The report comes close: "the average grade point average for the bottom quartile of applicants whom UCLA admitted for academic year 2019–20 was 4.15, but the average grade point average for its admitted student athletes was 3.74. Similarly, two‑thirds of the admitted student athletes whom UC Berkeley evaluated through its holistic review process for academic years 2017–18 through 2019–20 received the lowest possible rating from its application readers—which is equivalent to a recommendation that the applicant be denied admission."
So the student athletes averaged halfway between an A and an A-? So did I in HS, 15 years ago, and I was a pretty good student! GPAs are really hard to make sense of with all the AP bonuses and whatnot. Standardized test scores strike me as providing a more apples-to-apples comparison. Of course that’s increasingly difficult to do in a test-optional world. (My recollection from an article about ‘The Chosen’ in 2005 is that recruited athletes tend to score 100-200 points lower on the SAT, on average, at Ivy League schools. I would double-check had I not exceeded my monthly free New Yorker quota: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2005/10/10/getting-in/amp)
For regular classes, A: 4.0, B: 3.0, C: 2.0, D: 1.0 (with some variance depending on + or - grades offered). For Honors/AP classes, every grade is essentially bumped up 1.0 point.
So yes, a 3.74 is around an A- average, but that's an A- average in less rigorous classes, without competition from top students. That's more of a B-/C+ average in AP/Honors classes (obviously the calculation is far from perfect, though, because every school has it's quirks- at mine, you couldn't get above a ~4.5 overall). For reference, I graduated high school with a 3.6 with multiple Cs and hardly any As, simply by virtue of taking the maximum number of AP/Honors classes. The point being, a 3.74 is not a terrible GPA, but good students are generally over a 4.0 these days.
The article describes something actually inappropriate: falsely saying students are good athletes in exchange for money.
When I worked for Stanford in admissions, it ended up making up about 10-15% of each incoming class.
People on "the list" could still be denied, but the admissions officer would need to write a letter to the Dean explaining why - and that never happened.
People think donating small amounts to the school or being a legacy student help admissions, but they absolutely do not have an impact. The most impactful variables to admission are grades, race/gender, test scores, and essays - roughly in that order.
Beach volleyball is more common in areas close to the beach. Beach and indoor players are also significantly taller than the average person-- in the league that my college was a part of, the shortest woman playing middle blocker was still 185cm. Height and beach access both have correlations to socioeconomic factors.
For various reasons, the US has huge racial disparities when it comes to swimming ability. Most African American and Hispanic children don't know how to swim.
As others have mentioned, football, basketball and to a lesser extent soccer/baseball tend to be the "pleb" sports. But even within a sport, you'll see class and racial distinctions when you compare different positions. When you look at pros and college, the majority of quarterbacks and centers are white. QBs also tend to come from wealthier families. Meanwhile, wide receivers and running backs are mostly black. The defense is mostly black, and I don't think there's a single non-black cornerback in the NFL (unless you miscount Tre'Davious White)
Out of curiosity, how common is it for public elementary, middle and high-schools to include swimming lessons in (mandatory) PE class in general? How often do schools without their own swimming pools take their PE class at a nearby public pool?
This works well as a heuristic because visible racial characteristics are visible and the rich don't usually want to play with the poor.
I don't think it's in the double digits for any school. You need large amounts of wealth to donate your way in.
It's among the private schools, such as the Ivies, where this really comes into play.
[1] https://opa.berkeley.edu/campus-data/uc-berkeley-quick-facts
Beach Volleyball, I guess, kinda, but sand is pretty cheap even in cold weather climates.
Crew, sure. The 'field' is hard to get things to, typically. Lacrosse, well, maybe 20 years ago, but it's everywhere now.
Now, (horse) Polo and Dressage. Those are rich people sports.
And water polo... even if there are public pools near you, they probably aren't dedicating space for competitive water polo.
After segregation ended, many jurisdictions defunded public pools rather than fund desegregated pools. Instead, wealthier whites used private ones. For a brief history:
https://www.utoronto.ca/news/u-t-expert-troubled-history-bla...
When it comes to who gets these coveted "easy" seats for college admissions, it's not enough to say that the sport is hypothetically inexpensive to participate in. You have to look at all the resources that make it possible to become an elite athlete in that sport. Most public schools--especially poor ones--don't have those resources.
One of the girls at one of the schools near us didn't have any of that (most likely). I think they shared their pool with a few teams though. I know they didn't have their own coach, and I know that she was the stand-out star of the team.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melissa_Seidemann
Their demographics are white, but not majority, with ~30% hispanic. I don't know the demo in 2006 though:
https://www.greatschools.org/california/pleasant-hill/466-Co...
Natural talent is still a thing. Though I do agree that more $$$ = better training.
David Epstein's Range talks a lot about training in your younger years. He has a much better argument than me, but the gist is that you have to have a 'trial' period before you commit (depending on sport conditions). In 'unkind' (his term) sports, if you overtrain early, you'll burn out. I'd say Water Polo and Volleyball are those kids of sports. Swimming, on the other hand, is a 'kind' sport where early identification and rigorsous training are beneficial.
It's a really good book: https://davidepstein.com/the-range/
> One of the girls at one of the schools near us didn't have any of that (most likely). I think they shared their pool with a few teams though. I know they didn't have their own coach, and I know that she was the stand-out star of the team.
Of course it's not always true. However your rebuttal actually proves the point of this discussion. You can name one outlier, who is exactly that, an outlier. The issue isn't "athletic scholarships are 100% inaccessible to people outside of the top 10% wealth bracket", it's more along the lines of "the overwhelming majority of athletic scholarships for sports are provided to people who are already benefitting from systemic privelege, and the remaining slots will be filled by outliers"
Consider two equally skilled waterpolo players, one who has a shared pool and the facilities to go with it, and one who has a private pool, coaching staff, etc. Now consider who is more likely to be in that position in the first place. That's not to say that there are no minorities in the second group, but they are overwhelmingly more likely to not end up in that scenario in the first place.
> In Violation of University Policy, the Campuses We Reviewed Admitted 64 Applicants Because of Their Families’ Donations and Connections
> UC Berkeley inappropriately admitted 42 other applicants
the UC schools as a whole have ~226K students, and at Berkeley, it's ~17,000. I'm very surprised that the corresponding fractions are so small.
Then again, if you get recruited to play a sport that is all-but-exclusively a rich person's leisure activity -- Water Polo, Crew, Golf, Volleyball, and Beach volleyball are all played at Berkeley -- and recruiting gave you an edge in admissions, does that count as "inappropriate?" I would say so, but I doubt this report would. The line between corruption and "that's just how we do things around here" is not self-evident to me here.