13 ms·

Cui bono? There are a lot of problems with the Ivy League, the lack of athletic scholarships are one of the few things they do absolutely right. The thing is t

Cui bono? There are a lot of problems with the Ivy League, the lack of athletic scholarships are one of the few things they do absolutely right. The thing is that athletics are less, not more democratic as a distribution mechanism for admission slots. The author seems to be under the mistaken belief that most of these slots would be available for your football and basketball players, where stories of rising from poverty are commonplace at the highest level. That's simply not the case at Ivies. You think underrepresented and the economically disadvantaged are rowing or playing squash or fencing or golfing or diving at the level where this would matter? Sure, there are ways of making this equitable, but that's not solved by the scope of this argument. The fact is that athletics has been a backdoor for admissions, and always used to exclude, not to include, those outside the upper class. The college admission scandal showed as much, with the Stanford sailing coach. It has historical roots in excluding Jewish students, and it's currently used to exclude Asian students among maintaining a proportion of elite students. Certainly, it looks like price fixing, and I don't have a problem with that argument, but I would prefer is more universities took courage to actually focus on academics like chicago, caltech, mit, etc.

brian_cunnie 4y ago
> It has historical roots in excluding Jewish students I'm glad the Ivy (Penn) that I graduated from over thirty years ago was enlightened enough to admit good students regardless of whether they were Jewish. Or Asian. > athletics has been a backdoor for admissions ... used to exclude ... those outside the upper class. The student athlete I knew, my roommate Tony Tomaska, was the son of a Chicago policeman. He played for the football team. He was working class, not upper class.
- lofatdairy 4y ago
  I do recommend the Third Reich in the Ivy League as a generally good read, which highlights the significantly more nazi-sympathetic student body at harvard with the more activist population at Columbia, largely in part due to the fact that Columbia failed to attract the white elites of NYC and had a larger Jewish population as a result. >The student athlete I knew, my roommate Tony Tomaska, was the son of a Chicago policeman. He played for the football team. He was working class, not upper class. Yeah I don't deny that a lot of athletes are from disadvantageous backgrounds, I was only to highlight that the sports we associate w/ that fact do not make up a lot of other sports in the ivy league, and that if your goal diversity, you should just increase admissions of disadvantaged students, not use athletics as a proxy.
  - pinewurst 4y ago
    FYI it’s “The Third Reich in the Ivory Tower”
    - fsckboy 4y ago
      there may be something good in the book(?) but talk about a title that makes the author sound unhinged how about "vestiges of old fashioned bias remain in the ivory tower" or something
      - Dylan16807 4y ago
        It wasn't "vestiges" for there to be support for the third reich while it was gaining power. I could see your point if the book wasn't talking about the 30s, but it was talking about the 30s.
    - lofatdairy 4y ago
      Ah, that's right, apologies, I should have double checked the title before replying.
  - pyuser583 4y ago
    I’m familiar with some very creepy attitudes the local land grant college had toward Nazi Germany. Was this an Ivy League thing or a higher ed thing? Much of the early 20th century was spent building US higher education around the German model.
- fsckboy 4y ago
  The post WWII period was a golden age for social progress. Along with the final collapse of colonial empires ruled over by royal families came a corresponding breaking down of class and overt ethnic/racial barriers in the West and America, with universities using test scores to open their doors to students of merit regardless of background or gender. but that golden age, having achieved remarkable success, is over. It was predicted by somebody-nobody-listened-to that strip-mining IQ and EQ talent from various communities and elevating them to elite status would leave behind communities more deeply impoverished and dysfunctional than they were before. And what is our politics today but that exact battle?
  - pyuser583 4y ago
    Did life improve in the post-colonial world? There don’t seem to be too many 1950s era success stories in this regard.
    - fsckboy 4y ago
