There are a lot of problems with the Ivy League, the lack of athletic scholarships are one of the few things they do absolutely right. The thing is that athletics are less, not more democratic as a distribution mechanism for admission slots. The author seems to be under the mistaken belief that most of these slots would be available for your football and basketball players, where stories of rising from poverty are commonplace at the highest level. That's simply not the case at Ivies. You think underrepresented and the economically disadvantaged are rowing or playing squash or fencing or golfing or diving at the level where this would matter? Sure, there are ways of making this equitable, but that's not solved by the scope of this argument.
The fact is that athletics has been a backdoor for admissions, and always used to exclude, not to include, those outside the upper class. The college admission scandal showed as much, with the Stanford sailing coach. It has historical roots in excluding Jewish students, and it's currently used to exclude Asian students among maintaining a proportion of elite students.
Certainly, it looks like price fixing, and I don't have a problem with that argument, but I would prefer is more universities took courage to actually focus on academics like chicago, caltech, mit, etc.
>the lack of athletic scholarships are one of the few things they do absolutely right. The thing is that athletics are less, not more democratic as a distribution mechanism for admission slots
A more basic problem with "athletic scholarships" is that being an athlete has absolutely nothing to do with being an academic/scholar/student of something else.
It might be a good way to bring some publicity to the school, and to make it have a strong team. But it has absolutely nothing to do with a school's intended purpose (except the "make money" purpose).
Athletic scholarships should only be a thing in sports academies - where you're trained to be a coach, a PE teacher, or a related academic in some of those areas.
In fact, universities and colleges should just have clubs to play sports informally, at the same level they have a music playing club, or a gym, or a cooking club. Like in the rest of the civilized (on that matter at least) world.
You could learn most things in a library for free. One of the big advantages of a University is being around other ambitious people at the same point in their career. The “big club” aspect is an important part of the value proposition.
We should definitely dump athletic departments, though, they are completely unrelated to the mission.
One of the big advantages of a university is that they give you credentials you can show to your employer (including university itself if you want to be a scientist). Everything else is 90% wishful thinking.
That leads to product bundling you describe, which should be vigorously fought with antitrust laws.
If it's a big club, it's hard to justify the vast and ongoing federal support to the institutions through the grants, loan programs, and tax advantaged status.
I love the honesty in this thread, higher Eds main value prop, outside of stem, has been the connections made.
However, no one to my knowledge has validate that assumption and my gut is telling me it's probably BS for the majority of people.
Let's see how that holds up when QE doesn't come back. IMO it's mostly around deal flow and finance where this plays out and I'd guess the percentage is very small that walk away with that value.
As cost of university education spirals out of control, I expect that different forms of education, producing comparable levels of knowledge without all the expensive frills, will emerge, and be accepted by most employers. Of course places like MIT or Stanford won't be affected. A lot of smaller-caliber colleges will be.
Every human groups can be also a place where you "bond and make lifelong friends. Also a great place to find a partner for life". Regardless of activity and regardless if that group, like a chess club or drama society, has athletic scolarship level favoritism or not.
No, athletic departments are not vital for the above social secondary benefits of an education, just one of the hundreds others out there providing bonds and lifelong friends without this level of special treatment. For educational and academic purpose of universities it is even less vital, a tiny tiny fraction of the educated people rely vitally on this receiving good education throughout the history and around the world. If it was gone it was not missed much, mostly by athletics not graduates, academics and educators.
Agree. A lot of the frustration and confusion here seems to be due to assuming these universities should just serve the smartest kids. The truth is that in practice they provide credentials for both elites and experts, and the former need not be brainiacs.
I get the value of the major D1 college sports teams in the university experience, but honestly who gives a shit if Harvard is good at golf or not? I don't imagine anyone outside of people on the e.g. squash team are impacted by squash at Harvard. Same goes for non-elite (in the socioeconomic sense) sports like track and field.
I love sports and I think we need more opportunities for recreational play of sports after high school. But I just don't get the point of schools with middling varsity teams in unpopular sports continuing to pour resources into those teams.
I'd love to know if there are good reasons for it I'm missing though.
I would actually argue the opposite. Sports clubs are a great way for students to bond, to socialise, and to organise - not the only one, but around here, clearly an alternative to traditional student clubs and study associations.
This is fine and dandy for up to middling levels of achievement. But universities have no business being in professional sports. They do have a business accommodating professional athletes of a variety of sports, but that's where the mid-level sports clubs come in: enough decent facilities to stay in shape, but not required to provide Olympic-level of training.
