The
Chronicle of Higher Education, January 26, 2001
How the Playing Field
Is Encroaching on the Admissions Office
James L. Shulman and
William G. Bowen
Faculty members often remark that the
most discouraging aspect of teaching is encountering a student who just does not
seem to care, who has to be cajoled into thinking about the reading, who is
obviously bored in class, or who resists rewriting a paper that is passable but
not very good. Such students are failing to take full advantage of the
educational opportunities that colleges and universities are there to provide.
Uninspired students come in all sizes and
shapes, and no one would suggest that athletes are uniformly different from
other students in this regard. But the evidence presented in our book, The Game
of Life: College Sports and Educational Values, does demonstrate a consistent
tendency for athletes to do less well academically than their classmates -- and,
even more troubling, a consistent tendency for athletes to underperform
academically not just relative to other students, but relative to how they
themselves might have been expected to perform. Those tendencies have become
more pronounced over time, and all-pervasive: Academic underperformance is now
found among female athletes as well as male, among those who play the
lower-profile sports as well as those on football and basketball teams, and
among athletes playing at the Division III level as well as those playing in
bowl games and competing for national championships.
In our research for The Game of Life, we
studied 30 academically selective colleges and universities. Being selective
means that they receive many more applications from well-qualified students than
they have places in their entering classes, and thus must pick and choose among
applicants on a variety of criteria, including athletic talent. By national
standards, the freshman classes that they admit have very strong academic
qualifications -- with SAT scores, for example, that are well above national
norms, and with large numbers of high-school valedictorians and National Merit
Scholarship winners.
The institutions included Ivy League
members -- Columbia, Princeton, and Yale Universities, and the University of
Pennsylvania -- and women's colleges -- Barnard, Bryn Mawr, Smith, and
Wellesley. We also studied coed liberal-arts institutions: Denison and Wesleyan
Universities, and Hamilton, Kenyon, Oberlin, Swarthmore, and Williams Colleges.
Some of the others that we reviewed were private universities in the National
Collegiate Athletic Association's Division I-A: Duke, Georgetown, Northwestern,
Rice, Stanford, Tulane, and Vanderbilt Universities, and the University of Notre
Dame. Others were Division I-A public institutions: Miami University of Ohio,
Pennsylvania State University at University Park, the University of Michigan at
Ann Arbor, and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. In addition, we
looked at Emory, Tufts, and Washington (Mo.) Universities.
What did we find? Athletes who are
recruited, and who end up on the carefully winnowed lists of desired candidates
submitted by coaches to the admissions offices of those selective institutions,
now enjoy a very substantial statistical "advantage" in the admissions
process. That advantage -- for both male and female athletes -- is much greater
than that enjoyed by other targeted groups, such as underrepresented minority
students and alumni children.
For example, at a representative
nonscholarship institution for which we have complete data on all applicants,
recruited male athletes who applied to enter with the fall-1999 class had a
48-percent greater chance of being admitted than did male students at large,
after taking differences in SAT scores into account. The corresponding
admissions advantage enjoyed by recruited female athletes in 1999 was 53
percent. The admissions advantages enjoyed by minority students and legacies
were in the range of 18 to 24 percent.
When recruited athletes make up such a
substantial fraction of the entering class in at least some colleges, is there a
risk that there will be too few placesfor other students, who want to become
poets, scientists, or leaders of civic causes? Is there a possibility that,
without realizing what is leading to what, the institutions themselves will
become unbalanced in various ways? For example, will they feel a need to devote
more and more of their teaching resources to fields like business and economics
-- which are disproportionately elected by athletes -- in lieu of investing more
heavily in less "practical" fields, such as classics, physics, and
language study? Similarly, as one commentator put the question, what are the
effects on those students interested in fields like philosophy? Could they feel
at risk of being devalued?
In an ideal world, institutions would
like to see a diversity of majors, values, and career choices among all
subgroups of students. Society is best served when the financial-services sector
"inherits" some students who have a deep commitment to understanding
history and culture, rather than mainly those with a narrower focus on earning a
great deal of money as an end in itself. In the same way, academe benefits when
some of those who pursue Ph.D.'s include students who also have learned some of
the lessons about life that are gained on the playing field, rather than just
students with a narrower focus on an arcane, if not obscure, realm of academic
research. In short, the heavy concentration of male athletes, in particular, in
certain fields of study raises real questions of institutional priorities and
balance.
Moreover, high-school students, their
parents, and their schools watch attentively for the signals that colleges send.
The more that leading institutions signal through their actions how much they
value athletic prowess, the greater the emphasis that potential applicants will
place on those activities. The issuing of rewards based on sports
accomplishments supports -- and, in fact, makes real -- the message that sports
is the road to opportunity.
