<p>momofwildchild - Do any of Ivy sports make money? </p>
<p>Did the recruits who were told they were in get offer letters they had to sign?</p>
<p>The parent shared an email from Princeton coach in last March stating the coach could not provide a likely letter but strongly encourages the candidate to file a regular admit application. All that changed by end of July when three of the Ivies including Princeton were willing to issue likely letters if she accepted their offer.</p>
<p>re post 810
what part is not true, pray tell??</p>
<p>HYPSM is Div 1A - not Div 1. </p>
<p>EXCUSE ME?? STANFORD IS a DIV 1 PAC 10 TEAM.
get your facts straight.</p>
<p>MIT is Dlll. Stanford is a Dl powerhouse.</p>
<p>^^^Yup, I saw I mistyped.</p>
<p>Don’t want to interrupt the discussion of the admission of athletes, which is quite interesting to me–mostly unknown territory. A member of my extended family is a Division I basketball recruit, but not to an Ivy, and that’s yet again a different circumstance.</p>
<p>I understand why Pizzagirl would be incensed that some of the students who don’t get in blame URM’s, or legacies, or athletes, or the children of the very rich, who “took” their spots. I think the analysis by these students falls short, generally speaking–if this level of generality is ok with all? It seems probable that none of these students would have been admitted if there had been 0 admits in all of the special categories.</p>
<p>I would be very willing to pull all of the students in special categories out of the discussion entirely, and focus on the allocation of the remaining spaces.</p>
<p>I’d like to do that in a subsequent post, to prevent the length from going out of bounds.</p>
<p>Now, consider the possibility that a neighbor’s S/D was not admitted. I’d think of this in terms of several sub-categories:</p>
<p>a) The S/D had very little realistic chance.</p>
<p>b) The S/D had a reasonable chance, but one suspects that some element of the application had a negative effect on the odds of acceptance.</p>
<p>c) The S/D had a strong chance, relative to the pool, considering the institutional priorities, and it is likely that the student approached the application carefully, dotted the i’s and crossed the t’s (metaphorically), wrote a quite good essay, had genuinely strong letters, and still didn’t get the nod from admissions.</p>
<p>I offer as a hypothesis the statement: Category c) is non-empty. </p>
<p>From local experiences, I think, with reasonable certainty, that c) is non-empty at MIT and Stanford. From CC, I think, with less certainty, that c) might be non-empty at the Ivies.</p>
<p>“I am not sure how low their AI is compared to Ivies”’
It is now on par withe the Ivys. It was raised about 10 years ago, much to the consternation of many Alumni around here AND our neighbor, the former men’s BBall coach Mike Montgomery, who left shortly after the new rules were instituted, after many years of having a top flight team, cause he could no longer get the recruits he wanted due to the academic minimum requirements for athletes.</p>
<p>HYPSM is Div 1A - not Div 1. </p>
<p>Div 1a only exists in football. The Ivies are Div. 1 for everything but football; 1A is pretty close to Div 1, and they sometimes play each other. Div 1 and 1A are obsolete terms but persist cuz their replacements are much less intuitive.</p>
<p>Stanford is Div 1 for everything. I think MIT is Div 1 for rowing or something like that.</p>
<p>So, if there are students in category c), what happened? One could argue the “too many qualified students” angle. No doubt this is sometimes true. One could argue that the neighbor doesn’t understand the depth of the applicant pool or the hyper-qualifications of those admitted. This could also happen.</p>
<p>I’m left with some in the category c) who are–really, truly–a cut above the general group of very qualified students. At this point, I can only speak locally, but I still think such students exist. Some of the CC students might also be in this group.</p>
<p>menloparkmom,</p>
<p>I did not intend to be acrimonious towards your post, but I dispute this statement
Now that I re-read your post, I do not necessarily dispute it, once I realized you hedged with the word “often.” However, I do not agree with this:
if it assumes that the adcoms issued their edict before the coach blabbed, because I know of at least one instance where an assurance was made by a coach and later disputed by an adcom. Whether due to human error or otherwise, Stanford’s record is not iron-clad and does not deserve all-caps. :)</p>
<br>
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<p>Div 1A applies only to football. For all other sports, including all women’s sports, HYP and the rest of the Ivy League are plain old Div. 1. No “A” appended. </p>
<p>In men’s basketball the Ivy League champion gets an automatic berth into the NCAA Div. 1 “March Madness” tournament.</p>
<p>(cross-posted with Schmaltz)</p>
<p>Thanks to the 5+ posters who have corrected me. Anybody else want to chime in?</p>
