Reply to "Not a Meritocracy"

Forum Index » College and University Discussion

Reply to ""Not a Meritocracy""

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote] And questioning the contribution of student athletes to the quality of our higher education is legitimate. You think athletics is important to higher education and others do not. Not giving so many sports to tennis players means more spots available to students with higher level academic interests.[/quote]

You set up a false dichotomy here.  The tennis player might be a student with high academic interests.

My DS was a recruited athlete - and NMF and valedictorian.  Three of the six recruits in his class are now in med school (and if you know anything about med school admissions, you recognize that’s a huge academic achievement).  Athletes can be academically ambitious as well.[/quote]

And those slots would have been taken by students who also could have gone to med school. Instead your kid and the other recruits had a sure fire admission when, no matter their stats, it would have been a crap shoot. That’s the hook. [/quote]

NP here - at least the athlete has accomplished something special on top of their great academic record.  This is not true of the legacy/VIPs that get this sort of leg up. (but both need to admit that the hook helped - it's crazy that these people argue their kid "had the stats anyway"....so do thousands of others and yours was given a leg up...just own it).[/quote]

In your opinion.  College athletes are no more special than many other extra curricular pursuits. [/quote]

No - that's not my opinion.  I'm saying there are SOME other non-athletic extra curricular pursuits that are equally time consuming and competitive to excel in but are not given the hook that a recruited athlete does.  I know why that is (value of sports in this culture) and I'm not arguing against that.  But I'm saying that even if your athlete has a + Y that they earned (vs a + Y of a VIP that was not earned) your kid is still getting some sort of a hook.  (again - I said I'm ok with that hook but it's too bad others with hard earned special talents don't always have such fortune).   I'm also adding that there are some athletes who have probably put in the same effort (maybe more) than the recruited athletes but don't have the talent to get them over the recruit line. [/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics