Reply to 40% of Williams' classes are athletic recruits

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[quote=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."[/quote]

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