<p>Background: The applicant categories (a, b, c) that I am discussing are listed in post #857. I hope that there will be an opportunity to continue this discussion at some point. Please note that I requested that URM’s, athletes, legacies, and wealthy donors’ children should be pulled out of the discussion, to consider only the remaining places.</p>
<p>What I think likely: The applicant needs to resonate in some way with the reader(s) on the admission committee. The c) group just didn’t resonate well enough with the people who read their applications. If a student understands the prevailing philosophy at a school, he/she can tailor the package a little, to highlight aspects of his/her personality and background that seem to be closest to what the school is looking for. I don’t think this is dishonest. Most people are complex and multi-faceted.</p>
<p>A difficulty that arises is: The student has no idea who the primary readers of the application will be (probably just 1 or 2 people, who may summarize the application and/or advocate for the student to the rest of the committee). This thread has gone on long enough that I could pose the following scenario: The student’s application will be read by Pizzagirl, or Bay, or epiphany, or texaspg, or collegealum314, or me. There’s no way that the student could resonate with all of us (ok, we don’t all work in admissions, but still).</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Sorry, but I have to address this because I believe texaspg is earnest in his/her desire to understand the process.</p>
<p>No, the HYPS coach does not do anything with regard to the admission of the athlete other than to decide how badly s/he wants him on the team and whether the applicant meets the minimum AI. After that, the decision is in the adcoms hands (the likely letter LITERALLY comes from the admissions commitee, including the official telephone call), who actually meets early to make decisions on the athletes.</p>
<p>I believe you are correct that once a likely letter is issued, it is RARE for an applicant not to be admitted, but again, those likely letters are issued by the admissions committee, not the coach. But all of the application hoops have been jumped through, so the <em>process</em> is not any easier than for a regular admit (and includes that additional standards be met).</p>
<p>Local press often gets it wrong about Harvard “scholarships.” Our local paper once published that a football player had received a full-ride scholarship to play football for Harvard. I was embarassed for his family (assuming they cared), because I knew it really meant that his parents made less than $60K per year (or whatever the threshold was that year).</p>
<p>"Thanks to the 5+ posters who have corrected me. Anybody else want to chime in? "</p>
<p>I think if Pizzagirl were here, she’d tell you in no uncertain terms that Div 1a is only in football, and that otherwise, the Ivies are, like Northwestern, just plain Div. 1.</p>
<p>For any of the parents of the current year’s top-scoring, academic star seniors (and the seniors themselves), I suggest very close reading of all of the admissions material you can locate, for the universities of interest. Also CC is much more advanced than when I first read it–you can observe some repeatable patterns in the admits/rejections. There’s an opportunity to put adult insights + the student’s AP Lit skills to work. While the applications are still going to go to readers with diverse opinions, it’s possible to ferret out–at least a bit–what the university admissions people value. Most people are complex; I don’t think it’s wrong for the applicant to put a little more emphasis on those aspects of his/her character.</p>
<p>Left for later discussion: some qualms about what admissions people value–restricted to non-Ivies (MIT and Stanford). Not meaning qualms about URM’s, athletes, legacies, or the super-rich.</p>
<p>Thanks Schmaltz. I agree. I’ll be sure to remind her that it doesn’t matter since my kid has the Stanford degrees.</p>
<p>Quantmech - I am like you. I admit all STEM majors and so I am not to be trusted with the admission process unless it is MIT/Caltech/Harvey Mudd or Olin.</p>
<p>Bay - I disagree but no point in hashing over how the process works. Sufice it to say I wish my kid were an athlete good enough to have an offer letter by now from one of the SCEA choices under consideration. It is much more preferable to doing so much application work and waiting most likely until all fools day.</p>
<p>When the athletics discussion is beginning to wane, I’d appreciate it if anyone is willing to take on the comments in my posts 826, 827, 834, and 837.</p>
<p>Re athletics: The schools that count in basketball are the NCAA tournament schools, in my opinion. Princeton got the nod this last year for the opening round (if I recall right), but generally aren’t the Ivies are just totally outclassed in basketball? Even if technically Div. 1, Schmaltz and Pizzagirl?</p>