Not sure where to ask this question…got a curveball thrown at us…kid is in at VT (top choice, super excited) and Purdue (also top choice) but now has a chance to go to RPI (with merit and brings the cost down) and play a D3 varsity sport (offered a roster spot). Is being a D3 athlete on top of getting an education help with job placement or open more doors vs getting a degree from a higher ranked/better known school (yes, for this exercise, ranking Purdue/VT higher than RPI but that is our opinion only). Kid is torn between wanting a large college vs continuing to play a sport (that kid has been a part of for 9 years). Yes, already considering that club sports can be an option at the large schools.
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RPI is no slouch. Their students have very good outcomes. Does he like RPI? Is his sport an important part of his identity? Does he like the coach and teammates? I’d take the money and run.
As far as ranking, I don’t think the other two colleges are so much higher that it’s going to make an impact on job prospects.
Yes, employers like athletes. Team sports are typically viewed favorably. Internships and job experience are much more important.
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Many jobs seek athletes. They know how to work on teams. Sales jobs especially like athletes.
And depending on the major I would disagree that Purdue and Va Tech are stronger than RPI which is a FANTASTIC and well respected name.
The #s stand toe to toe both in engineerimg and CS. RPI is the poor man’s MIT in many ways. It’s grads are high in demand.
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RPI has great career outcomes so I wouldn’t worry about ranking in this situation, especially if your child is planning on majoring in engineering. I’d be more concerned about managing the workload of engineering and playing D3.
My husband’s hiring experience is that he’s likely to put the resumes of athletes on the top of the interview pile but then it has to be up to the student to be able to deliver in the interview and have the rest of the package including work experience.
PS. My daughter felt like the vibe at RPI was very much like a smaller version of Purdue. It would likely have been her second choice.
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Yes, majoring in Engineering so appreciate the perspective on ranking and the career outcomes.
What @Lindagaf, @momofboiler1 & @tsbna44 said.
The vast majority of college athletes don’t continue their sport beyond college, and this is especially true for D3 athletes. Your son’s decision comes down to whether he wants to transition to life after sports sooner or later. If he chooses to play while studying engineering, his schedule will be intense, leaving little time for other activities.
All the schools he’s considering have strong programs. While some employers may view athletic experience as a plus, most will focus on what he’s done that directly relates to the job.
If he decides to quit his sport, will he regret choosing RPI over Purdue or Virginia Tech? The size difference is significant—RPI has about 7,000 students, while Purdue and VT have 30,000–40,000. If he’s drawn to a larger school environment, will RPI feel too small, especially after his first year?
The paper below offers some food for thought. College athletics can be a great experience, but it’s not the right path for everyone.
https://scholarworks.bgsu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1260&context=jade
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I agree with @Lindagaf. In hiring associates for several major law firms, I always noted any serious athletic background mentioned on a resume. In my experience, serious athletes tend to have drive and discipline, to be able to deal with failure and also to be able to deal in a a mature way with constructive criticism. My son was a D3 varsity athlete, and it was a central part of his college experience. He also managed to complete a demanding double major, and he has said that the disciplined routine of practices and meets was helpful to him in dealing with his academic demands. RPI is a great school, so if your son wants to play his sport and likes RPI, it sounds like a good choice for him.
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I was a college athlete and throughout my “real world”professional career I have benefited tremendously from having played my sport. Alumni network, shared interests, conversation starters or just a perception of discipline are arguably all halo effects of being a college athlete. They are also irrelevant if the student doesn’t enjoy their actual time as an athlete.
If the student intends on pursuing a rigorous academic curriculum and is on the fence about their commitment to being an athlete, I question the wisdom of possible career impact being even considered in making the decision.
It will be very hard for a division 3 athlete to thrive academically and athletically if they aren’t enjoying the sport and are being pushed by a rigorous set of classes. Both will likely suffer and frequently the sport is abandoned which can cause social disruptions and other problems.
Your student is clearly an overachiever and would likely have a hard time if the combined work load became unmanageable. The reality of college is the expectations of student athletes are greater than anything the student has experienced to date. He should not make a college decision and join a team without fully appreciating and embracing the level of commitment it will require. For some the structure of a sport helps them stay disciplined academically while for others hours of practice and travel are an overwhelming burden and waste. Typically this distinction is decided by the students love of the game.
The implied eventual career benefits can only be realized by being a successful college athlete and in my mind should rank third to academic fit and the students desire to play. He has several great options, I would start with the simplest of questions. Does he want to play his sport in college or is he a ready to move on. Only if he does want to play should any and all future benefits be considered in my opinion.
Full disclosure, RPI was an inter division rival in my sport. Please DM if you want insights into the demands and experiences of playing at this level.
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At many schools, there are efforts to keep alum who played a sport connected with that sport. While this is done for development reasons, it also creates networking – and internship/employment-- opportunities for these athletes. To a lesser extent, ditto for parents of teammates.
There is a fair bit of serendipity involved in the usefulness of these ties, but they are real and often unavailable to students outside the sport.
And yes, employers in general like to hire athletes for the many reasons cited above.
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I don’t think it’s all or nothing at the other colleges.
Has he looked into their club sport offerings. Some are very robust.
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Sports are great. So is music, volunteering, organizing the “no more single use plastics in the cafeteria” initiative, having a paying job while a student, editing and indexing a professor’s book, being operations manager of the college symphony who organized a three week tour of Europe which included sell-out performances and not a single insurance claim for lost/damaged instruments.
Employers love sports for many reasons- but the biggest in my experience is that it shows strong time management skills which suggests an employee who won’t crumple with a tough deadline or won’t balk at the demands of “peak season” (even if that season is 52 weeks long). There are many kids who successfully demonstrate these skills even without playing a team sport! Kids still get jobs without sports teams!
