Amherst College Paper Article on Athletic Recruiting.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Recruited athletes get a huge thumb on the scale because of the American money-generating sports culture. Not because it builds character.

It is what it is. Why do the parents of these students push back on this? Why pretend it’s so hard to get special treatment? You and your kid benefit from this. You win!

Why pretend?

We do win.

Some of us have All-American, near-perfect GPAs, 1450 and higher SATs, AP/IB-loaded-up kids who are not better than yours; they just serve a function for Amherst and other schools.

Amherst and its competitors could easily fill a class with Indian and Chinese students that would run academic circles around all of us. [bold]That is your competition and threat. Not some kid you see as being less than yours because they played lacrosse at Deerfield.[/b]

You can't have everything both ways, can you?

That's where you're wrong. Their kids could have been better at lacrosse than your kid they were never going to be better at academics than the Indian and Asian kids.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:My kids played sports in HS but not in college. All you whiners who bemoan athletes and the interest universities have in them need to wake up. Sports mean money, visibility, cache. Athletes who are able to play at the college level work very hard and do not have the typical college slacker experience. If your kid doesn't have athletic talent you need to help them cultivate another hook if you're so worried that they'll get "cheated" out of their shot.

How much money visibility and cache does cross country and squash generate?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Recruited athletes get a huge thumb on the scale because of the American money-generating sports culture. Not because it builds character.

It is what it is. Why do the parents of these students push back on this? Why pretend it’s so hard to get special treatment? You and your kid benefit from this. You win!

Why pretend?

We do win.

Some of us have All-American, near-perfect GPAs, 1450 and higher SATs, AP/IB-loaded-up kids who are not better than yours; they just serve a function for Amherst and other schools.

Amherst and its competitors could easily fill a class with Indian and Chinese students that would run academic circles around all of us. That is your competition and threat. Not some kid you see as being less than yours because they played lacrosse at Deerfield.

You can't have everything both ways, can you?

This.

My kid spent 20+ hours a week since 6th grade in their sport and won a national championship junior year with a similar profile.

Not going to feel bad if a high-academic D3 school feels that’s a bigger hook EC-wise than the club someone else’s kid started in high school or some internship.

Don't forget the non-profit they started with mom and dad's money or the research paper they authored with the scientist funded by mom and dad's money or the anthropology dig they spent their summer working on after the project got an infusionn of mom and dad's money. At least the athlete had to get good enough to make a coach go out on a limb for them.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Also every so often these slac schools use sports to increase their chances of gettting a top student.

My kids has 1580 SAT, 4.7 GPA, and will have 15 AP courses after senior year. Great leadership in a few different other areas besides the sport. Great service. Definitely a narrative. Ivy legacy.

But the kid wants to play the sport so it is looking like NESCAC or UAA league as not good enough to play at the Ivy.

It’s rarer…understand the NESCAC and UAA coaches think the same as Ivy coaches. They want to win games and will probably use their influence on the 1350 kid they really want and may tell your kid they have a roster spot if they are accepted on their own.

It almost counts against you if you are too strong on your own.

Good point. Though I wouldn't say high stats count against you per se, just that coaches will prioritize superior athletic talent over stats. That's exactly how this works. If you're not among the most competitive recruits, you're just one of the many high stats kids applying.

It can work against you. If you don't need them, you might drop the team as a freshman. They won't pull for you like they would pull for a kid that needs your influence to graduate on time..

Your comment makes zero sense.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Malcolm Gladwell on recruited athletes at Harvard:

The chapter opens with a livestream of a Harvard women's rugby game that six people are watching in which Harvard beats Princeton 61 to 5. You go into how this team was created, starting in 2013. In short, the coach is flying all over the world recruiting players who come from pretty specific upper-class circumstances. And you write that this is the way of many sports at Harvard, which happens to have more Division I sports than any other school in the country. Harvard has way more student-athletes than, say, the University of Michigan. And so you argue that the reason they're spending all this money flying around the world to populate sports that most colleges don’t have has to do with a tipping point — specifically with avoiding a tipping point. Can you describe your argument as to why Harvard is doing something that seems peculiar from the outside?