If sports clubs want to aim higher, it's up to their (student-run) board to get there. Basically: universities should provide decent facilities, not run the teams.
All I read here is “it’s a great tool for social reproduction and stratification”. This is dystopian. We’ve seen what this mindset gave with Oxbridge, and it is toxic.
The US college sports system is mainly a feeding ground for professional sports teams, and none of that is necessary for either education or social destratification.
It is only vital in the sense that people have vested interests in it, but it's not to the benefit of the students.
For many students, the sport team culture and the activities surrounding these events is a big draw and motivator to attend university.
Most college athletes will not play at the professional level. Their young adult connections and the values they develop as being part of a team to overcome great challenges in preparation and on game day are important to our society. The stress one feels for a final exam does not compare to the emotions one feels on a big game-day! Valuable mental models are developed from athletics. Lessons learned are applied to every industry. it’s important simulation.
To deduce it all to irrelevance is a mistake that many intelligent people with no team or sporting experience often make to no fault of their own.
College athletes who are going pro are studying their chosen field just as studiously as any other field (and more than most business/communications majors). Athletes who aren’t going pro, which is most of them, do better than average academically.
Being an athlete isn’t particularly different than getting a minor or a dual major. Just because there’s sweating involved doesn’t make it not a scholarly pursuit, we should stop being such gatekeepers.
>Being an athlete isn’t particularly different than getting a minor or a dual major. Just because there’s sweating involved doesn’t make it not a scholarly pursuit, we should stop being such gatekeepers.
From a certain perspective there is little that separates sports from a lot of arts majors. Someone studying acting is very unlikely to turn that into a profession just like a football player. Why does running around on a field have less intellectual value than doing make believe on a stage? They are both glorified hobbies. If someone can study one as a major, why not the other?
This is the typical response when mentioning the value of sport on HN. You just scoff at the notion without providing a single reason why acting is a more intellectual pursuit than football. You're assuming the reasoning is obvious and that is likely a sign that you haven’t done any serious thinking about the question.
You're still sidestepping my original question, but to answer yours here is the definition of "intellectual" from the Cambridge Dictionary[1]:
-relating to your ability to think and understand things, especially complicated ideas
-very educated and interested in studying and other activities that involve careful thinking and mental effort
What do you find intellectual about acting or chess? The same almost assuredly applies to football, but it can be difficult to see if you don't even give sports any consideration in that regard.
You seem to be dismissing the mental aspects of sports because of the physicality involved, but physicality is a huge part of acting and even chess puts huge physical stress on one's body. People have literally died playing chess due to the physical stress. Subjects don't fall into a binary categorization of physical or mental. Sports, like many disciplines of art, requires both to varying degrees.
The NBA sends letters to D1 college basketball players, emphasizing to them the value of their studies, as less than 1% of them will make it to the NBA.
I expect that most arts majors have at least 1% doing that thing.
They may not be rock stars, but I expect that 1% of music majors are at least playing, be it local orchestras or bands or live or canned music (jingles, etc.).
Seems like your measures of success are rather uneven. There are plenty of jobs related to sports that don't include playing professionally. If playing in a local orchestra counts as success, why not coaching the local high school team?
I was never trying to talk about levels of success. There's nothing wrong with (to use your example) being involved as a teacher, or in sports management, at college.
I meant more the fact that even at least one of the pro sports leagues tries to remind even people who are doing extremely well in the sport, that as well as they've done, that next step as a player is going to be even harder. So to not neglect things in single-minded pursuit of "I'm going to the NBA" (because you're probably not).
>I meant more the fact that even at least one of the pro sports leagues tries to remind even people who are doing extremely well in the sport, that as well as they've done, that next step as a player is going to be even harder. So to not neglect things in single-minded pursuit of "I'm going to the NBA" (because you're probably not).
Sure, but the next step of going from drama school to a professional actor is also extremely hard. There may not be a central authority like the NBA directly stating that to college kids, but most people won't be able to make that transition either.
> A more basic problem with "athletic scholarships" is that being an athlete has absolutely nothing to do with being an academic/scholar/student of something else.
Welcome to 1910.
> It might be a good way to bring some publicity to the school, and to make it have a strong team. But it has absolutely nothing to do with a school's intended purpose (except the "make money" purpose).