As a result, young people in schools of
all kinds -- from prep schools to inner-city schools -- are less likely to get a
message that the way upward is to learn to write computer code or take chemistry
seriously when it is not only the big-time-sports institutionsbut also the Ivies
and the most selective liberal-arts colleges that place a large premium on
athletic prowess, focus, and specialization. Athletics scholarships and tickets
of admission to nonscholarship institutions provide a more powerful incentive
than the promises contained in high-minded proclamations.
Taken together, such a signaling process
has a powerful impact. We were told of one situation in which almost half of the
students from a leading prep school who had been admitted to an Ivy League
university were either outstanding hockey or lacrosse players, and not
particularly noteworthy students. When asked at a recruiting session in a large
city about the success of his prep school in placing its students in the most
prestigious colleges, the school's representative gave the absolute number of
students admitted to that Ivy League institution, hoped that no one would ask
him how many of the admittees had been athletes, and went home with mixed
feelings about his presentation. The real issue, however, is not about how
forthcoming the prep-school representative was inexplaining his school's success
in placing students,but the nature of the reality that underlies that
"success."
In fact, the changes in the face of
athletics between the 1950's and today can be related to a still broader shift
in admissions philosophies. In the 1950's, much was said about the desirability
of enrolling "well-rounded students." One consequence, among many
others, was that athletes needed to have other attributes -- to be ready to take
advantage of the broad range of the institution's academic offerings, or to be
interested in being part of the larger campus community, for example. Many of
them were class officers, not just team captains. We suspect that the subsequent
success of a number of the athletes of this era in gaining leadership positions,
including positions as chief executive officers, owes something to their having
had a strong combination of attributes.
Sometime in the late 1960's or the
1970's, that admissions philosophy was altered in major ways. At some of the
institutions with which we are familiar, the attack on the desirability of the
well-rounded individual came from faculty members. One group of mathematicians
objected vehemently to the rejection of candidates who had extremely high math
aptitude scores but were not impressive in other respects. A new admissions
mantra was coined; the search was on to enroll the "well-rounded
class," rather than the well-rounded individual. The idea was that the
super-mathematician should definitely be admitted, along with the super-musician
and maybe even the super-gymnast. It was argued that, taken together, such an
array of talented individuals would create an attractively diverse community of
learners. For some years now, most admissions officers at academically selective
institutions have talked in terms of the well-rounded class.
The mathematicians who lobbied for the
admission of high-school students with off-the-scale mathematical potential were
absolutely right. "Spiky" students of that kind belong in a great
university with a great mathematics department. We are much more skeptical,
however, that "spikiness" can be used to justify the admission of a
bone-crushing fullback whose high-school grades are over the academic threshold
but who otherwise does not seem a particularly good fit for the academic values
that a college espouses. There are many types of spikiness, and the objective
should be to assemble a well-rounded class with a range of attributes that
resonate with the academic and service missions of the institution. Looked at
from that perspective, the arguments for spiky mathematicians and for spiky
golfers seem quite different.
We also wonder how well some of the
increasingly spiky athletes who entered the colleges that we studied in 1989
(and those who entered later) will do in the long run. Not as well, we suspect,
as their male predecessors who entered in the fall of 1951, and the female
athletes who entered in 1976 -- and who appear to have had, as the saying goes,
"more arrows in their quivers."
It seems clear that consideration should
be given to changing the way in which at least some admissions offices approach
the athletics side of the process of selecting a class. The admissions process
should rely much less heavily on the coaches' lists, and less weight should be
given to raw athletic talent and single-minded commitment to a sport -- or what
we can only call athletic "purposiveness." Rather, admissions staffs
could be encouraged to revert to the practices of earlier days, when more weight
was given toathletic talent seen in combination with other qualifications that
made the applicant attractive to the institution -- including a commitment to
the educational purposes of the institution. The exceptional records achieved
both in college and after graduation by the male athletes who entered in 1951
and the female athletes who entered in 1976 reflect the presence of the
admissions approach we are advocating.
In sum, intercollegiate athletics has
come to have too pronounced an effect on colleges and universities -- and on
society -- to be treated with benign neglect. Failure to see where the
intensification of athletics programs is taking us, and to adjust expectations,
could have the unintended consequence of allowing intercollegiate athletics to
become less and less relevant to the educational experiences of most students,
and more and more at odds with the core missions of the institutions themselves.
The objective should be to strengthen the links between athletics and
educational missions -- and to reinvigorate an aspect of college life so that it
can be celebrated for its positive contributions, not condemned for its excesses
or criticized for its conflicts with educational values.
James L. Shulman is a financial and
administrative officer at the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. William G. Bowen is
president of the foundation and a former president of Princeton University. This
article is adapted from their bookThe Game of Life: College Sports and
Educational Values, published this month by Princeton University Press. Mr.
Bowen was also a co-author of, and Mr. Shulman collaborated on, The Shape of the
River: Long-Term Consequences of Considering Race in College and University
Admissions (Princeton University Press, 1998).
Copyright 2001 by The Chronicle of
Higher Education
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