Originally Posted by
Nick
... why are athletes in minor sports given a break on admissions ...
PR for the school. Tradition of wanting to excel in competition.
Interesting article: https://www.theatlantic.com/educatio...udents/573688/
That raises a baffling question: Why are colleges willing to lower their admissions standards to recruit the best athletes when their expensive sports programs are unlikely to return the investment?
For some colleges, it’s a ploy to burnish their national reputation by getting their name out there, on the field or on the court. And, in some cases, it works: After Florida Gulf Coast University made a David-and-Goliath-like run to the March Madness Sweet 16 in 2013, the school saw a 27.5 percent jump in applicants the following year.
Incidental marketing aside, sports can also make a college seem more attractive to its students. Athletics, Thelin says, “is one of the few unifying activities that can bring the school together. Football, especially.” And, he told me, college sports can nurture loyalty to an institution years after a student leaves campus, and perhaps inspire one to donate money to the school.
But how many people are really going to lacrosse games and sailing meets and the other sporting events that don’t typically have graduates reaching for their checkbook? Part of it is the power of tradition: For more than a century, colleges—starting with elite schools in the Northeast—have fixated on physical activity and sports as a way to mold young, impressionable students to their making. That continues today: “Strong academic colleges often like to at least offer the prospect of the sound mind, sound body,” Thelin says. And, still, colleges need to field a minimum number of sports to join a particular conference, such as the Ivy League, which prevents them from putting all their cards on the table for high-profile sports exclusively.