I feel like we don't talk enough that top LACs are 40%+ recruited athletes.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:My recruited athlete has a 35 on his ACT, and a wGPA of 4.8. Why not recruit high stats athletes if their scores fall in the range of accepted students? Better than a legacy or child of a big donor.

Because if you fill 35% of a class with recruited athletes, it decreases the diversity of the class. And by diversity I include artists, musicians, poets, scientists, scholars, and yes, athletes. Sure, you can be both. But most recruited athletes spent a large chunk of their teenage years studying and playing their sport. They didn’t spend 25 hours per week on something else. And they are disproportionately wealthy, reducing another metric of diversity. And they tend to stick together, having a polarizing impact on campus akin to the Greek system, if the percentage is high.

As if you don't have to be rich to be top tier as an artist, musician, or scholar. As if the parents of those kids never paid for a ton of tutoring, coaching, trips to camps, and expensive musical instruments.

you missed the part where those kids aren't being recruited and there's not a lopsided class with 40% actors.

laughing that only reed kids smoke weed. have you been to the Amherst campus lately? or any campus?

[Anonymous]

Bleah, sorry for the repetition above-- time for bed.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:This is a very tired topic. Parents without athletes hate the recruited athlete hook. We get it.

But there are so many needless slots set aside for weird exclusive sports. It's blatant backdoor affirmative action for pampered rich white kids who couldn't cut it otherwise.

It is obvious that these schools do not think these sports are "needless" or they would not have them.

And if you think these ultra-woke schools are providing "backdoor affirmative action for pampered rich white kids" then you are truly deluded.

[Anonymous]

I think legacy preference and 70% of these "sports" are gone in next 5 years.

It's hard to argue for keeping either. Not one good defense in this forum, that's for sure.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:The college sports thing makes absolutely no sense. If someone is really athletic maybe they should go into the military or some other survival-type job. Meanwhile, going to university should really be more for intellectual pursuits, instead of playing mindless ball and doing keg stands.

Maybe you should read a book so you can understand that American colleges and universities are not, and never have been, dedicated to "purely intellectual pursuits". They don't even admit non-athletes on the basis of pure academic or intellectual merit.

[Anonymous]

Schools can cut sports at any time. Title IX led to a big expansion of overall sports supported by small (and large) schools. I still think of it as an overall plus.

Stanford managed to get most of their rich kid sports fully endowed after trying to cut some.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:do people need help googling?

Amherst:
https://amherststudent.com/article/bridging-amhersts-athletic-divide/

The divide is deeply harmful to both types of students. Athletes, seen as less intelligent by many non-athletes, can lack academic confidence, which may partly explain why while 49 percent of non-athletes write senior theses, only 16 percent of varsity athletes do.

lol if you think the athletes care if the non-athletes "see them as less intelligent".

The athletes have a higher graduation rate than the non-athletes, so they're not lacking in academic achievement despite their supposed lack of "academic confidence" (whatever the hell that is).

Amherst has an overall 96% graduation rate. I don’t think any group is graduating at a higher rate than any other group.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:My recruited athlete has a 35 on his ACT, and a wGPA of 4.8. Why not recruit high stats athletes if their scores fall in the range of accepted students? Better than a legacy or child of a big donor.

Because if you fill 35% of a class with recruited athletes, it decreases the diversity of the class. And by diversity I include artists, musicians, poets, scientists, scholars, and yes, athletes. Sure, you can be both. But most recruited athletes spent a large chunk of their teenage years studying and playing their sport. They didn’t spend 25 hours per week on something else. And they are disproportionately wealthy, reducing another metric of diversity. And they tend to stick together, having a polarizing impact on campus akin to the Greek system, if the percentage is high.

As if you don't have to be rich to be top tier as an artist, musician, or scholar. As if the parents of those kids never paid for a ton of tutoring, coaching, trips to camps, and expensive musical instruments.

you missed the part where those kids aren't being recruited and there's not a lopsided class with 40% actors.

laughing that only reed kids smoke weed. have you been to the Amherst campus lately? or any campus?

If you are still talking about 40% recruited athletes at LACs, you should probably re-read the thread. And no one said that only Reed kids smoke weed. Again, re-read.

[Anonymous]

England, Ireland, Canada, Australia, and China have some great universities if the American system isn't to your liking.
There is no one forcing people to focus as myopically as people on DCUM do on a small number of schools in the US either. Thankfully, there really are plenty of college slots to go around! They might not be at Harvard, Stanford, MIT, Amherst, or Swarthmore but there is no one who morally "deserves" to go to one of those types of schools anyway.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:England, Ireland, Canada, Australia, and China have some great universities if the American system isn't to your liking.
There is no one forcing people to focus as myopically as people on DCUM do on a small number of schools in the US either. Thankfully, there really are plenty of college slots to go around! They might not be at Harvard, Stanford, MIT, Amherst, or Swarthmore but there is no one who morally "deserves" to go to one of those types of schools anyway.

+1 People act like there are not plenty of colleges for everyone. Colleges are shutting down each year!

