’s all relative.</p>
<p>But if you want to compare the team GPAs at Ole Miss to other Division I FBS schools (which the Ivies aren’t), it’s likely right in the mix. </p>
<p>“But don’t kid yourself, plenty of Ivy football players had no prayer of being admitted based on their grades/scores alone.”</p>
<p>Sure. But that’s because those schools are highly selective. There is, of course, a world of difference between “elevating” a football player with (let’s say) a 3.5/1900 SAT to an Ivy, where he is still capable of doing the work and isn’t going to graduate without being able to string 2 sentences together, and admitting a kid with a 2.0/860 to an Ole Miss, where the kid likely isn’t capable of doing true college-level work. </p>
<p>I think that the link and the OP says it all.</p>
<p>While I know being an athlete is a hook at Yale, trust me they are not admitted without being able to do the work. There are no “easy” major" set aside for athletes and many of them are on track for med school, law school or other post graduate pursuits. Sadly, that why my team will never be able to compete with the likes of an Alabama, Auburn, Texas A&M or Ole Miss. Also, remember Ivies do not give merit or athletic scholarships, it is only based on need. So if you want a free ride to play based mostly on athletic ability, then you will have to choose another school.</p>
<p>“But don’t kid yourself, plenty of Ivy football players had no prayer of being admitted based on their grades/scores alone. (And there’s nothing wrong with that, if fielding a successful football program is a priority, as it is in most of the Ivies, which after all was originally an ATHLETIC conference.)”</p>
<p>The difference is - if all the Ivy and similar football players all collectively retired from football tomorrow - would still be students who would be able to both get into and profit from decent schools (maybe not schools at the caliber they got into, but decent schools nonetheless). I simply don’t think you can say the same for some of the state school programs where they are admitting students who just aren’t college material just because they can play. </p>
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<p>Ole Miss admits non-athletes at about the same level of academic qualifications as the NCAA minimum. Now, if you think that such qualifications are below the threshold of being college material, there may be a valid criticism there, but it is not athlete-specific (i.e. admission of such students is not “just because they can play”).</p>
<p>OK, fair point, I didn’t realize that. </p>
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<p>Of course. As I said, it’s all relative!</p>
<p>And I’m sure you don’t believe that it’s only schools with large football programs that admit kids unlikely to graduate.</p>
<p>I highly doubt Ole Miss is the only FBS school admitting kids incapable of doing “true college-level work,” whatever exactly that is. Nonetheless, it’s a mistake to judge the quality of a large university based solely on the academic credentials of a Div I athletic program, which is the conclusion some posters defaulted to.</p>
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<p>It says quite a bit beyond the click-bait headline, but that doesn’t mean everybody read the entire article. </p>
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<p>I went to an Ivy, so I’m well aware that they don’t offer athletic scholarships, or any scholarships, for that matter. But your average high school football player is not from a wealthy family, so he will have his financial needs met if the Ivy football coach wants him. No, that’s not the same as a “free ride,” but a HS football player with a 3.5/1900 SAT is a LOT more likely to get admitted to an Ivy than somebody else with those same stats who applied. That’s well below the 25th percentile.</p>
<p>It was revealed some years ago that there was an Ivy League agreement to “secretly” offer additional aid (not illegal) to athletes at member schools that were constantly in the doldrums on the football field. Columbia was the beneficiary of this handshake deal among league members. The league was embarrassed by Columbia’s futility in football in the 1980s-1990s. And complaints about Cornell’s athletic department have resurfaced in recent years because of the the stunning success of the Big Red in the NCAA tournament.</p>
<p>“Also @twoinanddone just because less people have heard of Stetson doesn’t mean it’s not a better school”</p>
<p>It would be ‘fewer people’ not ‘less people’. (I learned that at my public school.) </p>
