Volume CXXXIII, Number 5 October 12, 2001 f

Low standards, easy college acceptances for NESCAC athletes
BELINDA J. LOVETT
EDITOR IN CHIEF

Editor's Note: The report discussed here was commissioned by the New England Small College Athletic Conference (NESCAC) presidents in December of last year and was intended as a followup to the book The Game of Life: College Sports and Educational Values. Because there was not ample time between the release of this report and press time to cover the report in depth, this article and this article simply summarize the results of the report . Further analysis, including interviews, will appear in a follow-up article next week.

According to a recent report, 75 percent of the males who were recruited by NESCAC schools to play football, basketball, or ice hockey are in the bottom one third of their class. In addition, these students scored an average of 150 points lower on their SATs than did their average non-athletic counterparts. These are only two statistics taken from a 30-page report titled the "Academic-Athletic Divide," which was presented to the NESCAC presidents on September 27. The report was kept under wraps until this week, when President Barry Mills released it to the College on Tuesday.

The report was written by the authors of The Game of Life, William G. Bowen and James L. Shulman. The report follows a meeting on December 14, 2000 when NESCAC presidents discussed the findings from The Game of Life and requested that a similar study be conducted that included all NESCAC schools.

The in-school data used in the new study came from the NESCAC matriculating classes of 1995, and the admissions data came from NESCAC matriculating classes of 1999.

(Tufts, however, was not included in the report due to its comparatively larger student-body size. Williams also was not included in studies that used recruitment as a variable, because it was unable to supply recruiting information. Bates was not included in studies that used SAT scores, because submitting such scores is considered optional for Bates applicants.)

The report compared participation, recruitment, admission, and academic performance of both male and female athletes and non-athletes. Male athletes were further broken down into high-profile sports (football, basketball, and ice hockey) and low-profile sports (all others). Bowen and Shulman did not designate any women's sports as high-profile.

The report was also able to use recruitment as a factor in its analyses. Students were considered "recruited athletes," according to the report, if their "name had been placed on a coach's recommendation list that was used by the admissions office when making admittance decisions."

The first numbers the report looked at were percentages of athletic participation. In the '95 class, an average of almost half of male students and a third of female students played an intercollegiate sport at some point during their college career.

The next area that the report looked at was recruitment. Recruitment played the biggest role in high-profile athletics (68 percent of the high-profile athletes were recruited), but it also played an important role in low-profile athletics (40 percent of low-profile athletes and 50 percent of female athletes had been recruited).

The report then looked at the admissions advantage that recruited players receive over non-recruited players. The report found that the average male recruit has a 34 percentage-point advantage over the average male non-recruit, and the average female recruit has a 33 percentage-point advantage over the average female non-recruit.

The report also found that athletes in general tend to have lower SAT scores than non-athletes. Low-profile athletes and females tended to have scores of 30 points less than students at large, and high-profile athletes tended to have scores of more than 125 points below those of students at large.

It was also found that recruited athletes had even lower scores than non-recruited athletes. Recruited high-profile athletes had scores almost 90 points below the walk-ons in the same sports. Recruited low-profile athletes and female athletes also had lower SAT scores than the walk-ons in the same sports, although walk-on low-profile and female athletes tended to have about the same scores as non-athletes.

The report also indicated that not only do athletes come to college with lower test scores, but they perform even worse in college than would be expected of students with such test scores.

Although athletes do tend to graduate in higher numbers than non-athletes, they do not at all perform as well in the classroom as non-athletes. Two-thirds of high-profile athletes were in the bottom third of their class, and more than one-quarter were in the bottom one-tenth of their class.

The difference was even more pronounced with recruited athletes. Three-quarters of high-profile recruited athletes were in the bottom third of their class.
The report also showed that athletes were more likely to major in the social sciences than the humanities, even though for students at large, the percentage is about the same.

NESCAC schools include Amherst, Bates, Bowdoin, Colby, Connecticut College, Hamilton College, Middlebury, Trinity, Tufts, Wesleyan, and Williams.