40% of Williams' classes are athletic recruits

[Anonymous]

Does this bother anyone else?

[Anonymous]

No -- not at all. It is a small school. If they can pick a "two-fer" (kid who is smart and athletic) over just a "one-fer"...just smart...of course they will pick the "two-fer" since they need kids to represent Williams in lax, crew, etc.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Does this bother anyone else?

No.

[Anonymous]

Given Williams scores and selectivity I suspect these are also kids with great grades and scores. And don't forget there are no athletic scholarships in D3. I wouldnt be surprised if Amherst is as high/higher - I know many more kids who have gone to Amherst for sports.

[Anonymous]

I suppose what bothers me is that the huge amount of time kids spend on sports (the amount of time needed to be good enough to be recruited for sports) takes so much time away from other interests, such as reading, music, exploring the natural world, etc. I dated a tennis recruit in college and his world was so small -- he knew very little outside of tennis. I think it's sad that these kids are being forced to narrow their worlds at such a young age. I learned more from reading for fun in high school than I did in class. I worry that this trend -- of colleges choosing well-rounded classes instead of well-rounded students (i.e., narrowly-focused students instead of students who've done a variety of things) is short-sighted.

[Anonymous]

You are stereotyping pp. Kids who are great at sports can also be great at many other things. These colleges pick elite students. Some kids are just tremendously fortunate that they can do it all.

[Anonymous]

I suspect that the people most bothered by this stat are parents of non-athletes. LOL!!

All jokes aside, I agree with PP that you may be shortchanging the typical athlete at the D3 level. My DC is a basketball player at a top ranked SLAC. Here are some of her high school credentials (Her GPA and test scores were very good BTW and well within the range the SLAC accepts). She played basketball on a high school team that was ranked in the top 50 in the nation in girls’ basketball. She played AAU basketball in the summer. Was a member of the AA Students’ Organization, the Spanish Club and the Prospective Student Shadowing Committee. Was a counselor at the school’s camps every summer. She had a part time job during the basketball off-season. Oh she graduated with over 100 hours of Community Service and she had a pretty active social life. And this was a pretty typical resume for the female athletes at her high school and the young ladies she plays with in college. I say all of this to say that the kids at the D3 level tend to be very balanced and have a strong resume outside of their chosen sport.

With respect to Williams, Amherst (the D3 National Champ in women’s basketball) and other top-ranked SLACs, these schools have always looked for high school kids with a “public balance” whether it be through athletics, art, drama, debate, music or whatever. They want students who are good in the classroom, but also can help spread the brand of the school. They want people who can represent the school externally.

[Anonymous]

This review explains my view well: http://www.tnr.com/book/review/airball .

Here's an excerpt for those who don't want to read the whole article:

"It isn’t just that top schools reserve a large number of spots in their generally small classes for recruited athletes. Perhaps the least defensible aspect of the entire enterprise is how many resources go into identifying and wooing these athletes, even as comparable efforts to recruit other kinds of students are few and far between. Princeton hosts and supports an annual program that I run to help aspiring journalists from low-income backgrounds apply to elite colleges, but we only work with about twenty students a year, a tiny fraction of the students who could use our assistance. Every dysfunctional urban high school in the country has a valedictorian, and many of those high schools also have a high-achieving newspaper editor or debate club president. Unlike at more privileged high schools, however, too few of these students are encouraged by their teachers or parents to apply to top colleges. Meanwhile, hundreds of coaches from elite colleges scour the country for their next big recruit. Imagine if similar efforts were put into finding the next newspaper editor or the next theatrical talent, and finding him or her at an inner city high school. The results could be transformative for both higher education and the incentive structures at urban high schools. As long as elite colleges put sports on a plane above all other extracurricular pursuits—including many that are more closely tied to academics—this will never happen....The answer, in the end, is simple: Ivy League schools and other similar institutions need to start treating sports like they treat the orchestra, the newspaper, and other activities—spreading the university’s recruiting resources evenly across all these extracurriculars and making no special compromises on admission standards for one activity that the school is not prepared to make for all others."

[Anonymous]

Thanks for the link. I understand your overall point that at certain schools, there seems to be too much of a focus on athletics. However, that article is not entirely relevant to Williams though.

The article primarily talks about the Ivy League schools. Well, all of the Ivies are in NCAA Division I. Williams is NCAA D3.