<p>I’ve been to Stetson. My daughter was recruited there, could have attended, but didn’t like the school and academically wasn’t a fit. If I wanted to be snobby, I’d say that an honor student with a 3.8 doesn’t have to settle for Stetson, but I don’t believe that. It wasn’t right for HER, but not because she was too good for Stetson. She didn’t like the location, the facilities, the programs, or the athletics. Its athletic teams are called the “Hatters.” People hear ‘Hatters’ and think hats (in the West, ‘Stetson’ is used as another word for hat, like ‘Xerox’ is used for ‘copy’). I live about an hour away and many of my neighbors have never even heard of Stetson. One hour away. Why don’t you ask 10 people in NJ if they’ve heard of Ole Miss or Stetson and see which gets a bigger response? It is not as highly regarded as Ole Miss for either academics or athletics by anyone, on any ranking you can find, but if my daughter would have liked the academic program, that wouldn’t have mattered to me. I thought it was an okay little school, not an academic powerhouse, but I’m sure many people like it and that’s great. No need to put down Ole Miss to appreciate the good things about Stetson. </p>
<p>Many large public schools have one or two areas where they really excel. The University of Wyoming has an excellent engineering program for environmental specialties and a very good international studies program (when you have Dick Cheney helping with international programs and putting big bucks into the programs…), all for the second lowest instate tuition cost in the US (many instate student attend free). South Dakota and North Dakota also have excellent mining programs (engineering and geology). </p>
<p>I look at the schools, not the rankings.</p>
<p>"I highly doubt Ole Miss is the only FBS school admitting kids incapable of doing “true college-level work,” whatever exactly that is. "</p>
<p>Sure, and no one has ever suggested that Ole Miss is the only school admitting such kids. I don’t even know if they are particularly egregious in this regard, since I don’t follow college football.</p>
<p>“Nonetheless, it’s a mistake to judge the quality of a large university based solely on the academic credentials of a Div I athletic program, which is the conclusion some posters defaulted to.”</p>
<p>It might not be a way to judge the quality of the school – I, too, have heard good things about the Chinese program at Ole Miss. It may be, however, a way to judge what the school values. </p>
<p>Again, I’m not speaking specifically about Ole Miss here, but if there is a school that is lowering its admissions standards tremendously in order to recruit athletes (and by tremendously, I <em>don’t</em> mean “what the Ivies let in” but I mean “not capable of doing college-level work”), I am going to think less of the school in general, even if I hear good things about specific programs X, Y and Z. Because it says something to me about what they focus on, what they find valuable, and it makes me not quite so sanguine that there won’t be academic compromises.</p>
<p>@Ramon712 </p>
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<p>Whether this friend plays football at Ole Miss or at any other Div 1 school, his prospects for graduating with a “functional degree/career” will be the same…it will all depend on HIM.</p>
<p>8-| </p>
<p>Yes, but it’s a heckuva lot harder if you are in a milieu / surrounded by others who don’t take academics seriously (or don’t have the capability to succeed in academics). </p>
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<p>Many or all of the southern publics are still required to follow some old law that requires them to admit all applicants with a rather lowish threshold. This law was passed 40+years to prevent southern schools from keeping out AA students who had the req’d minimums. </p>
<p>The southern schools aren’t asking for that law to disappear because they’re happy that their AA enrollments are typically much higher than other publics in other parts of the country. </p>
<p>@mom2collegekids I agree with you to some extent – but I also have first hand experience with athletes that were not given the opportunity to earn a functional college degree. He is highly recruited and on his list are schools that hare structured and have supports in place that he will graduate with a functional degree and can go on to have a productive career outside of football. There are others that have reputations of being football factories and graduate athletes with worthless degrees. And yes, it is up to him – but when your coach holds the purse strings and he tells you that you can’t take that class or that you must that that class – the kid’s options can be limited.</p>
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<p>Since there are not many (any?) schools with 100% graduation rates, it appears that students “not capable of doing college-level work” do slip through the admissions gates of even the most selective schools – indicating that screening applicants for those “capable of doing college-level work” is an imperfect process. Of course, at lesser levels of selectivity, graduation rates fall, indicating that more students “not capable of doing college-level work” get in.</p>