Dazed n Confused wrote:
High School
1140 SAT
College
3.0 at Brown
.
I got a 1540 on my SATs and definitely wouldn't have gotten into brown. I run d iii and am very happy there.
Luckily there is some data on all this, and a great new yorker piece by malcolm gladwell:
http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2005/10/10/051010crat_atlarge.
a couple key quotes: "even now, recruited athletes have an acceptance rate to the Ivies at well over twice the rate of other students, despite S.A.T. scores that are on average more than a hundred points lower"
And the best passage, which is long:
"Athletes, Shulman and Bowen demonstrate, have a large and growing advantage in admission over everyone else. At the same time, they have markedly lower G.P.A.s and S.A.T. scores than their peers. Over the past twenty years, their class rankings have steadily dropped, and they tend to segregate themselves in an “athletic culture” different from the culture of the rest of the college. Shulman and Bowen think the preference given to athletes by the Ivy League is shameful.
Halfway through the book, however, Shulman and Bowen present what they call a “surprising” finding. Male athletes, despite their lower S.A.T. scores and grades, and despite the fact that many of them are members of minorities and come from lower socioeconomic backgrounds than other students, turn out to earn a lot more than their peers. Apparently, athletes are far more likely to go into the high-paying financial-services sector, where they succeed because of their personality and psychological makeup... Shulman and Bowen would like to argue that the attitudes of selective colleges toward athletes are a perversion of the ideals of American élite education, but that’s because they misrepresent the actual ideals of American élite education. The Ivy League is perfectly happy to accept, among others, the kind of student who makes a lot of money after graduation. As the old saying goes, the definition of a well-rounded Yale graduate is someone who can roll all the way from New Haven to Wall Street. "
So yes recruited athletes have it easier, but from the university's perspective, they bring valuable qualities as well.