      life has generally improved for everybody, everywhere in the world, as it was also the time of the green revolution, antibiotics, etc., and many former colonies revel in their self governance even while their politics seem even more dysfunctional than western politics. But you might be making the point that some former colonies would have been better off remaining as colonies, a hill I am not willing to defend, let alone die on. America, Canada and Australia benefited from being English colonies, but that's sort of tautological because they were originally colonies settled with English people, apart from indigenous peoples and later arrivals. Hard to say if indigenous people are better off, certainly particular indigenous people have been worse off, and there's certainly the enduring popular romantic notion that being a hunter gatherer is peak evolution for us/them and the tiny sustainable populations of the nomadic invaders and such of several continents were entitled to be left alone to battle each other for supremacy while collectively hogging those resources for themselves, free from having to battle anybody else for them. But personally, while descended from hunter gatherers, I'm glad I'm not a hunter gatherer myself (he said, typing on his silicon dream machine) though considering it, I would have made a great one tempermentally.
TechBro8615 4y ago
They don't have athletic scholarships because admission is need-blind for all students and you will only pay what your family is able to. But they still have "slots" for athletic admissions, where each coach gets to pick who they admit, and as long as they clear the minimum bar (which is different for each sport) of GPA and test scores, they will be admitted early. It's not technically "athletic scholarships" but it may as well be. What it does mean is that an excellent athlete from a rich family will choose Stanford over Harvard, because Stanford will pay them a scholarship even though they don't "need it." This is one reason why Stanford athletics are superior to those of Ivy League schools.
kerpotgh 4y ago
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fiftyfifty 4y ago
This is absolutely spot on. Don't forget sailing, tennis, lacrosse, and some Ivy League schools even offer equestrian. Even sports like swimming, hockey, and volleyball are getting to be more and more dominated by well-to-do kids from families that can afford expensive traveling club teams. When Brown tried to eliminate its men's track and field team a few years ago the decision was reversed when it was pointed out that track and field was one of the only sports adding diversity to the campus.
coldtea 4y ago
>the lack of athletic scholarships are one of the few things they do absolutely right. The thing is that athletics are less, not more democratic as a distribution mechanism for admission slots A more basic problem with "athletic scholarships" is that being an athlete has absolutely nothing to do with being an academic/scholar/student of something else. It might be a good way to bring some publicity to the school, and to make it have a strong team. But it has absolutely nothing to do with a school's intended purpose (except the "make money" purpose). Athletic scholarships should only be a thing in sports academies - where you're trained to be a coach, a PE teacher, or a related academic in some of those areas. In fact, universities and colleges should just have clubs to play sports informally, at the same level they have a music playing club, or a gym, or a cooking club. Like in the rest of the civilized (on that matter at least) world.
- tophi 4y ago
  A university is not just a place to go to learn anymore. It’s a big club that happens to be a place where you study. You bond and make lifelong friends. Also a great place to find a partner for life. Athletic departments are vital to the university system in American schools and their local economies.
  - onos 4y ago
    Agree. A lot of the frustration and confusion here seems to be due to assuming these universities should just serve the smartest kids. The truth is that in practice they provide credentials for both elites and experts, and the former need not be brainiacs.
  - coldtea 4y ago
    >A university is not just a place to go to learn anymore. It’s a big club that happens to be a place where you study. Yes. That should stop. >Athletic departments are vital to the university system in American schools and their local economies. That too.
    - nine_k 4y ago
michaelbuckbee 4y ago
Netflix has a docu-series called "Last Chance U" about the junior college athletic system and how it operates. I knew intellectually that college athletes were coddled academically and while it's hard not to root for the individuals depicted in the documentary to succeed it's also hard not to think that there must be dozens of kids at the schools where they come from that were more academically inclined and could have made better use of the resources provided to the student athletes.
- grogenaut 4y ago
  Having played college ball at an high end academic school a few thoughts here. Last Chance U is great and a great insight, I really enjoy the show, and get heart broken for these kids. You can't really get schaudenfraude when they fail like other shows or dramas. But there's a few things you may not have caught, which seems to be the same across most college sports and just exacerbates as you become more competitive/make more cash like a D1 school. When I was in season I spent 5-8 hours a day on the sport. 