College sports are affirmative action for rich white students according to The Atlantic

zcxvxcv wrote:

The point of the article is that overall, athletes are 61% white and 65% white in the Ivy Leagues, despite football and basketball being majority black, and that because athletes constitute a large proportion of undergraduates, larger than minority or legacy admissions, this constitutes a form of affirmative action for whites. The whites advantaged tend very much to be wealthy because youth sports today are extremely expensive. 46% of recruited athletes at Harvard had family incomes over $250,000, vs. around 1/3 of all Harvard students. And athletes were just under 20%, according to the article, although that seems way too low. At liberal arts colleges, you find participation rates in intercollegiate athletics well over 25%.

It's all about admissions at the handful of highly selective colleges. Go to the school for an interview. Talk to the coach of your sport: "I'm well off but I'm free to you, no scholarship required." It's a low risk option for the coach who has to fill out a roster and stay moderately competitive. It makes sense that the proportion of people of white is higher on the female side than the male side (consider sports like swimming, lacrosse, field hockey, cross country, skiing, etc. that can be filled out with non-scholarship female participants to meet the school's Title IX obligations). At many Ivies and pseudo-Ivies the community of students of white (we're not talking Asians here either) in sports is really a college within a college that has markedly different demographics than the rest of the school. This is true even for selective private DIII schools that have "need based" financial aid, but are still looking for rich undergraduates to fill out the half of the student body that doesn't get financial aid. There, athletes make up a huge chunk of the student body, and the football team itself is often a refuge for high school "stars" who would never get a second glance from a DI or DII football team.

Alternate Reality wrote:

This article is a load of crap.

The ivy league schools(which the article is focusing on) do not offer athletic scholarships.

They have a blind admission /financial aid system.

You may be recruited but...

First, you need to qualify for admission.

Then, financial aid is established based on need.

This applies to ALL students, not just athletes.

SO, the rich white kids may get into Harvard or Yale, but would not get financial aid because daddy is a CEO somewhere, or a corporate lawyer.

Having to pay for your own tuition is NOT affirmative action.

It's consistently true at these institutions that about half the student body does not get scholarships. This is not accidental. Even though the schools are formally "need blind", they still know how to skew the pool of accepted applicants so that they don't admit too many needy students. Even the most elite Ivies have financial goals to meet (that's why these schools aren't free to all their undergraduates), and part of meeting those goals is to have very high tuition and fees (approaching or exceeding $70000 these days) for the non-scholarship half of the student body. Minor athletic prowess in an obscure sport is undoubtedly a marker for well-off white kids from the suburbs of Boston, NYC, northern New Jersey and Fairfield County, CT.

The desirability of attending Harvard or Yale is not debatable at all. You may not personally find either of those schools desirable, but your personal opinion is irrelevant about attending a school is irrelevant. What matters is the desirability to the throngs of high school seniors looking to get into college. Objectively speaking, Harvard and Yale are without doubt two of the most desirable universities in the country. Look at their acceptance rates and look at their offer decline rates relative to other schools. Go to the State U of your choice (or any school outside of other top ranked schools like Stanford) and ask the incoming freshman class how many were also accepted at Harvard or Yale. There will be a few here or there, but not many. Go to Harvard, and practically everyone there was also accepted by whatever state university they applied to.

That's desirability.

You are incorrect regarding their agenda. They have lowered he standards for minorities and they would be happy if they could eliminate all whites and Asian Americans even if it meant having all students granted free admission.

There are 75 colleges in the USA that give rodeo scholarships.

John Utah wrote:

http://images.performgroup.com/di/library/sporting_news/e9/41/kansas-jayhawks-032316-getty-ftr_n6xh1pjxbyw71v869d6oyovn3.jpg?t=-1506921973&w=1280&h=720&quality=100

The five guys from Kansas conveniently pictured in Mr. Utah's post generate more than enough revenue to fund the entire soccer or volleyball or lacrosse team or whatever. The scholarships given to male basketball and football players at big time programs are not really a cost to the school in the way that a lacrosse or soccer scholarship would be. Plus with regards to student life, men's basketball and football games are the only ones that students actually attend with any regularity and numbers, thereby enhancing campus life, school spirit and alumni pride in a way other sports cannot, even at small schools that don't have big TV contracts.

So to be fair, I think you would need to exclude men's basketball and football from any scholarship analysis. Those aren't gifts. Those are exchanges for services.

Do people really like John Utah really not understand affirmative action??

It seems pretty easy to figure out that basketball + football have majority black athletes because those sports are a lot more acceptable. It's fairly obvious that there are some pretty white sports where you need to come from money to get a college scholarship for. More white folks tend to play those sports and be wealthy in the first place and have legacy at places like an Ivy League because, you know, the US enslaved black folks. So now we're saying let's try to even things out by having things like affirmative action.

I think they are playing with the term 'scholarship"

Do any of these kids get counted, while on a academic scholarship and playing a sport?

As an aside, my personal view is college should be no more than 3 years, and do way with college sports altogether.

If colleges find it worth funding sports, some commercial group can fund those sports and give the kids a different channel of opportunity. At least they won't be majoring in eligibility.