Malcolm Gladwell: Two things are going on. They're going to extraordinary lengths to recruit athletes who are good at sports that almost no one plays — fencing, rowing, rugby, on and on — not just the big ticket ones like football and basketball. And the second thing that they're doing is in order to ensure that these athletes will get into Harvard, they are giving these recruited athletes an admissions break that is enormous. Basically, they have an affirmative action program set up in place for students who excel at a specific number of sports. If you ask them why would they do those two things, the answers they give are completely unconvincing. They're bullshit. They can't even come up with a good line. They're like: “Well, it's sort of good for school spirit,” or basically versions of that, which make no sense. So you’re compelled, if you want to explain this phenomenon, to come up with a more convincing reason why they're doing it, and my argument is that a school like Harvard is powerfully incentivized to maintain a certain kind of privileged culture. It's the basis on which their exclusivity and their brand value rests, and to do that, they would like to maintain a certain critical mass of wealthy, privileged, largely white — not exclusively — kids, and it's very difficult to do that if all you're doing is picking the smartest, because the overlap between rich and smart is limited. So you’ve got to create a mechanism to get rich kids in the back door, and sports is the mechanism.

So if you're going to let in tennis players, the only way you could ever get a DI or even a DIII slot on a tennis team at an exclusive school is you had to have played junior tennis. There's just no way around it. In order to play junior tennis in America right now, you need to be spending, at minimum, thousands, in some cases, well over 100-grand a year. So right there, by saying I will set aside special spots on my sports teams and give enormous admissions breaks to really good tennis players, what I'm saying is I'm going to guarantee that a certain number of rich kids will always be at Harvard. That's what it's about.

Gladwell also says to not go to highly selective schools, if you want to take his advice here are you taking it there as well?

That aside, Gladwell is spouting nonsense in this case. He used tennis as an example. Harvard started competing in tennis in 1928, a time when they were hardly worried about not enough rich people. The vast majority of athletic programs at the schools in question far predate any concerns regarding ‘full pay’ but there could be a class element involved, especially for certain sports like sailing.

The second largest D1 sports program is Ohio State which doesn’t exactly align with Gladwell thesis.

The largest D3 program is …..wait for it, MIT. Do you actually believe that they are chasing wealth?

Finally, even if Gladwell thesis held water (it doesn’t), so what. Private institutions are allowed to have and maintain institutional priorities.

DP. there was a second part to his thesis - the rate of Asians in Ivies vs Caltech.

Caltech doesn't recruit athletes (or not as much) and the percentage of Asians grew. Now stand at: 46%
At the Ivy League there are still some Ivies that are below 30% and Harvard/Columbia is closer to 40%

His thesis is that sports are used to "control" the percentages; To be a top-tier student athlete at a niche sport - the parent is also a participant. The parent needs to take time off, pay for private lessons, camps, etc. They can be "need blind" and auto-filter for rich when they accept niche sports athletes. Which lean towards rich white.

CalTech absolutely recruits athletes. I know multiple. But they all meet CalTech’s academic bar.

OK. isn't that the point that bar hasn't been lowered? So merit took over?

The student who is not a recruited athlete has to clear a higher academic bar because they don’t get the benefit of the hook.

Nope! Sports is considered as another EC. https://tech.caltech.edu/2024/10/08/ug-admissions-athletics

My kid spoke with the MIT and CalTech coach for baseball.

MIT coach said you need sky high SATs, top grades, rigorous classes...but baseball can essentially be your only EC and Math championships and what not aren't relevant.

CalTech coach said you need sky high everything, Math championships (yes, please), published research (yes, please), other stellar ECs (absolutely)...and by the way, we hope you can play baseball at a decent level.

There is a reason why the CalTech baseball team counts a 10 win season (and 30 losses) as an incredible season, and the basketball team famously hasn't won a conference game in like 20 years.

This aligns with our experience as well. My kid was offered recruiting support at MIT and also talked to CalTech. They quickly ruled CalTech out after watching them play. They weren’t at the level of the JV team at my kids High School.

Sounds great. All Div 3 should be like this. Kids can walk on to teams, even. Not enough walk ons, no team. Offer more PE that kids want to take.

Who cares if Div. 3 then isn’t as good: schools comprised of 30-40% recruited athletes are a travesty. If these kids aren’t good enough for Div. 1, they should not be getting such admission preferences anyhow…

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Recruited athletes get a huge thumb on the scale because of the American money-generating sports culture. Not because it builds character.

It is what it is. Why do the parents of these students push back on this? Why pretend it’s so hard to get special treatment? You and your kid benefit from this. You win!

Why pretend?

We do win.

Some of us have All-American, near-perfect GPAs, 1450 and higher SATs, AP/IB-loaded-up kids who are not better than yours; they just serve a function for Amherst and other schools.

