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https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/five-myths/five-myths-about-the-ivy-league/2019/03/22/13fdb0da-4bf0-11e9-93d0-64dbcf38ba41_story.html?utm_term=.a9da8b14ed5f
Five myths about the Ivy League No, the Ivies aren’t America’s most selective colleges. As far back as the 1950s, Harvard’s dean of admissions, Wilbur Bender, warned about the notion that “the only person who belongs at Harvard is the valedictorian, the obvious intellectual, the white-faced grind” and imposed an effective quota of 10 percent on “top brains.” So if Harvard has a 10% quota on intellectuals - where should the non-athletic intellectual stars go to university in the US? |
Why do you exclude athletic intellectuals? |
Presumably they would be shoe-ins for the ivy league |
| MIT, Chicago, St. John College (Annapolis) |
| My advisor at HYPS actually advised that I transfer to Chicago; he thought I was too intellectual for the place. (This was 20 years ago). |
Shoo-ins darling. Shoo-ins. |
And you believed that?
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| There is a whole league of colleges that do not give athletic scholarships or significant advantage to athletes. They are in Division III and their conference is called the University Athletic Association (UAA). The students are truly called "student-athletes" with an emphasis on "student". I believe there are 8 schools in the conference including Carnegie Mellon, Emory, University of Rochester, University of Chicago, Brandeis, and Case Western. NYU and Washington University. |
All are excellent schools |
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The biggest myth is that the Ivy League is some sort of association that means "schools that are the best." It's a football league, plain and simple.
There's no merit-based criteria for getting into it. |
And there you have the biggest myth of all. |
Not to hear the crazy parents on this forum Parent of a kid attending an Ivy and another attending an UAA. Both are getting great educations and both worth the parental sacrife. |
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Parent of a HYP student athlete here. When my son went through the recruiting process he was offered likely letters/admissions support at several UAA schools, including WashU, UChicago and Emory. The UAA absolutely gives preference to top student athletes. So does the NESCAC. Division III recruits athletes. Many have student bodies that are 30%+ student athletes.
And the Ivy League is absolutely an athletic conference. But the comment that there is no merit-based criteria for admissions is 100% false. Look into the academic index agreement between the schools. It's math. I’m not here to defend student athletes and admissions preferences but some of the “facts” stated here are flat out wrong. Seems folks make stuff up to just get others angry. |
| I was just about to come to say the same thing, I know people who have been recruited athletes at all of the mentioned schools other than Carnegie Mellon, though come to think of it, I know one there as well. How much they are willing to bend will vary by school and by the athlete's ability but I would be surprised to find any school in the country that fills its athletic teams randomly or by recruiting students who would get in otherwise. If you have sports, you need players, and those players add to the school environment in ways the school deems important (many kids would likely not want to attend schools without sports). |
| What is the support for the idea that Ivy applicant demand sports? True for Alabama, Ohio State and perhaps Duke. But the idea that people want to go to Yale or Columbia because of spectator sports is nuts. Way too many slots for athletes. |