Amherst College Paper Article on Athletic Recruiting.

[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.

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
[b]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.

Absolutely it true. The coach at MIt when offering my kid support said two oh of three chance based on experience. That may not be the near 100% at Williams but it is 16x the regular chance. It is a huge boost.

That's insane - even MOP doesn't have that acceptance rate.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote: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.

You’re a loon

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Everyone knows athletics translates to affirmative action for wealthy white kids. There is clear data here. All those screaming about race-based affirmative action should be screaming about this kind of affirmative action too, right?

Stop trying to quote that quack Gladwell

[Anonymous]

Only reason someone is trying athletic admit is because they can't get in through regular admissions.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Only reason someone is trying athletic admit is because they can't get in through regular admissions.

Nice try. That’s patently untrue.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

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. [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 .

Its interesting that any achieving Asian is a striver but your intellectually superior kid is unassuming and a natural. Where is this school in the bay area that no one has topped your daughter's score.

It’s a top Bay Area school, one you most definitely would recognize. Her score wasn’t perfect so others have topped it, just not in her year. Nobody said that all are strivers but if you have lived in that environment you know exactly what I mean though it may make you uncomfortable.

Yes, I live in an area with many high achieving families. I just don't like this attitude that Asians are strivers and white kids are naturally smart when they do well. Also, I see the non-Asians hire expensive tutors (who write papers for their kids) and college counselors in 8th grade, are very focused on college brands, are more likely to get accomodations (more than 30% of my dc's private school grade has accomodations) and hire sports private coaches. All this makes me equally uncomfortable.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Everyone knows athletics translates to affirmative action for wealthy white kids. There is clear data here. All those screaming about race-based affirmative action should be screaming about this kind of affirmative action too, right?

Stop trying to quote that quack Gladwell

Are you a Jordan Peterson guy?

[Anonymous]

Clearly the person quoting Malcom Gladwell does not have an Econ degree from Amherst. Maybe they picked it up from Amazon or the airport bookstore.

[Anonymous]

How many recruited athletes at the NESCAC actually get an offer? Is it around 70%? or higher? Hypothetically- if I was an athlete and was recruited for D1 with top 50 school my acceptance rate would be close 95% versus NESCAC recruit with 70% rate or lower. No way would I risk not getting into a school. You only get 1 ED submission why not go for sure thing. NESCAC probably has a lot of walk-one to fill the ranks.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

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. [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.

https://maa.org/news/usa-earns-second-place-at-66th-internationalmathematical-olympiad/

My guess is your daughter not worried about the kids getting athletic preferences.
When the PPP says: "Amherst and its competitors could easily fill a class with Indian and Chinese students that would run academic circles around all of us." Your daughter is probably not part of the "us" in that sentence.

The "us" in that sentence maybe could have been a DIII level lacrosse player, that lacrosse player is not better than them. The the "us" in that sentence was never going to academically edge out the best asian students that have crowded out so many of the "us" at the most selective colleges.

My my my you are insecure.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Only reason someone is trying athletic admit is because they can't get in through regular admissions.

Nice try. That’s patently untrue.

Of course it is true, with very few exceptions. Like the parent bragging her kid got a 1450 or the kid with a 32 ACT? Unhooked, they would not have been admitted.

[Anonymous]

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?

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.

Right, but what point are you trying to make? We are talking about Amherst where the majority of recruits have academics above the mean and only a small number get preferential treatment.

The majority of non-hooked rejected applicants are above the mean. They are rejected. By definition, every single athlete who was admitted got preferential treatment. That is not a small number; it is 40% of the entire freshman class (the freshman athlete proportion is higher than the usual 30-35% because of attrition). Logic is your friend.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Clearly the person quoting Malcom Gladwell does not have an Econ degree from Amherst. Maybe they picked it up from Amazon or the airport bookstore.

Take that Gladwell from a Econ Dept ranked #44 in the country.

[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?

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.

Right, but what point are you trying to make? We are talking about Amherst where the majority of recruits have academics above the mean and only a small number get preferential treatment.

The majority of non-hooked rejected applicants are above the mean. They are rejected. By definition, every single athlete who was admitted got preferential treatment. That is not a small number; it is 40% of the entire freshman class (the freshman athlete proportion is higher than the usual 30-35% because of attrition). Logic is your friend.

Indeed it is and using logic the majority of unhooked rejected applicants would not be above the mean unless there was a huge difference between the mean and the median which is unlikely. Also, by definition walk on athletes are admitted without regard to athletic ability so that assertion is incorrect as well.

Being a recruited athlete is a huge boost, almost a guarantee of success where failure is almost certain for the unhooked. Those able to be recruited do have the ultimate hook. But failure for most is driven by the numbers, not the prescence of athletic recruits. Putting all of those spots back in the pool might result in a somewhat different class but almost applicants would still be rejected. The athletes with a small number of exceptions do not in any way ‘water down’ the academic profile of the class contrary to the assertions of many on this board.