Amherst and its competitors could easily fill a class with Indian and Chinese students that would run academic circles around all of us. [bold]That is your competition and threat. Not some kid you see as being less than yours because they played lacrosse at Deerfield.[/b]

You can't have everything both ways, can you?

That's where you're wrong. Their kids could have been better at lacrosse than your kid they were never going to be better at academics than the Indian and Asian kids.

I wouldn’t get too full of yourselves. My unassuming Bay Area white kid academically exceeds the strivers in her school daily. Nobody topped her SAT score and she took it as a sophomore. The top math kid from a couple of years ago is also a blonde blue eyed kid with top IB job in hand.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Recruited athletes get a huge thumb on the scale because of the American money-generating sports culture. Not because it builds character.

It is what it is. Why do the parents of these students push back on this? Why pretend it’s so hard to get special treatment? You and your kid benefit from this. You win!

Why pretend?

We do win.

Some of us have All-American, near-perfect GPAs, 1450 and higher SATs, AP/IB-loaded-up kids who are not better than yours; they just serve a function for Amherst and other schools.

Amherst and its competitors could easily fill a class with Indian and Chinese students that would run academic circles around all of us. That is your competition and threat. Not some kid you see as being less than yours because they played lacrosse at Deerfield.

You can't have everything both ways, can you?

This.

My kid spent 20+ hours a week since 6th grade in their sport and won a national championship junior year with a similar profile.

Not going to feel bad if a high-academic D3 school feels that’s a bigger hook EC-wise than the club someone else’s kid started in high school or some internship.

Don't forget the non-profit they started with mom and dad's money or the research paper they authored with the scientist funded by mom and dad's money or the anthropology dig they spent their summer working on after the project got an infusionn of mom and dad's money. At least the athlete had to get good enough to make a coach go out on a limb for them.

After spending lots of mom and dad’s money on fees, equipment, travel expenses, private coaching, etc.?

[Anonymous]

After reading the thread, not all of it, I so glad my kid would not want to spend four years of their lives with these lunatics. Thank god we have Pomona.

Amherst thank you for giving us David Foster Wallace. That was enough.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Malcolm Gladwell on recruited athletes at Harvard:

The chapter opens with a livestream of a Harvard women's rugby game that six people are watching in which Harvard beats Princeton 61 to 5. You go into how this team was created, starting in 2013. In short, the coach is flying all over the world recruiting players who come from pretty specific upper-class circumstances. And you write that this is the way of many sports at Harvard, which happens to have more Division I sports than any other school in the country. Harvard has way more student-athletes than, say, the University of Michigan. And so you argue that the reason they're spending all this money flying around the world to populate sports that most colleges don’t have has to do with a tipping point — specifically with avoiding a tipping point. Can you describe your argument as to why Harvard is doing something that seems peculiar from the outside?

Malcolm Gladwell: Two things are going on. They're going to extraordinary lengths to recruit athletes who are good at sports that almost no one plays — fencing, rowing, rugby, on and on — not just the big ticket ones like football and basketball. And the second thing that they're doing is in order to ensure that these athletes will get into Harvard, they are giving these recruited athletes an admissions break that is enormous. Basically, they have an affirmative action program set up in place for students who excel at a specific number of sports. If you ask them why would they do those two things, the answers they give are completely unconvincing. They're bullshit. They can't even come up with a good line. They're like: “Well, it's sort of good for school spirit,” or basically versions of that, which make no sense. So you’re compelled, if you want to explain this phenomenon, to come up with a more convincing reason why they're doing it, and my argument is that a school like Harvard is powerfully incentivized to maintain a certain kind of privileged culture. It's the basis on which their exclusivity and their brand value rests, and to do that, they would like to maintain a certain critical mass of wealthy, privileged, largely white — not exclusively — kids, and it's very difficult to do that if all you're doing is picking the smartest, because the overlap between rich and smart is limited. So you’ve got to create a mechanism to get rich kids in the back door, and sports is the mechanism.

So if you're going to let in tennis players, the only way you could ever get a DI or even a DIII slot on a tennis team at an exclusive school is you had to have played junior tennis. There's just no way around it. In order to play junior tennis in America right now, you need to be spending, at minimum, thousands, in some cases, well over 100-grand a year. So right there, by saying I will set aside special spots on my sports teams and give enormous admissions breaks to really good tennis players, what I'm saying is I'm going to guarantee that a certain number of rich kids will always be at Harvard. That's what it's about.

Gladwell also says to not go to highly selective schools, if you want to take his advice here are you taking it there as well?