It engages people who care about sports but don't really care about the research being performed there. Most people attending universities never get an advanced degree. I wouldn't even consider a JD or MBA an advanced degree so much as a professional certificate masquerading as advanced education.
> Athletic scholarships should only be a thing in sports academies - where you're trained to be a coach, a PE teacher, or a related academic in some of those areas.
Meanwhile, former athletes who were able to attend universities due to athletics and have since become wealthy regularly donate millions to their alma maters.
> In fact, universities and colleges should just have clubs to play sports informally, at the same level they have a music playing club, or a gym, or a cooking club. Like in the rest of the civilized (on that matter at least) world.
Well, it turns out that universities are full of educated people and they've run the numbers. The numbers say that athletics are an attraction to universities for students and alumni alike.
Is that an argument? The "newer is better" kind? Perhaps 1910 had that part figured out better than 2023.
>Well, it turns out that universities are full of educated people and they've run the numbers. The numbers say that athletics are an attraction to universities for students and alumni alike.
I never argued it doesn't make them money or that the bean counters there can't see that.
Just that it's (or oughta be) unrelated with the goals of an academic institution, whether it's lucrative or not.
> Is that an argument? The "newer is better" kind? Perhaps 1910 had that part figured out better than 2023.
The NCAA has been around and has regulated athletic scholarships in its current form since 1910. They're the ones who stepped in and said that athletes needed to be students at the universities they represented. That's good for the universities AND good for the athletes.
> I never argued it doesn't make them money or that the bean counters there can't see that.
> Just that it's (or oughta be) unrelated with the goals of an academic institution, whether it's lucrative or not.
Then you don't have any more universities aside from a few flagships and deeply endowed private institutions, because they have fundamentally different objectives than they did at the beginning of last century.
They don't have athletic scholarships because admission is need-blind for all students and you will only pay what your family is able to. But they still have "slots" for athletic admissions, where each coach gets to pick who they admit, and as long as they clear the minimum bar (which is different for each sport) of GPA and test scores, they will be admitted early. It's not technically "athletic scholarships" but it may as well be.
What it does mean is that an excellent athlete from a rich family will choose Stanford over Harvard, because Stanford will pay them a scholarship even though they don't "need it." This is one reason why Stanford athletics are superior to those of Ivy League schools.
This is absolutely spot on. Don't forget sailing, tennis, lacrosse, and some Ivy League schools even offer equestrian. Even sports like swimming, hockey, and volleyball are getting to be more and more dominated by well-to-do kids from families that can afford expensive traveling club teams. When Brown tried to eliminate its men's track and field team a few years ago the decision was reversed when it was pointed out that track and field was one of the only sports adding diversity to the campus.
> It has historical roots in excluding Jewish students
I'm glad the Ivy (Penn) that I graduated from over thirty years ago was enlightened enough to admit good students regardless of whether they were Jewish. Or Asian.
> athletics has been a backdoor for admissions ... used to exclude ... those outside the upper class.
The student athlete I knew, my roommate Tony Tomaska, was the son of a Chicago policeman. He played for the football team. He was working class, not upper class.
I do recommend the Third Reich in the Ivy League as a generally good read, which highlights the significantly more nazi-sympathetic student body at harvard with the more activist population at Columbia, largely in part due to the fact that Columbia failed to attract the white elites of NYC and had a larger Jewish population as a result.
>The student athlete I knew, my roommate Tony Tomaska, was the son of a Chicago policeman. He played for the football team. He was working class, not upper class.
Yeah I don't deny that a lot of athletes are from disadvantageous backgrounds, I was only to highlight that the sports we associate w/ that fact do not make up a lot of other sports in the ivy league, and that if your goal diversity, you should just increase admissions of disadvantaged students, not use athletics as a proxy.
The post WWII period was a golden age for social progress. Along with the final collapse of colonial empires ruled over by royal families came a corresponding breaking down of class and overt ethnic/racial barriers in the West and America, with universities using test scores to open their doors to students of merit regardless of background or gender.
but that golden age, having achieved remarkable success, is over. It was predicted by somebody-nobody-listened-to that strip-mining IQ and EQ talent from various communities and elevating them to elite status would leave behind communities more deeply impoverished and dysfunctional than they were before. And what is our politics today but that exact battle?
life has generally improved for everybody, everywhere in the world, as it was also the time of the green revolution, antibiotics, etc., and many former colonies revel in their self governance even while their politics seem even more dysfunctional than western politics. But you might be making the point that some former colonies would have been better off remaining as colonies, a hill I am not willing to defend, let alone die on.
