"A Little Secret: Athletics at the Most Selective Colleges and Universities in the Nation": College and University Admissions, Part III

I”m going to state a fact that most of you who follow admissions at highly selective colleges probably don”t know. Roughly 20 percent, or one-fifth, of the entering class at the Ivy League universities and the leading small liberal arts colleges are recruited athletes. They are not “walk-ons”; they are actively recruited and there is a great deal of competition within and beyond the Ivy League for the best of those athletes in order to produce winning sports teams. In contrast, about 5 percent of the students at athletic powerhouses like the University of Michigan, Notre Dame, and the Pac 10 schools are recruited scholarship athletes. What is going on here? The Ivy League and their smaller liberal arts companions are not really contending for almost all national athletic titles, and they claim to admit “student-athletes?” All of what follows, I confess, comes from a former jock, since many years ago I competed in both baseball and basketball for Columbia, and I remain an avid, if not addicted sports fan.

This plethora of recruited athletes is not a secret known only to a handful of people. In fact, James L. Shulman and William G. Bowen (the former president of Princeton and later the president of the Andrew G. Mellon Foundation) revealed these facts and many more in an important book, The Game of Life: College Sports and Educational Values, published almost a decade ago. Bowen also co-authored a second policy oriented book on athletics at top tier colleges and universities.¹ Bowen and his collaborators have studied this matter in detail by collecting a tremendous amount of data and subjecting them to detailed analysis – testing all manner of hypotheses about the athletes and how they do in college and beyond. He followed several different graduating classes at these schools – one from 1976, another from 1989 and a final group that graduated in 1999. In full disclosure, when I was provost at Columbia, I joined Bowen around the time of his book”s publication in a failed attempt to change policies towards recruiting athletes to the Ivy League. Despite the facts and the initial efforts at change, the situation at these universities and their recruited athletes today is much the same as it was in 2000.²

How did the number of recruited athletes reach today”s proportions at these elite schools? First, the Ivy League supports more athletic teams than any other conference in the nation. Harvard has 39 intercollegiate teams; Cornell, Yale and Columbia have over 30. Correlatively, the University of Michigan has 25; Notre Dame has 24, and UCLA, 22. Second, Title IX, which has made the world of positive difference for women athletes, requires that schools attempt to reach gender parity in their athletic programs – in terms of proportional numbers and meeting the needs of women wanting to participate in organized team sports. The number of women”s teams has expanded over time, which has had, of course, a large effect on the number of recruited athletes. Third, since the Ivy League adheres to a “need blind admissions” and “full need financial aid” policy, no student is given an athletic scholarship to attend these schools, and it follows that students don”t lose their financial aid if they decide after being admitted, or after the first year of their participation in a sport”s team, to quit the team and devote themselves to other things. Fourth, recruited athletes, for the high profile sports of football, basketball, and hockey (not all Ivy schools have a formal hockey team) receive a very substantial edge or advantage in the admissions process. Some are what are known as “coaches picks” and at least for the big time sports their SAT scores are over 100 points lower than the class average³ – yet they have about a 30 percent advantage in getting admitted compared to non-athletes in the applicant pool. These athletes” SAT scores are well above the national average, but far lower than most other students who are admitted into these distinguished schools.⁴ Fifth, recruited athletes tend to finish their college careers in the lower third of their graduating class; many of them dropped off their teams long before their graduation. Each year, Ivy League schools, allowing for significant attrition in numbers, recruit more football players than the national champions. Sixth, Bowen found, to the surprise of many, no evidence that former athletes donated more to their alma mater than non-athlete graduates. Finally, on the brighter side, Ivy League athletes graduate at almost the same rate as other students in their class (more than 90 percent) and they do very well after college graduation, both economically and in terms of their involvement in and service to their communities.

The policy issue is not, of course, whether there should be athletic teams at these great universities and colleges. No one has advocated their elimination. There are many ways in which individuals and universities and colleges benefit from student participation in intercollegiate and club athletics. Athletes learn important life lessons, such as the need for hard work, personal discipline, and working as part of a team – all elements that prove useful later on for achieving success at almost any task. Of course, athletics is not the only way of learning these lessons or acquiring these traits. Moreover, from the institutional point-of-view, rooting for the home team (especially if they are winners, like Duke”s basketball team) tends to increase the level of social cohesion and integration on campuses that are often divided and in conflict on a wide set of political and social issues.

