Reply to Friend just announced her junior DD has committed to play lax at a top school

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Everyone of these parents complaining about this would happily accept the preferred athletic treatment if their kid was offered it.  [/quote]

Maybe, but I'd at least acknowledge the preferential treatment, which some people seem unable to do here.  All I see is protests of sour grapes, they work hard, it's just as stressful for athletes just in other ways, it's just the same as another other EC.....

My kid is a double legacy at a top school which definitely gives special treatment to legacies.  Who knows if that will be in place by the time my kid gets to applying, but I freely acknowledge that [b]it is unfair and there is no justification for it at all[/b].  Despite the fact that I might benefit, for the system as a whole, I don't think it makes sense.

Can parents of student athletes do the same?[/quote]
I’m a parent of a recruited athlete and I freely admit that my kid got special advantages in admissions to a top school, and to OP’s point, needed to do far less of the drudgery of college admissions-related work than kids with no athletic hook. His status also meant he took the SAT a single time and was perfectly happy with a score he could presumably have increased by 100+ points had he done any prep.

But you lose me when you suggest there was something “unfair” about this process or that I or his or similar universities need to “justify it”. Those things might be true if this university had marketed itself as one that chose students only on the basis of their demonstrated academic achievements, as I gather many universities in Europe, China, and India do. But no Ivy or other elite private school (perhaps with the exception of CalTech?) does so. Quite the opposite in fact; they all make crystal clear that they want to admit students from a wide range of backgrounds with a wide range of impressive achievements, including non-academic ones. Perhaps you don’t think ability to play a sport at the college level is an impressive achievement, but it actually doesn’t matter what you think because the schools openly advertise their desire to admit student-athletes of a certain level.

For the same reasons, I don’t get agitated about kids with other hooks or see a reason why a college needs to justify prioritizing admissions for legacies, URMs, etc. A bizarrely large percentage of parents who are ambitious on their kids’ behalf somehow have deluded themselves into thinking that colleges should only want high stats kids with ECs obtainable by any very bright, hard-working kids. But again, that’s not how elite schools see it, nor have they ever.

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