3 hours for practice, 1-2 hours reading scouting reports, in rehab, working out, or watching film. On game day it was a good 8 hours if we weren't traveling, a full day if we were (longest bus ride was 7.5 h each way). We calculated that we spent around 3600 hours in sports over 4 years. That's over a part time job and nearing full time job while working. This makes it real hard to get to normal tutoring sessions which are in the afternoon many places. Or to labs, or office hours, etc. At my school the athletic department (ad) just got the big classes to setup tutoring sessions in the athletic complex (ac). They were open to anyone actually. But we had better discipline (a coach would sit in on many sessions and deal with any disruptions) and better hours so we got some of the best tutors to show up. My physics 101 tutor had to move to the gym he was so popular. Now move to Last Chance U... kids who have been failed in many ways by high schools who didn't teach them, parents, themselves, or just not being quite good enough to "make it" but not ready to realize that. They need a ton of help. This is very much the last chance for these kids at ball or making it through that avenue. Making it via sports is what 80% of these kids think is literally their only option. Tho there's the lineman in the first season was like "it'll get me a degree and out of the factory." But if you pay attention, most of those sessions the players are at, they're for all of the students, who also have guidance counselors. The difference is just that the Athletic Department pays for a guidance counselor, and the coach is a surrogate parent for these kids (who happens to work there), and the GC and the coaches, they talk and these kids have to stay eligible to play or to go to the school. Normal students can ignore the GC, and fail out, and they're not on TV. The players can't. If you haven't played school sports or don't have kids who play sports, a coach can often wield more influence over a kid than parents can. My friend just immigrated, his kid was playing sports, and my friend was lamenting his kid was slacking off. I suggested he email the coach. That evening the kid apologized to his dad and set up a study schedule he showed his dad and his grades went up a letter over the next month. Basically the coach brought the kid to his office during study hour and said "you're going to run a lot and your play time is going to go down if you don't get your grades back up." that's all it took. As a regular parent generally if you said "go run till you puke or realize you should get your grades up" you'd get laughed at.
pyuser583 4y ago
Yes but what about academic back doors? I was admitted to a college because I was really interested in a major they started offering and wanted to promote. I just got one of my children admitted to a very selective private school because “wanted” to participate in a program they had just begun. Schools always have programs and initiatives they are pushing, and give preference to students who want to use them.
- jrussino 4y ago
  How do you become aware of these programs and initiatives and their level of preference in the eyes of the school? Do you happen to have personal connections with people in the school administration or admissions office and find out by word of mouth? Or are you trying to infer what's important to them from some publicly-available information like the school's website/newsletter/twitter/press releases?
  - pyuser583 4y ago
    That’s a really great question - * in the case of my college, I knew what I wanted, and was shopping around for it. The major was a very unusual one - not even a major as much as a program (“great books”). * in the case of my daughter, I knew the school because I had taught there decades ago. * there are admissions consultants who keep track of these sorts of things and make it a point to know all the side doors. At the end of the day, colleges admissions should be about matching students and colleges who fit together. If a student isn’t as competitive, but is still a great fit, they should I get extra points for that. But this can be come a system those with money abuse. But that abuse takes the form of lying about whether they are a good fit for the college they are going to - which is dumb. If a student gets into Harvard by saying they really want to pursue the newly introduced degree of “Diversity, Equity, Inclusion” - is Harvard really a good fit?
throw0101c 4y ago
> fencing Tangent: take certain physical education courses at MIT and you can get a 'unofficial' pirate certificate: > An underground campus custom has become an official and increasingly famous part of MIT culture. Although student pirates have roamed campus informally for decades, in 2011 the Department of Athletics, Physical Education, and Recreation (DAPER) began issuing MIT pirate certificates to students who completed specific requirements. Six students earned the inaugural certificates and, today, 354 MIT students and alumni have received certificates at a spring ritual—Pirate Induction Day. * https://alum.mit.edu/slice/arrrr-mit-pirates-and-matt-damon-certified https://alum.mit.edu/slice/arrrr-mit-pirates-and-matt-damon-... > The MIT Pirate Certificate became available in the Fall of 2011. Students who have completed Archery, Fencing, Pistol (Air Pistol or Rifle) and Sailing should send an email to […] * https://physicaleducationandwellness.mit.edu/about/pirate-certificate/ https://physicaleducationandwellness.mit.edu/about/pirate-ce...
panick21_ 4y ago
The whole American system of collage sports is just totally strange to Europeans.

