A close friend of mine who has affiliations with Harvard XC just told me about their training regiment. The team follows a normal 2-workout/1 long run training schedule, but supposedly (on top of their 6min/mile easy runs), t...
That was interesting, but I didn’t quite understand this: “the team completes a circuit of weighted lifts (bench press, trap bar deadlift, etc.) following each running workout rep.”
They ignore their admission standards for athletes.
Nobody wrote the first sentence. The second is also incorrect, because being a recruited athlete is an aspect of their admission standards. It is a part of the process, the same as with many other factors that make the Ivy admissions process more than just evaluating grades and test scores.
I'm not saying that someone is going to say any of these things in this case. I am saying that there is a list of reasons to discredit a program and the replies will typically pick from that list and plug it in.
Someone congratulates NAU? "No admission standards."
Duke basketball has no standards, but for other sports academic standards exist. But that entails only a 1300-1400 SAT depending on your times and grades; test optional has also made it easier.
Times have gotten faster, but Ivies used to use an "academic index" which helps smart recruits: if you'd have perfect test scores and grades, you likely could get admissions help with only a 9:20 a little while ago.
From recent experience with H-Y-P, Stanford, and MIT recruiting, I don't think this is accurate.
H-Y-P coaches can offer a small number of recruits guaranteed admission, and they make those offers after confirming that the academics are acceptable - so the student does not fail, and so the program is not embarrassed.
They really don't have any interest in someone who is not likely to score them points at the meets they care about. So if you're an impressive runner who is below that cutoff, good luck with regular admissions, but you will not be getting ANY help from athletics. Admissions might be impressed that you are almost good enough for their team, which might help, but they are not doing it for team reasons. Same with Stanford (but of course with the difference of being able to offer scholarships). Perhaps brutal, but true.
MIT on the other hand cannot offer guaranteed admission. Best the coach can do is to write a letter of support to admissions, giving more or less support to recruits based on their performance, potential, and team needs. Admissions will weigh that letter along with the rest of the application.
Duke basketball has no standards, but for other sports academic standards exist. But that entails only a 1300-1400 SAT depending on your times and grades; test optional has also made it easier.
Times have gotten faster, but Ivies used to use an "academic index" which helps smart recruits: if you'd have perfect test scores and grades, you likely could get admissions help with only a 9:20 a little while ago.
From recent experience with H-Y-P, Stanford, and MIT recruiting, I don't think this is accurate.
H-Y-P coaches can offer a small number of recruits guaranteed admission, and they make those offers after confirming that the academics are acceptable - so the student does not fail, and so the program is not embarrassed.
They really don't have any interest in someone who is not likely to score them points at the meets they care about. So if you're an impressive runner who is below that cutoff, good luck with regular admissions, but you will not be getting ANY help from athletics. Admissions might be impressed that you are almost good enough for their team, which might help, but they are not doing it for team reasons. Same with Stanford (but of course with the difference of being able to offer scholarships). Perhaps brutal, but true.
MIT on the other hand cannot offer guaranteed admission. Best the coach can do is to write a letter of support to admissions, giving more or less support to recruits based on their performance, potential, and team needs. Admissions will weigh that letter along with the rest of the application.
partially true. The number of guaranteed admissions is not "small" at all. Yale's number is smaller than Princeton and Harvard but they all have a lot of guaranteed admissions.
If you have an 8:45 kid in the 3200 from a low income family, if he has above a 3.5 GPA they can get him accepted and he will pay NOT A DIME for his entire 4 years.
If they do that only 5 times per year/recruiting cycle then they have 20 kids on a "full ride" compared to the NCAA max of 12.6 scholarships. And they do it a lot more than 5 times per year.
Their stated recruitment standards (at least for the Ivies on that list) are slower than what they actually want. I think they're currently around 4:10/9:10, but I am friends with a perfect GPA, almost perfect test scores and almost sub 9 who also was a legacy who didn't receive support. Stanford wants sub 4 or sub 4 genetics, while MIT can't get your odds above 50%.
I also think that admissions, if they haven't changed since 2018 (they have, especially with respect to a certain policy likely to be banned; but I don't think they've changed in this regard) would give recruited athletes a "1" as the athletic rating which almost guaranteed acceptance; walk-on quality students (probably captains and state placers) would get a "2" which is still good but not the guaranteed acceptance a "1" is.
I've heard it's far smaller than the other 2 - as in fewer than half the spots.