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:The college sports thing makes absolutely no sense. If someone is really athletic maybe they should go into the military or some other survival-type job. Meanwhile, going to university should really be more for intellectual pursuits, instead of playing mindless ball and doing keg stands.

What does that mean exactly? Colleges shouldn't offer sports? Or colleges shouldn't recruit? I think sports at colleges are valuable. I would rather see a kid manage stress with sports than certain other activities. Learning to manage time, take care of your body, and work as a team are useful life skills. I can see how a D1 team could increase overall stress particularly if you don't plan to go pro, but I think D3 teams are a very different scene. Club sports are sometimes a good alternative, but sometimes are not organized enough to be worth the time investment. As for recruiting, I see the arguments both ways, but there isn't really far greater recruiting at top LACs than at their top private university equivalents. It's a myth hatched from a misconception that athletes at the D3 level can only make the team if recruited; that's more often true with D1 than D3.

No, sports aren't worth all that extra money. I'd rather have tuition cut in half instead of subsidizing oversize football stadiums and gilded rec rooms for the jocks. Given the massive student debt tsunami it would be much better if colleges only focused on education.

I do agree with you that exercise is healthy for everyone. But you could accomplish that much more cheaply by simply having a couple rec leagues and regular gym facilities.

Good grief, sports are absolutely NOT the source of rampant tuition inflation since 1990. If you want tuition cut in half then you have to fire all the administrators.

And since the topic here are LACs, these are schools that don't have "oversize football stadiums and gilded rec rooms", idiot. At these schools, the athletic programs largely pay for themselves.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I’m not American so I don’t understand this phenomenon. I can understand big state schools where having a big football team
might draw money or attention to school. Why would a SLAC care if someone fences or sails?Is it a way for well off but academically mediocre students to get in? Or do these students have the same qualifications as the non-athletes? Doesn’t it hurt the schools reputation as an academic-centered college? Sorry lots of questions.

They care because the athletes donate a lot more money than other groups over the years and as a whole tend to be more successful career-wise. That’s really why they do it: the athletes donate back to the schools in ways other groups don’t.

If the athletes at SLACs are as qualified as non-athletes, not sure why their being “recruited” would matter in terms of alumni engagement and donations.

Wouldn’t someone that was accepted, tried out, made the team be as attached to their school and an engaged donor as anyone?

I haven't seen data that supports the notion that families of athletes are more likely to donate.

There is data that successful D1 sports programs make schools money, but those aren't LACs, with the exception of outliers like Davidson.

It interesting that the highly ranked private schools that don't consider legacy status are primarily D3, either LAC (eg Amherst, Bryn Mawr, Carleton, Pomona, Wesleyan) or university (eg MIT, Caltech, Johns Hopkins, Carnegie Mellon).

https://www.collegekickstart.com/blog/item/selective-institutions-that-don-t-consider-legacy-status

I’m sure you definitely know better than the investment committees of colleges with massive alumni donation programs! You should definitely send them a letter and tell them that actually, you don’t think there is data. They will definitely believe you over their own records. 👍

Well, no one said they think they know better than the investment committee, just that they hadn't seen data saying families of athletes give more. It's entirely possible there is a correlation between the existence of athletic programs and giving rates without families of athletes giving more. It's kinda nuanced so watch out, no one wants you to hurt your head thinking about it too long.

[Anonymous]

Many good SLACs (and top midsize schools) could easily grow by 10-25% too. Elite schools educating so few people is problematic.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Wesleyan

http://wesleyanargus.com/2022/10/06/separated-spaces-rethinking-dining-hall-divisions/

a divide between athletes and non-athletes that was so deeply ingrained in the culture that the dining hall itself was divided into rooms based on this distinction, as if the division was promoted by the school itself. Arriving on campus in the fall, I almost immediately noticed this in most sectors of social life, including in the dining hall.

Read the entire article. The author, a non-athlete, realized that any "divide" wasn't necessarily the result of athlete actions. And that athletes are actually a minority on campus.

It’s important to remember that athletes are also in the minority. And while the word “minority” may come with implications and assumptions that we may feel uncomfortable using to reference Wesleyan student athletes, in this context, numerically, they are a minority on campus. And so, in some ways, they are an outgroup. It is easy to blame groups without numerical strength for problems that exist in a given space, and I think many of us, myself included, have accidentally done this. There is comfort in blaming athletes solely for the divided nature of our campus culture because we know there are more non-athletes to back us up than athletes to argue with us.

The other problem is that a lot of the anti-athlete sentiment has a distinctive racist tinge. And yes, I know about sailing and all that. But it doesn’t change the fact that a lot of the anti-athlete sentiment started when athletics started to be used to bring Black students to these campuses, and the language used hasn’t changed much.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:when not recruit 40% legit rich kids if you wanted "donors" 20 years from now. Believe me, rich kids have the stats too.

alumni donors are not that important. they pale when compared to one-off donations (and yeah, the future tech billionaires are not on the williams bball team) and the day to day churn of the bloated endowment.

You definitely know better than the college fund managers! You should tell them!