brian_cunnie 4y ago

> It has historical roots in excluding Jewish students I'm glad the Ivy (Penn) that I graduated from over thirty years ago was enlightened enough to admit good students regardless of whether they were Jewish. Or Asian. > athletics has been a backdoor for admissions ... used to exclude ... those outside the upper class. The student athlete I knew, my roommate Tony Tomaska, was the son of a Chicago policeman. He played for the football team. He was working class, not upper class.

lofatdairy 4y ago
I do recommend the Third Reich in the Ivy League as a generally good read, which highlights the significantly more nazi-sympathetic student body at harvard with the more activist population at Columbia, largely in part due to the fact that Columbia failed to attract the white elites of NYC and had a larger Jewish population as a result. >The student athlete I knew, my roommate Tony Tomaska, was the son of a Chicago policeman. He played for the football team. He was working class, not upper class. Yeah I don't deny that a lot of athletes are from disadvantageous backgrounds, I was only to highlight that the sports we associate w/ that fact do not make up a lot of other sports in the ivy league, and that if your goal diversity, you should just increase admissions of disadvantaged students, not use athletics as a proxy.
- pinewurst 4y ago
  FYI it’s “The Third Reich in the Ivory Tower”
  - fsckboy 4y ago
    there may be something good in the book(?) but talk about a title that makes the author sound unhinged how about "vestiges of old fashioned bias remain in the ivory tower" or something
    - Dylan16807 4y ago
      It wasn't "vestiges" for there to be support for the third reich while it was gaining power. I could see your point if the book wasn't talking about the 30s, but it was talking about the 30s.
  - lofatdairy 4y ago
    Ah, that's right, apologies, I should have double checked the title before replying.
- pyuser583 4y ago
  I’m familiar with some very creepy attitudes the local land grant college had toward Nazi Germany. Was this an Ivy League thing or a higher ed thing? Much of the early 20th century was spent building US higher education around the German model.
fsckboy 4y ago
The post WWII period was a golden age for social progress. Along with the final collapse of colonial empires ruled over by royal families came a corresponding breaking down of class and overt ethnic/racial barriers in the West and America, with universities using test scores to open their doors to students of merit regardless of background or gender. but that golden age, having achieved remarkable success, is over. It was predicted by somebody-nobody-listened-to that strip-mining IQ and EQ talent from various communities and elevating them to elite status would leave behind communities more deeply impoverished and dysfunctional than they were before. And what is our politics today but that exact battle?
- pyuser583 4y ago
  Did life improve in the post-colonial world? There don’t seem to be too many 1950s era success stories in this regard.
  - fsckboy 4y ago
    life has generally improved for everybody, everywhere in the world, as it was also the time of the green revolution, antibiotics, etc., and many former colonies revel in their self governance even while their politics seem even more dysfunctional than western politics. But you might be making the point that some former colonies would have been better off remaining as colonies, a hill I am not willing to defend, let alone die on. America, Canada and Australia benefited from being English colonies, but that's sort of tautological because they were originally colonies settled with English people, apart from indigenous peoples and later arrivals. Hard to say if indigenous people are better off, certainly particular indigenous people have been worse off, and there's certainly the enduring popular romantic notion that being a hunter gatherer is peak evolution for us/them and the tiny sustainable populations of the nomadic invaders and such of several continents were entitled to be left alone to battle each other for supremacy while collectively hogging those resources for themselves, free from having to battle anybody else for them. But personally, while descended from hunter gatherers, I'm glad I'm not a hunter gatherer myself (he said, typing on his silicon dream machine) though considering it, I would have made a great one tempermentally.

