OP, the gist of all these responses is that nobody can really say if your kid / any generic kid will find one ‘elite’ school more or less daunting than another. If your kid meets the standard of the college- say, in the middle 50% for test scores & GPA with a pretty rigorous curriculum- he should not find any given class in any given ‘elite’ more difficult than a comparable class in another ‘elite’. Some schools seem to have more ‘worker’ kids (eg, UChic, JHU, CMU) and some fewer (Dartmouth, UPenn, Brown)- but those are reputations, not absolutes, and there are certainly posters on CC with examples of students with the opposite experience. Imo, your quest to figure out which of the elites is ‘easier’ for a STEM athlete is unlikely to be yield more than the (excellent) comments and advice the above posters have offered.
Also what sport are we talking about? Different D1 sports at the same school can have very different schedules based on requirements, competition formats, etc.
Brown definitely does not follow this 4pm rule. This is literally the first time I’ve ever heard of such a thing.
Or the opposite, our coach allowed us to regularly skip 1 practice/week for academics, 2/week if absolutely necessary. Captain’s practices only happened during the fall. Could count the number of meetings I had to attend each year on one hand.
Yale does not block off practice times or “no class” times.
MIT blocks off practice time.
As @collegemom3717 said:
The individuality of each student makes answering your question impossible. I would suggest the only way to differentiate is to meet with coaches and players at schools you’re interested in. At the NESCAC and similar LAC schools, I think you’ll get varying degrees of “school comes first” from the coach. It is D3, and in the end, nearly all of those participating in sports will play their last organized game/match at school. For my daughter, it came after sophomore season. The demands of school and an interest in doing other EC’s for what amounted to a few minutes a week of playing time didn’t balance. She is still friends with the team, and they remain social, but the requirements of school and everything else didn’t fit…so sports was removed.
I was under the impression that Princeton and Yale do have a block of free time in the afternoon but Columbia does not. I do know of one athlete that had a bit of academic trouble but changed majors and got back on track.
If it gets to that point the school (and coach) get very involved.
Yale does not block the academic schedule for athletic practices. As I mentioned earlier, Princeton does.
Some of “blocking” is a matter of options. Small LAC’s have fewer classes, so A) it’s easier to fit them into a block of time before 4pm, and B) larger schools with more options don’t need to “block” the later times, as they have infrastructure limits and student desire to have later sessions. That doesn’t mean athletes can’t attend a section of the same class earlier in the day.
I’ve never heard that an athlete couldn’t take a required class because it was only offered at 4pm. The details of this tangent feel a bit frivolous.
@EyeVeee, your analysis makes sense and is helpful. But considering relative work loads between elites and how different institutions may or may not make being an athlete easier is not a frivolous consideration, at least to the prospective STEM major.
I have a son at Princeton and know athletes (some better than others, obviously) currently or recently at Cornell, Penn, Harvard, Dartmouth, Yale, JHU, MIT, Notre Dame, Vanderbilt. A bit more than half of these guys are football players, which is going to put them on the top end of time committment for their sport. The two guys at ND and Vandy are very much in a different league, and their schedule is completely dominated by football activities. Of the remaining, I think my son and his buddy at MIT would say that they generally have the hardest workload. Maybe that is true, maybe it isn’t. I do think that at a certain point the questions you are asking will depend entirely on things like choice of major and a particular semester’s classes at a given school. My son and his buddy at MIT are STEM guys. I think the only other one of the group mentioned above is at JHU, which is a D3 school with a consequently much lower time committment required for football.
Princeton does block time for varsity practices. When my son was getting recruited, they were the only ones to do that in the Ivy and they made kind of a big deal of it. I don’t know how big of a deal it is in practice however, since this block time does not necessarily include scheduled precept time or some labs. It also does not include captain’s practice time/lifts/meetings, which is a significant component of the time committment of varsity football. So it does help somewhat, but it is not like blocking off a couple hours of the day is a silver bullet for scheduling problems.
No Ivy provides official scheduling priority/help for athletes, however I have heard anecdotally that if there is a problem with a lab section/precept, it is fairly easy to get scheduled into a different section. I know my son has changed precepts in the past for this reason. But this brings up a different point that is worth considering. All of the Ivys provide extensive academic support to all students, including athletes. There will be a lot of people around the team and the athletic department to reach out to if the academics atart to get away. I think the kids who succeed are those who reach out for that help.
@Ohiodad51, thanks for sharing all this information! Is a precept like a small group discussion or problem solving session that meets at a different time than the larger lecture session? I am not familiar with that term. I did NOT know that Ivies all had excellent academic support. I thought since all students are supposed to be so strong that they may have overlooked academic support in general. Is academic support mostly for struggling students or is it something that can be utilized by kids that are doing well overall? Is there any stigma attached to using the academic support?
From what you know about MIT, how is the academic support there? Is it as good as the Ivies? My athlete has met with the MIT coach and they have maintained contact, though getting in seems like such a long shot. I am worried that my kid would finish practice and have trouble finishing problem sets every night and/or finding a study group that would want someone that had to spend so much time at practice. From what I understand, problem sets at MIT can be completed in groups and in fact a good study group is very much needed to succeed. Not sure how this compares to engineering students at other Ivies like Cornell. Do you have any insights? I am pretty worried how engineering or other STEM major can be successfully completed by an athlete.