Though Women's sports will suffer, so que the SJWs

They should tax the Ivy League endowments to pay for free tuition for poor people. Ivy League endowment funds are so large that the schools have turned into investment funds of the aristocracy that run universities for public relations purposes. They will admit their minstrels to play on their sports teams and UR minorities are the court jesters. That is good enough cover to admit the right peoples kids and keep the aristocracy secure.

Does anyone really care about sports at the Ivies? Most of them are private institutions anyhow (if they want to waste their money on rich kid sports, that's fine). I would think that college scholarships for sports are more of an affirmative action plan for ethnic minorities at most schools. The athletes in question typically have SAT scores 200 points or more lower than the rest of the student body. Like these sports or not, many of the sports are in the olympics (all of the water sports, tennis, skiing, swimming, golf, etc.). You can't really criticize these sports one way and not criticize all of the other sports the other way. The rich white kid sports are a joke anyhow.

Ivy League schools don't give athletic scholarships. Many of these children ARE wealthy, so they don't qualify for financial aid. They simply pay like everyone else, which usually is just a drop in the bucket for the parents, and they happen to be on the varsity roster for the sport. Absolutely nothing wrong with this. If the kid is low income and has the academics, they get financial assistance. Ivy League schools usually have a threshold of like 125,000 combined family income. If your family makes less than that, you get financial aid.

In addition, there is a box you check on the admissions process where you state whether or not you will apply for financial aid. Regardless of being an athlete, any students that checks the no box gets put an entirely different category, making it much easier to get into the school because the university KNOWS you will be contributing 30 to 60k a year.

This is not some rich loophole, this is smart, often rich kids playing a sport at Uni.

You have to understand that these rich kids are rich because someone in their family had to be smart and contribute something unique to society via a business or high-ranking job position. Lets stop punishing kids for the hard work of they parents and let them enjoy the fruits of their families labor. Instead, we need to focus on how we can stop making people poor, not whining about the rich being rich...

if Harvard wants to create a truly diverse college community, it must not sacrifice some forms of diversity for others. In this case, Harvard has sacrificed racial and socioeconomic diversity for geographic diversity. Indeed, the Admissions Office’s use of lower standards when sending interest letters to white students from rural states unfairly benefitted those students at the expense of rural students from minority races and lower socioeconomic backgrounds.

https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2018/10/25/editorial-keeping-diversity-in-balance/

In 2016, whites made up 58% of college and university students overall, compared to Hispanics at 17%, Asians 7%, Blacks 14%, American Indian/Alaska Natives 0.8%.

So, at 61% and 65% in NCAA sports and Ivy League sports, respectively, whites make up a higher proportion of the athlete population than the general college population.

Recall that numbers of the overall population don't necessarily reflect younger populations. The demographics of our country are changing gradually with increased Latino and Asian immigration in particular and higher rates of children among Latinos.

Age 18-24 populations for whites/blacks/AI/Asian:

18 3.46M/798k/115k/259k

19 3.52M/801k/112k/26

20 3.47M/776k/108k/26k

21 3.36M/721/102/25

22 3.3M 679k/99k/24.7k

23 3.28M/651k/97k/23.7k

For whatever reason Latinos were not included in that count.

There seem to be about 5 million Latinos of this age range.

It's useful to remember too that when rich students pay full freight, they are actually being subsidized by the universities to the tune of tens of thousands of dollars, according to their own claims that tuition, room and board and fees are heavily subsidized by endowment. Hence, those who could pay far more are getting enormous subsidies when you consider the enormous proportion of students at Ivies and the like from the top 1% and .1%.

You can get admissions boosts without financial aid boosts, although many recruited athletes are getting both even in the Ivies.

In the loop wrote:

It's actually affirmative action for tall people. Someone should run those numbers.

This one made me ROFL.

Must be how thejeff got his teaching degree.

zxcvzxcv wrote:

In 2016, whites made up 58% of college and university students overall, compared to Hispanics at 17%, Asians 7%, Blacks 14%, American Indian/Alaska Natives 0.8%.

So, at 61% and 65% in NCAA sports and Ivy League sports, respectively, whites make up a higher proportion of the athlete population than the general college population.

Recall that numbers of the overall population don't necessarily reflect younger populations. The demographics of our country are changing gradually with increased Latino and Asian immigration in particular and higher rates of children among Latinos.

Age 18-24 populations for whites/blacks/AI/Asian:

18 3.46M/798k/115k/259k

19 3.52M/801k/112k/26

20 3.47M/776k/108k/26k

21 3.36M/721/102/25

22 3.3M 679k/99k/24.7k

23 3.28M/651k/97k/23.7k

For whatever reason Latinos were not included in that count.

There seem to be about 5 million Latinos of this age range.

When a mixed race individual is applying to a school, and is not getting an athletic scholarship, they will check that they are the minority (a white/Hispanic kid will check Hispanic)

A kid receiving an athletic scholarship won't care, and may be more likely to check white.

Just a few kids doing this will make up for the 58% to 61% swing.

Those damn white people and their *shuffles cards* sports