That aside, Gladwell is spouting nonsense in this case. He used tennis as an example. Harvard started competing in tennis in 1928, a time when they were hardly worried about not enough rich people. The vast majority of athletic programs at the schools in question far predate any concerns regarding ‘full pay’ but there could be a class element involved, especially for certain sports like sailing.

The second largest D1 sports program is Ohio State which doesn’t exactly align with Gladwell thesis.

The largest D3 program is …..wait for it, MIT. Do you actually believe that they are chasing wealth?

Finally, even if Gladwell thesis held water (it doesn’t), so what. Private institutions are allowed to have and maintain institutional priorities.

As long as they are not using it as a proxy to discriminate based on race, sure.

And Gladwell doesn't say not to go to selective schools, he said you shouldn't go to a school you just barely got into. You don't want to be the dumbest kid at your college. You want to go to a college where you are going to be one of the smart kids.

And while Harvard started tennis a century ago, they were not providing huge preferences to tennis players.
Recruiting high level tennis players are not about families that can pay full freight, it's about families that that don't even notice when the tuition check hits their bank account.
The percentage of students that are athletes at Ohio is pretty small
The preference for athletes at MIT is not large, there are definitely better extracurriculars if you want to get into MIT. Most of the teams have walk on players.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Recruited athletes get a huge thumb on the scale because of the American money-generating sports culture. Not because it builds character.

It is what it is. Why do the parents of these students push back on this? Why pretend it’s so hard to get special treatment? You and your kid benefit from this. You win!

Why pretend?

We do win.

Some of us have All-American, near-perfect GPAs, 1450 and higher SATs, AP/IB-loaded-up kids who are not better than yours; they just serve a function for Amherst and other schools.

Amherst and its competitors could easily fill a class with Indian and Chinese students that would run academic circles around all of us. That is your competition and threat. Not some kid you see as being less than yours because they played lacrosse at Deerfield.

You can't have everything both ways, can you?

This.

My kid spent 20+ hours a week since 6th grade in their sport and won a national championship junior year with a similar profile.

Not going to feel bad if a high-academic D3 school feels that’s a bigger hook EC-wise than the club someone else’s kid started in high school or some internship.

This is a thread about Athletics at Amherst but it still manages to bring in Indian and Chinese students and how they aren’t “all-American”. Sad. We respect the role athletics play at our alma maters. There are athletes of East Asian and South Asian ancestry at the NESCAC schools. Are they any less American than your kid? Signed NESCAC grad whose parents immigrated from India.

Just FYI, All-American doesn't mean their kids are more american than your kids. It means their kids have received athletic honors at the national level.

What they PPP is trying to sday to the PP is that their spots are not being lost to athletes because the athletes have always had the9ir preference. They are losing their spots to indians and asians who are new on the scene.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Malcolm Gladwell on recruited athletes at Harvard:

The chapter opens with a livestream of a Harvard women's rugby game that six people are watching in which Harvard beats Princeton 61 to 5. You go into how this team was created, starting in 2013. In short, the coach is flying all over the world recruiting players who come from pretty specific upper-class circumstances. And you write that this is the way of many sports at Harvard, which happens to have more Division I sports than any other school in the country. Harvard has way more student-athletes than, say, the University of Michigan. And so you argue that the reason they're spending all this money flying around the world to populate sports that most colleges don’t have has to do with a tipping point — specifically with avoiding a tipping point. Can you describe your argument as to why Harvard is doing something that seems peculiar from the outside?

Malcolm Gladwell: Two things are going on. They're going to extraordinary lengths to recruit athletes who are good at sports that almost no one plays — fencing, rowing, rugby, on and on — not just the big ticket ones like football and basketball. And the second thing that they're doing is in order to ensure that these athletes will get into Harvard, they are giving these recruited athletes an admissions break that is enormous. Basically, they have an affirmative action program set up in place for students who excel at a specific number of sports. If you ask them why would they do those two things, the answers they give are completely unconvincing. They're bullshit. They can't even come up with a good line. They're like: “Well, it's sort of good for school spirit,” or basically versions of that, which make no sense. So you’re compelled, if you want to explain this phenomenon, to come up with a more convincing reason why they're doing it, and my argument is that a school like Harvard is powerfully incentivized to maintain a certain kind of privileged culture. It's the basis on which their exclusivity and their brand value rests, and to do that, they would like to maintain a certain critical mass of wealthy, privileged, largely white — not exclusively — kids, and it's very difficult to do that if all you're doing is picking the smartest, because the overlap between rich and smart is limited. So you’ve got to create a mechanism to get rich kids in the back door, and sports is the mechanism.