TechBro8615 4y ago

They don't have athletic scholarships because admission is need-blind for all students and you will only pay what your family is able to. But they still have "slots" for athletic admissions, where each coach gets to pick who they admit, and as long as they clear the minimum bar (which is different for each sport) of GPA and test scores, they will be admitted early. It's not technically "athletic scholarships" but it may as well be. What it does mean is that an excellent athlete from a rich family will choose Stanford over Harvard, because Stanford will pay them a scholarship even though they don't "need it." This is one reason why Stanford athletics are superior to those of Ivy League schools.

kerpotgh 4y ago

[dead]

fiftyfifty 4y ago

This is absolutely spot on. Don't forget sailing, tennis, lacrosse, and some Ivy League schools even offer equestrian. Even sports like swimming, hockey, and volleyball are getting to be more and more dominated by well-to-do kids from families that can afford expensive traveling club teams. When Brown tried to eliminate its men's track and field team a few years ago the decision was reversed when it was pointed out that track and field was one of the only sports adding diversity to the campus.

coldtea 4y ago

>the lack of athletic scholarships are one of the few things they do absolutely right. The thing is that athletics are less, not more democratic as a distribution mechanism for admission slots A more basic problem with "athletic scholarships" is that being an athlete has absolutely nothing to do with being an academic/scholar/student of something else. It might be a good way to bring some publicity to the school, and to make it have a strong team. But it has absolutely nothing to do with a school's intended purpose (except the "make money" purpose). Athletic scholarships should only be a thing in sports academies - where you're trained to be a coach, a PE teacher, or a related academic in some of those areas. In fact, universities and colleges should just have clubs to play sports informally, at the same level they have a music playing club, or a gym, or a cooking club. Like in the rest of the civilized (on that matter at least) world.

tophi 4y ago
A university is not just a place to go to learn anymore. It’s a big club that happens to be a place where you study. You bond and make lifelong friends. Also a great place to find a partner for life. Athletic departments are vital to the university system in American schools and their local economies.
- onos 4y ago
  Agree. A lot of the frustration and confusion here seems to be due to assuming these universities should just serve the smartest kids. The truth is that in practice they provide credentials for both elites and experts, and the former need not be brainiacs.
- coldtea 4y ago
  >A university is not just a place to go to learn anymore. It’s a big club that happens to be a place where you study. Yes. That should stop. >Athletic departments are vital to the university system in American schools and their local economies. That too.
  - nine_k 4y ago

michaelbuckbee 4y ago

Netflix has a docu-series called "Last Chance U" about the junior college athletic system and how it operates. I knew intellectually that college athletes were coddled academically and while it's hard not to root for the individuals depicted in the documentary to succeed it's also hard not to think that there must be dozens of kids at the schools where they come from that were more academically inclined and could have made better use of the resources provided to the student athletes.