Given the extraordinary number of exceptionally qualified and superior candidates with diverse interests and talents who apply to the Ivy League schools, over 90 percent of whom are going to be disappointed by the outcome, why in the world are the schools using up 20 percent of their slots on recruited athletes? To But Democrats don’t want to do away with the free-credits-report.com . be very concrete, if Columbia has a freshman class of 1,200, that means about 240 slots are allocated to recruited athletes. The Ivy League was, in fact, formed as a football conference, but it was also intended to exemplify the values of the student-athlete, that is, the student who participated in athletic competition rather than say reporting for the campus newspaper, but was essentially indistinguishable from the rest of the class in terms of academic ability and career goals. The objective never was to win national championships; it was to provide opportunities for extremely bright youngsters to participate in athletic competition and I daresay, to live up to that old cliché of having a sound mind and a sound body. If national championships were won, and they were occasionally in lower profile sports, such as fencing and lacrosse, that was unexpected icing on the cake. But the gradual growth in the number of recruited athletes and the creation of the illusion that these schools are truly competing at the national championship level – in all but the low profile sports, has begun to undermine the central mission and values of these elite schools. The mission is not to produce athletic powerhouses (something that is impossible without athletic scholarships and lower standards than the Ivy League will permit), but to advance the work of brilliant youngsters with extraordinary talent who are apt to make very important contributions to society in a variety of institutional spheres, the least likely of which will be professional athletics. The idea of the “scholar-athlete” has been largely lost at the Ivy League. Too many students who would otherwise be admitted who are apt to become exceptionally talented artists, dancers, physicists, neuroscientists, and sociologists – and maybe even “walk-on” athletes – are losing their opportunities to the recruited athletes, many of whom will never even go out for teams once accepted. For too many, athletics has become a back-door ticket into some of the nation”s leading universities and colleges and it ought to be stopped.

What then is to be done? First, the Ivy presidents and provosts who recognize the current state of affairs should commit themselves to rolling back the percentage of recruited athletes over a period of the next decade or so. Second, they could leave perhaps two high profile sports – perhaps football and men and women”s basketball – for recruited athletes (and perhaps select one more high profile woman”s sport to move toward compliance with Title IX parity requirements). Over a period of years, the number of football players on a team would be cut from over 100 to perhaps 60. All other sports would gradually become non-recruiting sports – students could join teams, but coaches in these sports would not formally recruit athletes to participate in these sports teams. They also would play other teams that also do not recruit athletes in those sports – so that there would be competitive parity, even if at a lower level than one sees at the powerhouse athletic schools. In short, almost all sports would move to the Division III level, but would stay within the NCAA. My personal preference would be for the Ivy League to withdraw from the NCAA. They get little from that association while having to comply with many bureaucratic and compliance regulations that really don”t apply to the Ivy League. The Ivies could easily collaborate with like-minded schools to construct their own competitive schedules. Third, a number of sports would be eliminated. Ivy athletics cost the universities money. They are not a source of positive revenue. The idea is to recreate the real world of student athletes and to reduce the numbers of recruited athletes so that other applicants with exceptional talents could be admitted to these Ivy Schools and great liberal arts colleges. Over the next decade these elite schools should strive to reduce the percentage of recruited athletes by half.

This will be a very difficult change to effect at these universities. For one, former athletes represent a powerful and highly vocal interest group among alumni. There also would be resistance from those in Departments of Intercollegiate Athletics and even from faculty and students who would argue against a different style of athletic competition at these universities. There is apt to be leadership inertia. Presidents of these universities are apt to be unwilling to spend the time and personal “capital” fighting the fight needed to slowly redress this problem. It would be, to say the least, time consuming without any guarantee of success. I”ve known university presidents who quit their jobs (or were forced out) because they simply advocated changing the “mascot” for the university”s teams from an offensive to a benign symbol. Think of how much harder it would be to come to grips with these kinds of gradual pullbacks. Finally, individual schools will have a difficult time making these changes unilaterally. It will take agreement among the league presidents to produce such change. Change won”t be easy, but I think necessary if we are to strive for still greater fairness in admissions and a more interesting student body at these elite educational institutions.