So if you're going to let in tennis players, the only way you could ever get a DI or even a DIII slot on a tennis team at an exclusive school is you had to have played junior tennis. There's just no way around it. In order to play junior tennis in America right now, you need to be spending, at minimum, thousands, in some cases, well over 100-grand a year. So right there, by saying I will set aside special spots on my sports teams and give enormous admissions breaks to really good tennis players, what I'm saying is I'm going to guarantee that a certain number of rich kids will always be at Harvard. That's what it's about.

Gladwell also says to not go to highly selective schools, if you want to take his advice here are you taking it there as well?

That aside, Gladwell is spouting nonsense in this case. He used tennis as an example. Harvard started competing in tennis in 1928, a time when they were hardly worried about not enough rich people. The vast majority of athletic programs at the schools in question far predate any concerns regarding ‘full pay’ but there could be a class element involved, especially for certain sports like sailing.

The second largest D1 sports program is Ohio State which doesn’t exactly align with Gladwell thesis.

The largest D3 program is …..wait for it, MIT. Do you actually believe that they are chasing wealth?

Finally, even if Gladwell thesis held water (it doesn’t), so what. Private institutions are allowed to have and maintain institutional priorities.

DP. there was a second part to his thesis - the rate of Asians in Ivies vs Caltech.

Caltech doesn't recruit athletes (or not as much) and the percentage of Asians grew. Now stand at: 46%
At the Ivy League there are still some Ivies that are below 30% and Harvard/Columbia is closer to 40%

His thesis is that sports are used to "control" the percentages; To be a top-tier student athlete at a niche sport - the parent is also a participant. The parent needs to take time off, pay for private lessons, camps, etc. They can be "need blind" and auto-filter for rich when they accept niche sports athletes. Which lean towards rich white.

CalTech absolutely recruits athletes. I know multiple. But they all meet CalTech’s academic bar.

This was true for a few years but it is a recent and abandoned experiment.

Nobody cares that you play a sport if you would have gotten in without the sport and historically, that's what happened.
Caltech teams used to recruit from the student body. You had kids on teams that didn't even make their high school teams.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Recruited athletes - even those in crew or lacrosse or whatever, and have no chance at all at making a living at their sport - tend to do very well with corporate recruiting, especially finance and consulting and Wall Street generally. And colleges like that.

It might be because these students know discipline, hard work, and teamwork. Similar to how the ROTC students tend to be highly valued. Those are good skills and reflect well on any individual. And our American social universe tends to really value athletes in particular.

A 100 or 200 points on an SAT test is a small thing compared to the value these student athletes bring to a collage.

This is entirely wrong.

The reason you value ROTC is not because these kids are more normal or more cool or more likely to become a wall street drone.

The reason you value ROTC is because it says something about character and civic mindedness and they hope some of this rubs off on the other students.

The kids in lacrosse and crew are there because they teach the poor kids with good academics how to act like rich kids.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Malcolm Gladwell on recruited athletes at Harvard:

The chapter opens with a livestream of a Harvard women's rugby game that six people are watching in which Harvard beats Princeton 61 to 5. You go into how this team was created, starting in 2013. In short, the coach is flying all over the world recruiting players who come from pretty specific upper-class circumstances. And you write that this is the way of many sports at Harvard, which happens to have more Division I sports than any other school in the country. Harvard has way more student-athletes than, say, the University of Michigan. And so you argue that the reason they're spending all this money flying around the world to populate sports that most colleges don’t have has to do with a tipping point — specifically with avoiding a tipping point. Can you describe your argument as to why Harvard is doing something that seems peculiar from the outside?

Malcolm Gladwell: Two things are going on. They're going to extraordinary lengths to recruit athletes who are good at sports that almost no one plays — fencing, rowing, rugby, on and on — not just the big ticket ones like football and basketball. And the second thing that they're doing is in order to ensure that these athletes will get into Harvard, they are giving these recruited athletes an admissions break that is enormous. Basically, they have an affirmative action program set up in place for students who excel at a specific number of sports. If you ask them why would they do those two things, the answers they give are completely unconvincing. They're bullshit. They can't even come up with a good line. They're like: “Well, it's sort of good for school spirit,” or basically versions of that, which make no sense. So you’re compelled, if you want to explain this phenomenon, to come up with a more convincing reason why they're doing it, and my argument is that a school like Harvard is powerfully incentivized to maintain a certain kind of privileged culture. It's the basis on which their exclusivity and their brand value rests, and to do that, they would like to maintain a certain critical mass of wealthy, privileged, largely white — not exclusively — kids, and it's very difficult to do that if all you're doing is picking the smartest, because the overlap between rich and smart is limited. So you’ve got to create a mechanism to get rich kids in the back door, and sports is the mechanism.

