Reply to I feel like we don't talk enough that top LACs are 40%+ recruited athletes.

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[quote=Anonymous]
The reason we don't talk enough about the fact the top LACs are 40% recruited athletes is that it's simply not close to being true.

I have looked at every link at this thread.  Not one backs up the claim.

As many on this thread have already pointed out, one may be on a varsity team without being recruited for it.  For the LAC haters who prefer D1 universities, this may be a novel concept, but it's actually pretty common at LACs.  My son was told by six different LAC coaches they would welcome him to their team if enrolled, but that he would not be recruited.  That was fine for us.  He likes the comraderie and exercise of being on a competitive team, but was still able to get into top LACs.  He is a walk-on athlete at Carleton and regularly competed against other colleges even in his first year.

It is far less likely that a student will walk on to a D1 team, let alone play.  One of the main advantages of LACs is that *for some* it is easier to pursue their interests.  Interested in continuing with varsity sports but not a recruited athlete (let alone a D1 recruited athlete)?  Go to an LAC.  Interested in summer research but don't want to compete with grad students?  Go to an LAC.  Our same child got a paid research job working one on one with a professor upon his first request.

Yes, there was a link in the thread to a Williams page stating 33% of their students play varsity sports.  Besides the fact that Williams probably has the highest ratio of teams to students, that doesn't mean 33% of those athletes were recruited.  As the xfactoradmissions article mentions, 20-50% of college athletes are walk-ons.  That number will be closer to the low end for D1 and closer to the high end for D3.

Perhaps the most useful link in the thread was the one to the Washington Post article.  There have been several citations of the percentages from the table of varsity athletes, but that's actually not the most relevant part of the article.  The most helpful part for our purposes is the discussion after the table that actually talks about how many students were recruited at each school that chose to disclose those numbers.  There were three private D1 schools ranked in the top 30: Duke, Brown, and Yale.  (Large publics are obviously going to have much smaller percentages of athletes.)  There were four LACs ranked in the top 30: Davidson, Colgate, Richmond, and CMC.  One can divide the numbers of recruited athletes by the numbers of first year students at each school to get the % of recruits.  For the three private D1 universities, that number comes to 12%.  For the four LACs, that number comes to 16%.  Note however that Davidson is an outlier, both in terms of the percentage of recruits and the fact that it is one of the few LACs that chooses to compete against D1 schools in all the major sports they offer.  If excluding them, the percentage of recruited athletes for the remaining three drops to 13%.

I hope this helps.
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