Division I schools tend to have bigger budgets and in most cases, the athletic departments are self funded. They keep the revenue they generate. And DI schools (like the Ivies) expect their athletic department to make money. Very few Division I schools use resources from the general budget to recruit athletes. And I think the passage you cite fails to account for this very important point. Athletic departments generate revenue. Certain reserach programs bring in grant money for reserach and development. The journalism department? Not so much. Like it or not, the kids in the revenue producing programs will be more heavily recruited - whether those programs are academic or athletic. It's a money thing at the DI level.

With respect to D3, my DD was recruited by a number of them. The resources used to recruit my daughter? Calls and occasional letters from the coach, a walking tour that every other prospective student got, lunch in the cafeteria when she visited (that other non-athlete prospects got) and an overnight stay in an athlete’s dorm room (where she slept on the floor). Heck, she even paid for her own ticket to the games. Trust me, D3 schools are not wining and dining these athletes – so I suspect that the resources spent on recruiting athletes do not take much away from the general recruitment effort. And most top D3 schools will not recruit an athlete who could not get in otherwise. For example, Carnegie Mellon and Dickinson both ask for GPA and test scores in the first letter to the recruit.

[Anonymous]

Bottom line: Athletes at these elite SLAC's are not dumb jocks. Most of them are establshed students also. Looking at a school like Williams where last year 1202 students were admitted and 550 enrolled. Using the 40% number, 220 of the 550 woud be athletes. Williams carries 15 Men's sports (including football) and 15 women's sports (30 total sports is higher than most NCAA Division III schools). So I am not sure that the numbers are unreasonable when you look at the real facts.

[Anonymous]

As informed people have posted earlier, there is a stereotyping and a misperception in this thread about the athletes at the D3 level and at Williams. My DS was a football player there. A football player at Williams is far different than a football player at Ohio State. Not to take anything away from any non-athlete, but athletes at the D3 level are true student athletes. They represent the school in their sport – they are the public face of the school many times. They are also active in campus activities and are expected to be good students. Most of the D3 students that I have met are not the tunnel visioned - one track athletes that I have met at the DI level. That is why many of them chose D3 schools – they can be athletes without sacrificing being a real part of the school community.

And I thank the PP for taking the time to post a concrete number. 220 athletes in a class spread across 30 sports at a 2000 student school is more than I would have expected, but not an overwhelming number (especially since probably 10-15% of the athletes are football players).

[Anonymous]

OP--I always find it odd that people are so aghast about athletic recruitment, yet they barely blink about the whole legacy thing. Athletes have specific, sought-after talents. Legacies are just member of the "lucky sperm club".

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:As informed people have posted earlier, there is a stereotyping and a misperception in this thread about the athletes at the D3 level and at Williams. My DS was a football player there. A football player at Williams is far different than a football player at Ohio State. Not to take anything away from any non-athlete, but athletes at the D3 level are true student athletes. They represent the school in their sport – they are the public face of the school many times. They are also active in campus activities and are expected to be good students. Most of the D3 students that I have met are not the tunnel visioned - one track athletes that I have met at the DI level. That is why many of them chose D3 schools – they can be athletes without sacrificing being a real part of the school community.

And I thank the PP for taking the time to post a concrete number. 220 athletes in a class spread across 30 sports at a 2000 student school is more than I would have expected, but not an overwhelming number (especially since probably 10-15% of the athletes are football players).

Good post. There are many students playing D3 because academics come first. there is not the academic disparity or separation from the main student body as found in D1.

[Anonymous]

I'm just curious as to why our society values athletics so much more than musical or writing ability. Or why a kid who is a first class lacrosse player has so much more to offer a school than a really good all-around athlete who also plays the violin at a very advanced level who also happens to have better grades. I don't like the whole idea of kids specializing so early. Any activity (including the violin, I might add) that takes up more than 15 hours a week on the part of a teenager leaves so little time for reading for pleasure, backpacking, learning how to sew or fix a car, etc., when the academics are so demanding as well. I just hate to see kids under so much pressure, and, if we are going to encourage kids to focus on one activity early on, it seems like it would be a better use of their time to encourage them to do something more directly related to academics, such as playing music or working on the school newspaper. I'm all for being physically fit, but I just don't understand the need to recruit Olympic caliber athletes. It's sad that there are very few "walk-on" positions on college teams any more. Everything has become so unnecessarily professional.


And the legacy hook (and big donor hook) bothers me just as much as it does you. There is no reason for that.

[Anonymous]

Where did you get the 40% number anyway?