07-13-2023, 08:42 PM
Has the reckoning finally arrived?
I’m not far from BC’s opinion. We’ve been playing the college admissions game with our kids over the past couple of years, and I’m honestly disheartened and angry at how athletics has distorted the entire admissions process. Back in the dark ages, my wife and I both went to small colleges and played DIII sports in an era where you could show up and walk on for a sport that wasn’t football or basketball. I think we didn’t understand on a granular level how much things had changed until we started touring the NESCAC schools and heard horrifying stats about how the overall student body is about one-third recruited athletes. At a couple of those schools, we learned that about 2/3 of the early decision slots go to athletes.
We had noticed locally that lots of fairly affluent (mostly white) parents were pushing their kids into the fairly obscure ‘non-revenue’ sports like crew, lacrosse, sailing, and ultimate frisbee. All of these sports have become weaponized for college admissions. If you had told me 35 years ago that there were going to be ultimate frisbee national travel teams, I would have passed out laughing.
Our kids decided to play soccer primarily, and we all know that there are tens of thousands of kids playing club soccer and gunning for college spots; so, we recognized that they would end up in the non-recruited athlete candidate pool even though both of them are considerably more athletically talented than their parents. (I can reasonably speculate that one of our kids could have been a three-sport guy where I went to college and would have started on the soccer team. Now, he’s probably not even going to get a whisper of interest from even the small DIII schools who get pummeled with applications from hundreds of academy/DA/ECNL kids.)
This makes me wonder out loud - what’s the societal good that comes from reserving spots for athletes and placing them ahead of other academically qualified kids who didn’t win the VO2 max lottery but might nevertheless be excellent well-qualified students? I mean, in the NIL and money era, I can at least see why big DI schools are in the game to make money, but what justification is there to do this for a place like Williams, or Pomona, or even for schools like Stanford, or Northwestern, or Brown? Like BC, I’m saying this as a fan, and it makes me sad that I’m struggling to find a moral justification for my fandom.
I’m not far from BC’s opinion. We’ve been playing the college admissions game with our kids over the past couple of years, and I’m honestly disheartened and angry at how athletics has distorted the entire admissions process. Back in the dark ages, my wife and I both went to small colleges and played DIII sports in an era where you could show up and walk on for a sport that wasn’t football or basketball. I think we didn’t understand on a granular level how much things had changed until we started touring the NESCAC schools and heard horrifying stats about how the overall student body is about one-third recruited athletes. At a couple of those schools, we learned that about 2/3 of the early decision slots go to athletes.
We had noticed locally that lots of fairly affluent (mostly white) parents were pushing their kids into the fairly obscure ‘non-revenue’ sports like crew, lacrosse, sailing, and ultimate frisbee. All of these sports have become weaponized for college admissions. If you had told me 35 years ago that there were going to be ultimate frisbee national travel teams, I would have passed out laughing.
Our kids decided to play soccer primarily, and we all know that there are tens of thousands of kids playing club soccer and gunning for college spots; so, we recognized that they would end up in the non-recruited athlete candidate pool even though both of them are considerably more athletically talented than their parents. (I can reasonably speculate that one of our kids could have been a three-sport guy where I went to college and would have started on the soccer team. Now, he’s probably not even going to get a whisper of interest from even the small DIII schools who get pummeled with applications from hundreds of academy/DA/ECNL kids.)
This makes me wonder out loud - what’s the societal good that comes from reserving spots for athletes and placing them ahead of other academically qualified kids who didn’t win the VO2 max lottery but might nevertheless be excellent well-qualified students? I mean, in the NIL and money era, I can at least see why big DI schools are in the game to make money, but what justification is there to do this for a place like Williams, or Pomona, or even for schools like Stanford, or Northwestern, or Brown? Like BC, I’m saying this as a fan, and it makes me sad that I’m struggling to find a moral justification for my fandom.