¹William G. Bowen and Sarah A. Levin, Reclaiming the Game: College Sports and Educational Values (Princeton University Press, 2003)
²The Ivy League situation differs from the patterns at Division III schools in the NCAA that do not actively recruit athletes, but do field competitive athletic programs. Schools such as MIT and the University of Chicago fall into this category. We can also contrast the Ivy practice with those of places like Stanford University (which over the past 16 years has won the Director”s Cup as the most successful overall athletic program in the nation) and Duke University that offer a limited number of athletic scholarships to flesh out their athletic teams.
³This is not true in all sports. For example, golf, crew, and fencing team members scored about as well as the average SAT score in the class. But in the class of 1989 that Shulman and Bowen followed at these schools, football players had scores that were about 120 points lower than the average; and hockey plays even a bit lower.
⁴It may surprise you that despite the vociferous and often expressed discontent about minority students getting an edge in admissions (“affirmative action”), the differences between minorities and the average class score are roughly the same as the difference among athletes and the average for the entire class. I can”t say that I”ve heard the same level of public outrage against the lower scores of athletes as I have against “preferential admissions treatment” for minorities.

Originally published at Huffington Post

Twisting in the Wind: College and University Admissions – Part I

As the November winds start blowing and the chill enters the air, hundreds of thousands of the nation’s students are filling out applications for college and university admissions that will need to be filed within a few weeks. The annual school rankings published by the cottage industry of assessors are out and students and parents are fretting over what is possible and what their college advisors insist is a “stretch.” There is much to know about the admissions process, yet most of it remains mysterious to students and parents. In this series of postings I hope to shed a bit of light on this subject.

The American path to college admissions is vastly different from the ones found in European and Asian societies. In most other nations, there is almost total reliance on standardized national examinations – and the anxiety goes way up as students prepare for these exams that will largely determine their future. Since students apply to specialized programs, such as law, once they are admitted to a university there are few ways of changing their focus of interest if they decide that they want to study, for example, physics. Switching “majors” in mid-stream is near impossible. Admissions officers don’t care much about the “whole person” or whether you were the lead trombone player in your high school band, or an all-league tight end or an agile 275 lbs pulling guard on your football team, or the star in The Vagina Monologues, the oft produced play in high schools these days. You are what you test. That is why the junior year in China, for example, is called the “black year,” as students prepare to see if they represent part of the one percent or so who will be offered positions in universities and colleges based on their scores on national examinations. In Europe, the structure of the academic system has not caught up with the policy of admitting all students who pass the national examination. Consequently, we see 200,000 students at the University of Rome and almost as many in the University of Paris. Few of these students ever see the inside of a classroom or actually talk with a professor, but they are eligible for national health insurance. They read published notes of formal lectures; they take exams at the end of their first year. In sum, most other nations have a very different set of criteria for determining qualifications for college and university admissions – and behind all of that is a different idea about the mission of higher learning. We see in these international variations in admissions practices different views, as well, about what constitutes meritocracy.

The American system stands in sharp contrast to that way of doing things. Here too there are noteworthy variations. First, most colleges and universities are in “need” of students. They are not highly selective. They are willing to accept students with rather limited academic achievement and with few outward signs of great academic potential. If they graduate from a state high school with a certain academic average or rank in class they are entitled to attend college – whether at a community college or a state college or top tier university in the state system. At its best, it provides an important avenue for upward mobility and skill acquisition needed for the job market of today. This is not a bad thing, but it differs appreciably from what goes on at perhaps 150 or so private and public colleges and universities in the United States that are highly selective – they have their choice of students from a huge pool of applicants. The numbers are staggering. In 2010, for example, Harvard received about 30,500 applicants of which they admitted 6.9% – not good odds even for the highly qualified and self-selected group who actually apply to that great university. The numbers and ratios of admissions, typically referred to as “selectivity,” at the other Ivy League schools are similar. Yale, Princeton, and Columbia accept about 8 percent of their applicants. In short, getting in is a crapshoot. The same kinds of numbers obtain at places like Williams, Amherst, and Swarthmore – admissions rates of about 15%, slightly higher than the Ivy League, because these colleges more often lose to the Ivy League schools when both schools accept the same person. There is little doubt that perhaps more than 5,000 of the 26,000 students who apply to Columbia each year could do very well at the University and contribute greatly to it. But there are only 1,000 or so positions available so many extraordinary students are turned down. And the odds of being admitted are going down. Reports in The New York Times suggest that the applicant numbers for 2011 are up by double digits at many of these schools (although we are witnessing individual students applying to many schools, given the uncertainty of being admitted to their top choices) and notably among the great public institutions, such as UCLA (about 58,000 applicants this year). Note that despite sharply rising costs at these elite schools of higher learning, the demand in the marketplace for slots in those top schools is actually rising.