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Would an engineering employer choose a graduate who majored in engineering and played soccer, or one who majored in engineering, minored in math, conducted undergraduate research in a university engineering lab, and joined Student Engineers Without Borders? It’s hard to say. Some might favor the athlete, but given the choice, I’d pick the latter. If both performed well academically, they’d likely have similar job prospects.
Ultimately, your son should choose what feels right for him. Many high school athletes are ready to move on from competitive sports, play for fun, and explore new opportunities. For others, the D3 experience allows them to continue doing what they love while balancing academics. Your son will be fine no matter which path he chooses.
One last thought, engineering has one of the highest dropout rates. Would your son be happy at RPI if he wants to change majors?
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My company has an ownership stake in a national recruiting firm that places white collar, business to business sales professionals. These types of roles have people making base salaries in the 200s, 300s & 400s, and with bonuses, some people W2 1M or more. Their clients LOVE to hire former college athletes.
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As someone who has been involved with hiring, in my own experience a candidate with experience in college athletics will often get a closer look in terms of their other accomplishments. Competing on a team in college can show that the candidate has time management skills and dedication, as well as the ability to overcome failure and works well with others. Having said that, the same qualities can be found in candidates who have been involved in serious music ensembles, dance companies, theater etc., so they would tend to get a longer look as well.
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My two cents is the answer to your question is basically yes.
As a general rule of thumb, I think what you actually do in college tends to matter more than exactly where that college is “ranked”. For good reason–next-step gatekeepers are selecting individuals, not institutions, and while your institution might provide some context, that is only going to be one piece of the puzzle. And even then, any two gatekeepers may have different impressions of any given institution anyway. In that sense, generic rankings imply a consensus that almost never exists in the real world.
And in this case, for Engineering specifically, RPI has such a good reputation that I think that rule of thumb is going to apply even before considering sports. Basically, if you do really well at RPI, lots of opportunities will be available for you. Same at VT or Purdue, of course, but that’s the point–you could reasonably choose any of these, and be confident you were not somehow limiting your possible post-college outcomes.
And then as others have explained, competitive intercollegiate athletics can contribue to doing well in college, in a variety of meaningful ways. Of course it can also go wrong, so it is absolutely not right for everyone, including some people who have the experience and ability but end up choosing not to continue, either when making the transition to college or during college at some point.
But if your kid would like to give it a try, then great. If it works out, that is likely going to be a significant positive for them as they look into post-college opportunities. If not, no big deal, they are still at an excellent college with many other ways of doing well.
Of course it is not wrong that you could also look at club sports at VT or Purdue, but you have to be careful–at least the top level of club sports at colleges like that can be super competitive. And although this is not a trump card, I think it is nice knowing you are representing your institution at the highest level it has available. So personally, if I knew I wanted to try continuing my sport in college, and I had a roster spot offered at a D3, in terms of just sports, I would value that offer over the possibility of doing club at colleges like those.
The last thing I would echo, though, is that RPI is indeed pretty MIT-like in terms of the institutional focus on STEM stuff, and that can be great for some kids and totally wrong for others. There are a decent number of RPI kids who end up doing something businessy, and they also have some strong tech-adjacent arts programs, and plenty of their natural science and math programs are strong as well as the more applied stuff like CS or Engineering. But if you thought there was a decent chance you might want a selection of robust majors in the Humanities or Social Sciences, RPI (or MIT, Caltech, and so on) is probably not the right choice for you.
But that is really a separate question from your institutional rankings versus sports question. If it really comes down to just that, and of course if I actually wanted to try continuing my sport, I would personally take the sports opportunity in this case, and trust I could do everything I needed to do as an individual to get great opportunities after RPI too.
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I don’t know the answer, but I’m curious. Only about 2% of college athletes go pro, leaving a lot of ex-college athletes entering the job market. Are these $200-400k jobs going to (for example) the offensive linemen who played on the Ohio State national championship team and comes with the ooh-ahh factor, or the D3 cross-country, swimmers, or soccer players?
I greatly admire engineers, so no disrespect intended, but most don’t have the salesman personality.
Just anecdotally, this seems to be part of the actual value of college sports among the people I know who like to see sports on a college resume. In fact, my sense is there are not a lot of academically-challenging majors where the stereotypical “personality” of that major is necessarily all that appealing, at least when it comes to “people skills” stuff. But if you then combine such a major with sports, it can do a lot to sidestep that sort of stereotyping.
Of course sports isn’t the only way to do that, and not all gatekeepers may even care that much about that stuff. But I think at least many are in fact basically looking for a combination of academic/intellectual ability AND strong people skills. So, the engineer who was also a successful intercollegiate athlete may at least prima facie strike them as a potentially good candidate.
As others noted, though, that will only get you so far. You still have to interview well, network well as necessary, come off well during an internship, and so on. Like, actually HAVE people skills.
But I don’t think it is wrong that college sports can, in the right circumstances, also contribute to actually developing such skills, not just in perception but in reality too.
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As an engineer in a family full of engineers… I found myself laughing and nodding to this… So true! When we interview consultants, I’m often amused that I’m the best in the room at making small talk!
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Plenty of successful sales people are not good at/don’t bother with small talk.
If you are selling large and complex climate control systems to an airport authority, or selling a soup-to-nuts security system to a large hospital (employee swiping, data security, access control to Class A narcotics, patient identification, etc.) your success in no way will depend on your ability to chat…
Not every sales role requires the typical extroverted, chatty persona.
Ever meet someone who sells maintenance contracts to airlines, or sells MRI equipment to VA hospitals? There’s a lot more to sales than chatting.
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