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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]What is to say the recruited athletes also don’t have strong academic stats? Athletes demonstrate hard work, perseverance, dedication, and leadership skills.

They also have higher graduation rates, donate more as alumni, and the stronger teams are good PR for the schools and build school spirit, some sports are revenue generating while others have higher overall GPAs.

Schools want diverse communities that include athletes, artists, and musicians. If you don’t like that model, many European colleges offer straight academics.[/quote]

Exactly. These colleges like the kind of people these athletes tend to be and want them on their campuses. They know that kids involved in athletics frequently go on to be successful in life.

“A strong mind in a strong body” is a common saying that expresses characteristics that many western colleges highly value. Thus, it is not the least bit surprising that liberal arts colleges recruit athletes to be part of their college community. 
[/quote] This is a great reason for admissions highly valuing all kinds of sports as a valuable EC in a holistic context. It does not explain why there needs to be a special backdoor for a specific set of sports but not others.

Why wrestling, but not Judo or Brazillian Jiu Jitsu? Why lacrosse, but not polo? Why swimming, but not synchronized swimming or water polo? Why skiing and ice skating but not luging or speed skating? Why snowboarding but not skateboarding? Why ice hockey but not curling?

Is there a significant difference in who the former vs the latter tend to be? Obviously not. Are only the former capable of building a strong body? Obviously not. Your justification clearly does not work.[/quote]

The pejorative and obvious answer is that the school directly funds and sponsors its varsity sports (e.g. there is an ice hockey team but not a curling team) in a way that doesn’t exist for any other extracurricular activity and they further compete directly with other schools in those varsity sports at a different level than any other activity. Many schools are literally *defined* by their membership in an athletic conference, most notably the Ivy League and Big Ten in Division I and even NESCAC at the Division III level. The athletics program is a *core* part of the identity of major universities (far beyond a student-run organization or an individual extracurricular activity), so that’s why there is an emphasis in recruiting for sports. Athletics recruiting at the top level is a zero sum competition for talent with objective wins and losses and elite universities want to show that they can win in every sphere.

That’s why it matters. If you want to argue that sports *shouldn’t* be treated this importantly, then that’s really a broader cultural and societal question as opposed to a university-specific one. Whether people like it or not, sports are very obviously seen as important in society and elite athletes have elevated stature in our culture, so elite universities pretty rationally want to be associated with anything that is connected to the top of society.

When half the threads here are talking about “Ivies”, they’re referring an athletic conference membership. Sports are core to the identity of many major universities and generally seen as important in our broader culture and society, so they are treated with corresponding importance.[/quote]

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