America, Canada and Australia benefited from being English colonies, but that's sort of tautological because they were originally colonies settled with English people, apart from indigenous peoples and later arrivals.
Hard to say if indigenous people are better off, certainly particular indigenous people have been worse off, and there's certainly the enduring popular romantic notion that being a hunter gatherer is peak evolution for us/them and the tiny sustainable populations of the nomadic invaders and such of several continents were entitled to be left alone to battle each other for supremacy while collectively hogging those resources for themselves, free from having to battle anybody else for them.
But personally, while descended from hunter gatherers, I'm glad I'm not a hunter gatherer myself (he said, typing on his silicon dream machine) though considering it, I would have made a great one tempermentally.
> Did life improve in the post-colonial world? There don’t seem to be too many 1950s era success stories in this regard
"Prior to deindustrialisation, India was one of the largest economies in the world, accounting for approximately one quarter of the global economy.... The Indian economy specialised in industrialisation and manufacturing, accounting for at least one quarter of the world's manufacturing output before the 18th century."
in 1900 it was 2%. There were huge famines under Colonial rule, the kind that would male Mao proud.
India is doing so much better now, its not even comparable.
How do you become aware of these programs and initiatives and their level of preference in the eyes of the school? Do you happen to have personal connections with people in the school administration or admissions office and find out by word of mouth? Or are you trying to infer what's important to them from some publicly-available information like the school's website/newsletter/twitter/press releases?
* in the case of my college, I knew what I wanted, and was shopping around for it. The major was a very unusual one - not even a major as much as a program (“great books”).
* in the case of my daughter, I knew the school because I had taught there decades ago.
* there are admissions consultants who keep track of these sorts of things and make it a point to know all the side doors.
At the end of the day, colleges admissions should be about matching students and colleges who fit together. If a student isn’t as competitive, but is still a great fit, they should I get extra points for that.
But this can be come a system those with money abuse. But that abuse takes the form of lying about whether they are a good fit for the college they are going to - which is dumb.
If a student gets into Harvard by saying they really want to pursue the newly introduced degree of “Diversity, Equity, Inclusion” - is Harvard really a good fit?
Tangent: take certain physical education courses at MIT and you can get a 'unofficial' pirate certificate:
> An underground campus custom has become an official and increasingly famous part of MIT culture. Although student pirates have roamed campus informally for decades, in 2011 the Department of Athletics, Physical Education, and Recreation (DAPER) began issuing MIT pirate certificates to students who completed specific requirements. Six students earned the inaugural certificates and, today, 354 MIT students and alumni have received certificates at a spring ritual—Pirate Induction Day.
> The MIT Pirate Certificate became available in the Fall of 2011. Students who have completed Archery, Fencing, Pistol (Air Pistol or Rifle) and Sailing should send an email to […]
Netflix has a docu-series called "Last Chance U" about the junior college athletic system and how it operates.
I knew intellectually that college athletes were coddled academically and while it's hard not to root for the individuals depicted in the documentary to succeed it's also hard not to think that there must be dozens of kids at the schools where they come from that were more academically inclined and could have made better use of the resources provided to the student athletes.
Having played college ball at an high end academic school a few thoughts here.
Last Chance U is great and a great insight, I really enjoy the show, and get heart broken for these kids. You can't really get schaudenfraude when they fail like other shows or dramas.
But there's a few things you may not have caught, which seems to be the same across most college sports and just exacerbates as you become more competitive/make more cash like a D1 school.
When I was in season I spent 5-8 hours a day on the sport. 3 hours for practice, 1-2 hours reading scouting reports, in rehab, working out, or watching film. On game day it was a good 8 hours if we weren't traveling, a full day if we were (longest bus ride was 7.5 h each way). We calculated that we spent around 3600 hours in sports over 4 years. That's over a part time job and nearing full time job while working.
This makes it real hard to get to normal tutoring sessions which are in the afternoon many places. Or to labs, or office hours, etc. At my school the athletic department (ad) just got the big classes to setup tutoring sessions in the athletic complex (ac). They were open to anyone actually. But we had better discipline (a coach would sit in on many sessions and deal with any disruptions) and better hours so we got some of the best tutors to show up. My physics 101 tutor had to move to the gym he was so popular.
