Stanford Men's Crew Academic Standards

coase
Sun, 30 Jan 2011 13:15:02 +0000

Football and basketball are quite different from the Olympic sports, swimming, crew, fencing, track & field. Ball sport athletes are given much more leeway at most schools, not just Stanford, whilethe Olympic sport athletes are expected to be on parr with the student body as a whole.



I realize that I am tilting at windmills, but here goes. The statement above sounds good initially, but it starts to wilt under a bit of scrutiny. First, when the comparison group is the entire student body, it obviously includes all the athletes, legacies and URMs. Try the comparison versus just the unhooked students and you would get a very different picture. Second, even if the comparison were valid, it would not apply to each and every athlete. At best, it would apply to the athletes in aggregate. In other words, there could be large concessions made to individuals as long as the averages were maintained. (Check the Ivy regulations.) In the sports I am most familiar with, the demographics are seriously skewed toward families with higher income and higher education. Thus, you can find lots of kids who are good athletes and who have high test scores. Kids like that make it easy for others with low scores to get in because of concessions. A sport like soccer costs $5,000 per year if you are on a top club team. Who can pay that? Well-to-do and well-educated parents. So, a Stanford can find one player with a 2300 and another with a 1900. The latter would never have gotten in but for his athletic prowess. I am not saying that is wrong, but it does happen. Just yesterday our D was expressing (correctly in my view) how fortunate she is that she plays a sport at a high level. She has seen the admissions outcomes of some of her older friends and realizes how much easier it will be for her because of her sport.