As many seniors can testify around this time of year, college admissions are a nerve-wracking and stress-inducing process. Every aspect of one’s high school career, from GPAs and test scores to extracurriculars and volunteer hours, is placed before a menacing jury of disinterested officers to be mercilessly critiqued. As such, many students are forced to seek out the most eye-catching achievements during their high school years, which they only hope may land them a spot in the halls of higher education. The recent college admissions scandal saw several affluent parents resort to less-than-honest ways of securing a spot on college campuses for their children, in an attempt to cheat this system. There’s a reason why this so-called “Varsity Blues” scandal involved both great sums of money and weeks-long media coverage. Put simply, students and parents want to know how to gain even the smallest advantage over their peers in this ever-so-stressful process.
However, as it turns out, there is one particular group of students who enjoy a greater head-start in the admissions process than others: athletes. Increasingly, it seems as though colleges are looking to athletic achievement as the key to finding what they view as the “ideal fit” for their institution—a student who will actively participate in their community, bringing home trophies and prestige for the good of everyone involved. According to the 2001 book The Game of Life: College Sports and Educational Values, athletes received an average admissions advantage of 53.0 percent over the “average” applicant as of 1999. This figure was higher than that granted to minority (20.0 percent) and legacy students (24.0 percent). The study controlled for students’ SAT scores to account for any academic factors that may have contributed to this phenomenon. Although the question of whether this advantage is “deserved” remains under debate, it is worth examining both the motivations and outcomes of this preferential treatment.
Multiple factors help to explain the importance of athletics during admissions. On one hand, intercollegiate athletics are a massive business, and the combined profits from ticket sales, merchandising, television royalties, and the like provide a major incentive for colleges to prioritize athletic potential when it comes to forming their freshman classes. According to Business Insider, the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) reported revenues of over $1 billion for the 2016-17 school year. This number simply goes to show the immense scale of intercollegiate athletics, as well as the huge financial motive behind admissions officers’ preferences toward student athletes. After all, colleges have every reason to allocate their resources toward whichever department happens to be most profitable, and the persistent popularity of intercollegiate sports makes selecting top-notch athletes an obvious investment on their part.
Another (perhaps more covert) incentive for colleges to prioritize athletics centers on another controversial aspect of the process: family income. Many of the “rich kid” sports that admissions departments consider favorably, including crew and squash, are not available to students in low-income neighborhoods. These sports can become clear indicators of an applicant’s socioeconomic status to an admissions officer, who obviously knows that wealthy alumni are likely to make hefty donations to their alma mater later on. Thus, placing so much emphasis on athletics in admissions can reinforce a seemingly endless cycle of privilege. This not only hurts the integrity of the entire process, but can also degrade the value of other students’ achievements. After all, if colleges are doing everything in their power to help already affluent students attain even greater heights, regardless of their actual merits, then what becomes of the student who has had to start from lower rungs on the societal ladder? Although athletic achievements should certainly be considered as valuable as any other, problems arise when such achievements are used as a proxy for wealth, rather than a measure of the value that an applicant would bring to an institution.
Athletics are a crucial part of student life, and athletes deserve to be recognized for their hard work. It is also difficult to blame colleges for capitalizing on the immense popularity of intercollegiate athletics. However, the integrity of the admissions process can only stand if colleges treat athletic achievements as outstanding displays of students’ talent, not simply as proxies for wealth and privilege.