When Colleges Recruit Athletes, Everyone Loses
This is a guest post by Jack Turnage, who will begin his senior year at Kent Denver School, in Denver, this fall.
Watching the London Olympic Games, I am particularly focused on the 17 Olympians fromPrinceton University. I am rooting wholeheartedly for them and all the other collegiate athletes on the U.S. squad. But as an incoming high school senior and an overoptimistically hopeful, athletically unexceptional Princeton applicant, I know that like athletes across the nation, Princeton’s Olympians were probably given preferential access to their university. The recruitment of elite athletes from grade school onward is degrading our entire educational system, and it bodes ill not only for me and other academically oriented high schoolers but, more important, for America’s children and our nation’s future.
Most of us are taught that we need only perform well academically to get into college, but the uncomfortable reality is that America’s institutions of higher education give athletes special access at the expense of gifted students. That is true even of top schools and those that are not allowed to offer scholarships. In Reclaiming the Game: College Sports and Educational Values, former Princeton President William Bowen and his co-authors describe how at 33 of America’s most academically selective colleges, recruited athletes are nearly four times more likely to be admitted than other applicants of similar academic caliber. And such recruits are significantly more likely to be in the bottom third of their class.
Kids are not stupid. High schoolers and younger students and their parents see the commonplace success that athletes enjoy in college admissions, and kids understand that athletic prowess makes them far more likely to be admitted to a top school than does academic excellence alone. In fact, it is understood in high school that recruited athletes of even modest scholastic achievement regularly do better getting into select schools than their peers with much higher academic credentials.
What does this mean? It doesn’t encourage students to excel academically. Rather, America’s universities have brazenly created a perverse incentive for kids to focus on athletics from a very young age. After it becomes clear to a child that athletic skill maximizes his chance of being admitted to the college of his choice, that child will understandably focus on getting better at a sport. Not surprisingly, both students and parents are willing to sacrifice academic achievement and growth to get into a good college.
Take one of my sister’s friends, who last year as a 12-year-old made the cut for a highly selective club lacrosse team. Since then she has practiced intensively every day and traveled extensively for national tournaments. Her place on the team is continually reassessed, subjecting her to relentless pressure years before even beginning high school. She loves lacrosse, but she also knows that if she works hard enough she will have a college commitment by the end of the tenth grade—before taking a single standardized test and with less than two years of high school grades.
The giant American sports funnel results in upwards of 110,000 high schoolers per year receiving athletic scholarships to Division I and II schools, according to the NCAA. But how many millions of kids are steered toward sports early on in the hope of attaining admission to top colleges only to find that they aren’t good enough, that their parents can’t afford to pay for year-round travel and training, and that in the pursuit of athletic excellence they’ve neglected their academic goals and aspirations, perhaps irrevocably? How many wannabe recruits enter college acutely deficient in the skills critical to success there and later? And why, in the first place, should a rower or a football player be valued four times higher and singled out years earlier than an academically comparable piccolo player or aspiring physicist or debater?
Some will argue that athletics offers disadvantaged students a chance at a college education. But apart from a few sports like basketball and football, the vast majority of sports at the high school level are funded by parents through athletic clubs and require substantial financial resources. That is true for nearly all of the winter sports, like skiing and skating, as well as for ones like field hockey, swimming, and tennis. Far from leveling the playing field, college sports recruiting offers the moneyed a substantial advantage over less wealthy families.
After 40 months with unemployment above 8%, and with U.S. workers continuing to lose ground to global competitors, can America really afford to have its students rank 25th among industrialized nations in math and sciences? Instead of focusing on gold, shouldn’t American universities be trying to out-compete China and India in producing science, technology, engineering, and math graduates?
This week I am cheering for all collegiate Olympians. But when London 2012 ends, I’ll go back to hoping that Princeton admitted their competitors for their academic merit more than for their athletic prowess—for my own sake and for America’s.
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