grogenaut 4y ago
Having played college ball at an high end academic school a few thoughts here. Last Chance U is great and a great insight, I really enjoy the show, and get heart broken for these kids. You can't really get schaudenfraude when they fail like other shows or dramas. But there's a few things you may not have caught, which seems to be the same across most college sports and just exacerbates as you become more competitive/make more cash like a D1 school. When I was in season I spent 5-8 hours a day on the sport. 3 hours for practice, 1-2 hours reading scouting reports, in rehab, working out, or watching film. On game day it was a good 8 hours if we weren't traveling, a full day if we were (longest bus ride was 7.5 h each way). We calculated that we spent around 3600 hours in sports over 4 years. That's over a part time job and nearing full time job while working. This makes it real hard to get to normal tutoring sessions which are in the afternoon many places. Or to labs, or office hours, etc. At my school the athletic department (ad) just got the big classes to setup tutoring sessions in the athletic complex (ac). They were open to anyone actually. But we had better discipline (a coach would sit in on many sessions and deal with any disruptions) and better hours so we got some of the best tutors to show up. My physics 101 tutor had to move to the gym he was so popular. Now move to Last Chance U... kids who have been failed in many ways by high schools who didn't teach them, parents, themselves, or just not being quite good enough to "make it" but not ready to realize that. They need a ton of help. This is very much the last chance for these kids at ball or making it through that avenue. Making it via sports is what 80% of these kids think is literally their only option. Tho there's the lineman in the first season was like "it'll get me a degree and out of the factory." But if you pay attention, most of those sessions the players are at, they're for all of the students, who also have guidance counselors. The difference is just that the Athletic Department pays for a guidance counselor, and the coach is a surrogate parent for these kids (who happens to work there), and the GC and the coaches, they talk and these kids have to stay eligible to play or to go to the school. Normal students can ignore the GC, and fail out, and they're not on TV. The players can't. If you haven't played school sports or don't have kids who play sports, a coach can often wield more influence over a kid than parents can. My friend just immigrated, his kid was playing sports, and my friend was lamenting his kid was slacking off. I suggested he email the coach. That evening the kid apologized to his dad and set up a study schedule he showed his dad and his grades went up a letter over the next month. Basically the coach brought the kid to his office during study hour and said "you're going to run a lot and your play time is going to go down if you don't get your grades back up." that's all it took. As a regular parent generally if you said "go run till you puke or realize you should get your grades up" you'd get laughed at.

pyuser583 4y ago

Yes but what about academic back doors? I was admitted to a college because I was really interested in a major they started offering and wanted to promote. I just got one of my children admitted to a very selective private school because “wanted” to participate in a program they had just begun. Schools always have programs and initiatives they are pushing, and give preference to students who want to use them.

jrussino 4y ago
How do you become aware of these programs and initiatives and their level of preference in the eyes of the school? Do you happen to have personal connections with people in the school administration or admissions office and find out by word of mouth? Or are you trying to infer what's important to them from some publicly-available information like the school's website/newsletter/twitter/press releases?
- pyuser583 4y ago
  That’s a really great question - * in the case of my college, I knew what I wanted, and was shopping around for it. The major was a very unusual one - not even a major as much as a program (“great books”). * in the case of my daughter, I knew the school because I had taught there decades ago. * there are admissions consultants who keep track of these sorts of things and make it a point to know all the side doors. At the end of the day, colleges admissions should be about matching students and colleges who fit together. If a student isn’t as competitive, but is still a great fit, they should I get extra points for that. But this can be come a system those with money abuse. But that abuse takes the form of lying about whether they are a good fit for the college they are going to - which is dumb. If a student gets into Harvard by saying they really want to pursue the newly introduced degree of “Diversity, Equity, Inclusion” - is Harvard really a good fit?

throw0101c 4y ago

> fencing Tangent: take certain physical education courses at MIT and you can get a 'unofficial' pirate certificate: > An underground campus custom has become an official and increasingly famous part of MIT culture. Although student pirates have roamed campus informally for decades, in 2011 the Department of Athletics, Physical Education, and Recreation (DAPER) began issuing MIT pirate certificates to students who completed specific requirements. Six students earned the inaugural certificates and, today, 354 MIT students and alumni have received certificates at a spring ritual—Pirate Induction Day. * https://alum.mit.edu/slice/arrrr-mit-pirates-and-matt-damon-certified https://alum.mit.edu/slice/arrrr-mit-pirates-and-matt-damon-... > The MIT Pirate Certificate became available in the Fall of 2011. Students who have completed Archery, Fencing, Pistol (Air Pistol or Rifle) and Sailing should send an email to […] * https://physicaleducationandwellness.mit.edu/about/pirate-certificate/ https://physicaleducationandwellness.mit.edu/about/pirate-ce...

panick21_ 4y ago

The whole American system of collage sports is just totally strange to Europeans.