So if you're going to let in tennis players, the only way you could ever get a DI or even a DIII slot on a tennis team at an exclusive school is you had to have played junior tennis. There's just no way around it. In order to play junior tennis in America right now, you need to be spending, at minimum, thousands, in some cases, well over 100-grand a year. So right there, by saying I will set aside special spots on my sports teams and give enormous admissions breaks to really good tennis players, what I'm saying is I'm going to guarantee that a certain number of rich kids will always be at Harvard. That's what it's about.

Gladwell also says to not go to highly selective schools, if you want to take his advice here are you taking it there as well?

That aside, Gladwell is spouting nonsense in this case. He used tennis as an example. Harvard started competing in tennis in 1928, a time when they were hardly worried about not enough rich people. The vast majority of athletic programs at the schools in question far predate any concerns regarding ‘full pay’ but there could be a class element involved, especially for certain sports like sailing.

The second largest D1 sports program is Ohio State which doesn’t exactly align with Gladwell thesis.

The largest D3 program is …..wait for it, MIT. Do you actually believe that they are chasing wealth?

Finally, even if Gladwell thesis held water (it doesn’t), so what. Private institutions are allowed to have and maintain institutional priorities.

DP. there was a second part to his thesis - the rate of Asians in Ivies vs Caltech.

Caltech doesn't recruit athletes (or not as much) and the percentage of Asians grew. Now stand at: 46%
At the Ivy League there are still some Ivies that are below 30% and Harvard/Columbia is closer to 40%

His thesis is that sports are used to "control" the percentages; To be a top-tier student athlete at a niche sport - the parent is also a participant. The parent needs to take time off, pay for private lessons, camps, etc. They can be "need blind" and auto-filter for rich when they accept niche sports athletes. Which lean towards rich white.

CalTech absolutely recruits athletes. I know multiple. But they all meet CalTech’s academic bar.

OK. isn't that the point that bar hasn't been lowered? So merit took over?

It really isn’t about merit and it never has been about merit.

If you read the thread along with some of the links that posters have left it is well established that most of these teams athletes at these schools academically look like any other student on campus. The Amherst article says straight up that athletes are evaluated using the same rubric as everyone else.

It is also well known that AOs at most of these schools say 80% or so of the applicant pool is qualified though only say 10% get accepted which means that for every acceptance there are say 7 kids who qualify based on merit but who don’t get accepted due to lack of space.

You can add all of the athletic spots back to the pool and a few might get lucky but more likely your kid still doesn’t get in. And in return for than minor change in practice the schools end up with a class that basically looks the same. Why would any school do this? Effectively zero upside for them.

Based on peer reviewed research and the studies by both sides at the SFFAv Harvard lawsuit, sports was the most significant preference in the admissions process.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Also every so often these slac schools use sports to increase their chances of gettting a top student.

My kids has 1580 SAT, 4.7 GPA, and will have 15 AP courses after senior year. Great leadership in a few different other areas besides the sport. Great service. Definitely a narrative. Ivy legacy.

But the kid wants to play the sport so it is looking like NESCAC or UAA league as not good enough to play at the Ivy.

It’s rarer…understand the NESCAC and UAA coaches think the same as Ivy coaches. They want to win games and will probably use their influence on the 1350 kid they really want and may tell your kid they have a roster spot if they are accepted on their own.

It almost counts against you if you are too strong on your own.

Good point. Though I wouldn't say high stats count against you per se, just that coaches will prioritize superior athletic talent over stats. That's exactly how this works. If you're not among the most competitive recruits, you're just one of the many high stats kids applying.

It can work against you. If you don't need them, you might drop the team as a freshman. They won't pull for you like they would pull for a kid that needs your influence to graduate on time..

Your comment makes zero sense.

At DIII where no money is at stake, how many kids drop their sport after freshman year?

[Anonymous]

When your kid can run a 4:15 1600, took Calc BC as a sophomore, MVC, Diff and LE as in 11th and got a 1560 on the SAT as a prospective poli sci major come talk to me, like MIT, Princeton, Hopkins Amherst and Williams did.

Don't be jealous of others' accomplishments. It's a bad look.