Reply to Amherst College Paper Article on Athletic Recruiting.

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]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.[/quote]

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.[/quote]

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. 
[/quote]

CalTech absolutely recruits athletes. I know multiple. But they all meet CalTech’s academic bar. [/quote]

OK. isn't that the point that bar hasn't been lowered? So merit took over?[/quote]

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.

[/quote]

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.[/quote]

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.[/quote]

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