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[quote=Anonymous]From the Atlantic in 2018 https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2018/10/college-sports-benefits-white-students/573688/

..."Put another way, college sports at elite schools are a quiet sort of affirmative action for affluent white kids, and play a big role in keeping these institutions so stubbornly white and affluent. What makes this all the more perplexing, says John Thelin, a historian of higher education at the University of Kentucky, is that [b]“no other nation has the equivalent of American college sports.” It’s a particular quirk of the American higher-education system that ultimately has major ramifications for who gets in—and who doesn’t—to selective colleges[/b].

When it comes to college athletics, football and basketball command the most public attention, but in the background is a phalanx of lower-profile sports favored by white kids, which often cost a small fortune for a student participating at a top level. Ivy League sports like sailing, golf, water polo, fencing, and lacrosse aren’t typically staples of urban high schools with big nonwhite populations; they have entrenched reputations as suburban, country-club sports. According to the NCAA, of the 232 Division I sailors last year, none were black. Eighty-five percent of college lacrosse players were white, as well as 90 percent of ice-hockey players.

And the cost of playing these sports can be sky high. “There are high economic barriers to entering in this highly specialized sports system,” Hextrum says. “White people are concentrated in areas that are resource rich and have greater access to those economic resources.”[b] Getting good enough at a sport to have a shot at playing collegiately often necessitates coaching, summer camps, traveling for tournaments, and a mountain of equipment. One in five families of an elite high-school athlete spend $1,000 a month on sports—the average family of a lacrosse player spends nearly $8,000 a year. Kids from low-income families participate in youth sports at almost half the rate of affluent families, according to a report from the Aspen Institute. It’s no surprise, then, that per The Harvard Crimson’s annual freshman survey, 46.3 percent of recruited athletes in the class of 2022 hail from families with household incomes of $250,000 or higher, compared with one-third of the class as a whole[/b]. ..."[/quote]

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