I can't think of other programs that are as good (or almost as good) with also a good team: I guess Penn has a couple of good athletes but they're not as fast as the others. And the low-ranked ones almost never have someone good except if it's a 25 year old Canadian like this year. Outside of them, Duke has strong mid-distance but atrocious distance; I guess Notre Dame has a good program but it's also a far weaker school
Every D1 school has recruiting advantages and disadvantages: boring.
Harvard is finally making the most of the high level athletes it recruits and that’s something to be really happy about: for the athletes and for the sport. It wasn’t always that way - take it from an alum of the program. Thank goodness for good coaching and a great team culture. Can’t wait to watch and support them in XC.
I had a friend on the hockey team who had a complex about being the dumbest guy there because he got in in spite of a 1000 sat score. He played in the pros later.
They most certainly have special admissions for special people
When I was a student at Harvard Law School, a classmate of mine who had worked in the Harvard College Admissions Office told me that I would be shocked by how low the scores of admitted hockey players were. I never really knew why the hockey players, in particular, seemed so stupid. But the Ivies do seem to take that sport pretty seriously, and the socioeconomic backgrounds of really good hockey players in North America seem rather disadvantaged as a whole, with probably most of them never even applying to college, so maybe the schools are willing to fish around the lower watermarks of the barrel to find marginally suitable candidates.
You left out at least a couple of points worth noting. First, that's 15% of family income, not 15% of, for example, student tuition or other expenses. Second, and more significant, is this later statement in the "Fact Sheet":
"Families at all income levels who have significant assets are asked to pay more than those without assets."
For those of us who came from lower-income families of super-savers, that has been a huge deal over the years, and renders some of the earlier statements in the "Fact Sheet" misleading at best, and perhaps outright false. But I have always advised the most intelligent and highly-motivated students to go to the best academic schools and forget about athletic scholarships, even if they have to find their own way to pay, without any family contribution or financial aid from the school itself. (It still sucks, however.)
15% of income is still very little. Keep in mind the median household income in the United States is 70k. An household income of $150,000 is around 90th percentile.
So a family that makes more than 90% of the rest of the country would only have to pay 15,000 per year for a school that costs 90,000.
Your complaint is that families that have saved money for college will have to pay for college? That's the point of saving!
You seem to have misunderstood my comments. In my first "point," I was simply clarifying the earlier poster's comment that "[I]f you make 160k you probably only pay 15%." One obvious, but incorrect, interpretation of that statement was that you would only pay 15% of the "sticker price" of the school, whereas the actual "Fact Sheet" of the school was speaking of a percentage of family income, not a percentage of tuition or other costs. So in the example provided by the earlier poster, that would be $24,000, and the percentages and amounts get considerably higher for higher family incomes and considerable lower for lower family incomes.
There are problems with that approach, particularly in its application to "non-nuclear" families and the manipulation of the system to "shield" high incomes, but I don't have a problem with the general idea of sticking more financially fortunate families with higher "ticket" prices.
Your response to my second "point" is silly, and completely misrepresents my comment. You say, "Your complaint is that families that have saved money for college will have to pay for college? That's the point of saving!" But that's untrue. First, my "complaint" was that the statement on the "Fact Sheet" that family assets would be considered at all levels of family income was contrary to the earlier statements on the "Fact Sheet" quoted by the earlier poster.
Second, and contrary to your statement, I said nothing about families that had "saved money for college." Many families save money simply because they are more cognizant of, disciplined, and socially responsible about the vagaries of future financial costs, especially when the parents are older and unable to participate substantially in gainful employment. My parents both came from very poor backgrounds, and they pinched pennies for future exigencies. While my father was still working, our family income probably never rose above $30,000 or so, and if he died fairly early, my family (and, more particularly, my mother) would have been almost completely dependent on whatever had been saved up to the time of my father's death.
I'm not aware that my parents ever saved any money in order for me to go to college, and if the family's assets had been substantially depleted by college costs, my mother could have ended up completely destitute. Yet the universities generally required even low-income families to use their existing assets before they would calculate and offer any financial aid. After my father learned this, he refused not only to pay toward my college tuition and expenses, but also refused to even fill out any financial aid forms. He rightfully recognized that he would have to deplete family financial assets before I could qualify for financial aid. I ended up paying my own tuition and costs at M.I.T. by committing to four years of military service after college, and I paid my own tuition and costs at Harvard Law School with whatever I had saved during my years in the Air Force. On these matters, I don't have strong regrets or gripes about how things worked out for me; it's actually been a pretty amazing life. But I also had certain talents and knowledge -- "personal capital" -- to call upon; others in similar situations might be far less fortunate.
Not surprising Harvard would be ranked last in free speech. It's a leftwing progressive school. Free speech is only for those who are politically and culturally aligned with the left.
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