At these highly selective colleges, the goal is to “shape a class.” Undergraduate admissions decisions rest in the hands of a staff of well-trained and highly motivated young people – the dreaded admissions officers.¹ Faculty members rarely have any input into these decisions. In fact, at most elite colleges and universities, the faculty have almost nothing to say about admissions policies or what criteria should be emphasized in admitting students. Even at the Ivy schools there is almost never a discussion with the faculty about how the admissions office defines a “success” or “failure” in a past admissions decision. Despite their considerable talents, most admissions officers are arguable not as talented or as interesting as thousands of students who are applying to these schools – many of whom will be rejected. The smartest, most imaginative, and creative administrators ought to be located in the office of admissions. They rarely are despite the admissions office’s dedication and remarkable determination to admit “the most qualified” students. That’s unfortunate because shaping an undergraduate student body is one of the most critical tasks of a university.

To shape a class admissions officers have to establish guidelines and categories that need to be followed through the process. There is a superabundance of applicants who are extraordinary by almost any numerical indicator: GPA, SAT, Achievement Examinations. But as much as applicants would like to think that there is some in “the sight of God” rank order of quality of applicants from, say 1 to 30,000 at Columbia, there is not. So what is done? Broad diversity parameters are set, including race, ethnicity, gender, geographic region of the nation and the world. It is not simply by chance that the proportion of students in each of these categories rarely varies much from year to year. These may not be quotas, but they certainly represent goals or targets. Beyond demographic and geographic criteria, there are also athletic teams that have to be filled out with about 20 percent of all admitted students; alumni children that need a break; and talented students in a variety of disciplines that need to be recruited. For colleges and universities that don’t have deep financial aid pockets, ability to afford the education may also be a parameter that is mixed in with the quality of the student’s record. Contrary to the opinion of some secondary school guidance counselors, these colleges are looking for a well-rounded class, as much as for well-rounded individuals. And yet the nation’s elite colleges betray their ability to make difficult decisions and rarely take the kind of chances some of us would like to see them take. They are too often guided by what the final result will look like in numerical terms compared with their competition – and how that might play out in U.S. News & World Report rankings.

An informal pact has developed between college counselors at secondary schools and the admissions people at the select colleges. The college counselors want a good track record of getting their kids into the schools they apply to and the colleges want to get the counselors to send them their “best” students, which is generally defined as those with the best academic record and Board scores. If you are not a kid who has gone down the straight and narrow path for his or her entire high school career, doing exceptionally well in everything, and racking up impressive numbers in advanced placement courses, you are rarely advised to apply to one of these highly selective colleges – unless you fall into some category (like a star athlete) where it is well-known that lower standards are applied in terms of formal testing and other academic credentials. Within the group of outrageously high achievers, whose SATs and GPAs are already off-the-chart, youngsters are pushed by their parents and secondary school teachers to “differentiate” themselves from the thousands of others by “doing something” special in “extra-curricular” activities. But, the brilliant poet to be or distinguished novelist, or political cartoonist of the future, who just did not give a damn about chemistry in his sophomore year and received an embarrassing C for the course, is told that he or she doesn’t have a prayer of getting into one of the selective schools. The kid who starts out as a street artist, but who will eventually do extraordinary work as a performance artist, is pushed away from the selective schools. There is an appreciation for diverse talents, but only if it comes hand-in-hand with great Board scores and a uniformly high GPA. But that is not the way the world works. If Columbia can produce a poet of Allen Ginsburg’s quality, who cares if he was lousy in mathematics? And if they can produce a physicist as brilliant as the eventual Nobelist, Julian Schwinger, who cares if he had no interest in high school European history?

The result of the superabundance of high achieving secondary school youngsters is that many of the top schools in the nation have taken the “quirkiness” out of the student body – and the rebelliousness of intellect, style, and thought, that is often ultimately critical to doing something of importance other than law or medicine. The result is both good and bad for the higher educational system. It turns out that some of the most talented quirky kids go to other places and thrive there – and have wonderfully productive careers after college pursuing their interests. It is unfortunate, however, that the criteria used for admissions by the most selective schools classify the exceptionally talented but “one-sided” youngster as “not eligible” for admission. And that’s a shame and not functional for our society.

In Part II of this posting, I’ll propose for your consideration an alternative method of admitting students for highly selective colleges and universities.

¹In contrast, the faculty is deeply involved with decisions of what students to admit to Ph.D. programs. Admissions officers, not faculty members, are largely responsible for admissions decisions to professional schools – with medicine being an important exception.

Originally published on Huffington Post