Reading through this thread, I think you have received some great perspectives. The truest theme running through this thread is that the answers to your questions arise from almost totally subjective experiences, with lots of variables including the school, the sport, and the student.
S1 is a DV1 fencer. While this is certainly among the “niche” sports, the Ivies in particularly take it very seriously. At some, e.g., Columbia, it is THE major sport. Speaking from S1’s experience, training and competing take a tremendous amount of time. This time away forces diligent balancing of his academic schedule, as well as great focus on keeping ahead in his work. In our personal experience, we refused to allow our child’s sport to dictate the level of academics to which he should strive. While we were prepared to use DV1 fencing programs as a criterion, we were not prepared to allow this one filter to dominate S1’s choice of schools. This being the case, S1 also had to be prepared to play-up academically as well as athletically. This required lining up tutors early, even though ace-high school student might not think he needs help. It required establishing early-on with professors that there would be missed classes and possible conflicts with exams. This in turn required proactivity in obtaining and doing assignments ahead of schedule, and often studying for and taking exams under less than optimal time constraints.
Your child sounds like a bright, well-rounded young man. IMHO, he should shoot for the best school(s) possible for his undergraduate education and life beyond. Considerations for his sport should certainly be given substantial weight. But the relative difficulty of balancing academics versus sports, and having a social life besides is very personal. Some can do it all, some not. My sense is that less competitive sports programs can be enthusiastic with lots of great experiences and fun, without breaking the back of college academics and social life. For example, I seriously doubt that a commitment to fencing at Haverford, Johns Hopkins, or Stevens Institute (to name a few stellar schools with such programs), overly-impacts work and play at these schools.
Good luck!
Here is a link explaining the precept system. https://admission.princeton.edu/academics/precept-system
I believe my son would tell you that it is a pretty integral part of the set up at Princeton. I think it is a bit more than a problem solving session, and I know that he regards attendance at precepts as more crucial than attending lectures.
Concerning academic support, that was a huge thing for me when my son was being recruited. I struggled mightly during my first year of college, and I delved pretty deeply into the systems available at the six Ivies which actually recruited him. You are not wrong that the Ivys expect their student athletes to be strong students. I do not think you will find mandatory study tables or academic advisors that will “help” athletes fill out their schedules like you will at “normal” D1s. But you will find academic fellows who are loosely attached to the various athletic teams and available to assist/advocate for a particular kid, free tutoring and generally robust academic support. I believe that the big distinction is that the Ivys expect their students, athlete or not, to be smart enough to reach out when in need. For those kids who do reach out, the support is extensive. On the other hand, if you don’t know enough to stick your hand up and shout help, you may just drown. I have seen coaches in the Ivy be gobsmacked because a kid failed a class they needed to remain eligible and were then lost for the season. That would not happen in “normal” D1. The coaches will know everything, in pretty much real time.
I do understand anecdotally that MIT is a bit more sink or swim after the first year. But really my knowledge there is limited, because the kid I know well there is a crew guy and a very strong student.
When my recent high school grad was going through the recruiting process, he was told by numerous coaches that the workload at MIT was the most brutal, followed by the workload at Princeton.
I have an older kid at MIT. Athletics is treated like any other extracurricular activity, and there is no special support for athletes like you might find at other schools. That being said, academic support is available to any student who reaches out for help. The profs hold office hours, and many students do attend office hours when they are stuck on a problem set. The kids also form groups to work on problem sets together.
My MIT kiddo is having a fantastic experience. The kids at MIT are students first and athletes second, which is exactly the type of environment my kids wanted.
Sorry I missed it above, but my understanding, at least at Princeton and I believe at all the other Ivys where my son was recruited, was that tutoring is available to all students. My son has certainly utilized tutors in classes where his grades were well above the line necessary for eligibility. I know he used tutors extensively in a class even though he was carrying a solid B at the time he went for help.
Many schools have tutoring available to all students. My daughter would not use the ‘athletic’ tutoring because it is general, and she’d be better off in the writing lab or the chemistry department tutoring.
I think where the athletic academic help comes more into play is that the coaches and other athletic department staff are notified of any problems immediately. Coach called daughter and asked why she missed a class (‘a’ as in one class). Turns out she just went to another section and the attendance record hadn’t caught up to the prof yet. The coach gets the grades, the coach knows who is falling behind. This coach does require study tables for anyone below a 3.0.
The athletes also help each other out. Daughter had a soccer player in one of her classes. Daughter helped him out with any notes he missed because of games, and she actually benefited as much as he did when reviewing her notes with him.
Required? Probably true, but athletes at Brown regularly have to pass on a class because it’s a once/week seminar in the later hours.
It’s the case at Brown at least.
For student-athletes who opt for an Ivy and anticipate a rigorous academic course load, it is strongly recommended to plan for the whole year at least in terms of scheduling. Specifically, think in terms of days of the week on which the student will typically miss school for competition travel. Consider also training time conflicts. Depending on the course offerings and the flexibility of the schedule, it may be better to put off certain requirements until later. In our experience, at an Ivy, during freshman year, there were a ton of sections offered for core requirements. There were, however, conflicts specific to the Fall semester which caused S1 to switch the Fall and Spring core offerings in one area. He also structured his schedule to have no Friday classes (get away day for national tournaments), and no Thursday afternoon classes (get away day for international competitions). No such system is perfect and each school-student-sport will throw its own curve balls. However, some advance planning can go a long way.