Now move to Last Chance U... kids who have been failed in many ways by high schools who didn't teach them, parents, themselves, or just not being quite good enough to "make it" but not ready to realize that. They need a ton of help. This is very much the last chance for these kids at ball or making it through that avenue. Making it via sports is what 80% of these kids think is literally their only option. Tho there's the lineman in the first season was like "it'll get me a degree and out of the factory."
But if you pay attention, most of those sessions the players are at, they're for all of the students, who also have guidance counselors. The difference is just that the Athletic Department pays for a guidance counselor, and the coach is a surrogate parent for these kids (who happens to work there), and the GC and the coaches, they talk and these kids have to stay eligible to play or to go to the school. Normal students can ignore the GC, and fail out, and they're not on TV. The players can't.
If you haven't played school sports or don't have kids who play sports, a coach can often wield more influence over a kid than parents can. My friend just immigrated, his kid was playing sports, and my friend was lamenting his kid was slacking off. I suggested he email the coach. That evening the kid apologized to his dad and set up a study schedule he showed his dad and his grades went up a letter over the next month. Basically the coach brought the kid to his office during study hour and said "you're going to run a lot and your play time is going to go down if you don't get your grades back up." that's all it took. As a regular parent generally if you said "go run till you puke or realize you should get your grades up" you'd get laughed at.
> If you haven't played school sports or don't have kids who play sports, a coach can often wield more influence over a kid than parents can.
I heard a (possibly apocryphal) story. One of Tony Dungy's kids was playing high school football, and was just grabbing a slice of toast for breakfast. Tony tells him "you need a bigger meal with protein before practice."
A week later he sees his son getting up early to make a big breakfast, and comments on it. His son says "yeah, coach told me I need to eat more"
An athletic scholarship seems both exciting and controversial ... until you calculate the hours that go into it and realize you could literally do better financially flipping burgers. Still, there is a useful and notable je na sais quoi about athletes, and the way they approach life, that is not fully valued by the academic community-- a drive for practicality, achievement, teamwork. Frankly a lot of the demeaning comments in this board are silly.
I turned down Harvard many years ago for not offering athletics scholarships-- I could not reasonably afford school any other way. And, I was laughed at for years by those in the know of the "need based" assistance framework. One thing that made it unaffordable in my case was they wanted a year of prep school on top of high school which definitely is exclusionary. But, if a Bloomberg contributor can fail to see a pathway equivalent to a scholarship for someone who financially cannot attend any other way, I'd say there is something to the author's grievance.
I mean flipping burgers doesn't really help as much in the long run. My college teammates and friends that I met through sports ended up being a pretty solid network. So many CFOs, VPs, etc obviously. But one Federal Judge, one Secret Service agent, one FBI Agent. The Secret Service guy actually walked onto the practice field his first day (this is D3 small school) having been a 2 way all state player in high school and said "I'm literally never going to touch the field" because everyone was so much bigger and more athletic than him at even a non-scholarship school. He stuck with it all 4 years though. That kid had grit as they say.
Interesting, what was the prep school? My school required 4 years of math/science in HS which is a thing many US schools don't require but if you're a top student you can go for. One kid I played with only had 2 years of HS. He spent the whole summer on campus from like 3 days after HS graduation to 3 days into football taking stats, physics, chemistry, and college algebra to get him up to snuff. I think that may be similar to the prep you're talking about. He ended up doing fine (average grades) in the B school, and I believe is a arson investigator now.
> The need for diversity in education is as vital today as ever. But it’s not clear whether the Ivy Agreement’s ban on athletic scholarships actually promotes that end. One might even wonder whether, by not competing over sports stars, the schools are reducing the diversity of their student bodies.
Yet later admits:
> But recent research tells us that fielding a great team predicts higher alumni giving only to the athletics department. And a 2005 study found little connection between on-field success and giving, at least among those alums who regularly attended sporting events.
Higher education became corrupted with money from athletics and I wish more schools took note of:
> In the Ivy Group Agreement, the universities defend their ban on athletic scholarships as part of a general policy “that the players shall be truly representative of the student body and not composed of a group of specially recruited athletes.”
The flaw with this statement is that the Ivies absolutely do recruit athletes and allow coaches to prioritize students for acceptance, just like other D1 schools. The only difference is that instead of putting scholarship money in front of them, they dangle an Ivy League degree.
If Ivies removed coaches from the admissions process, they would have more integrity.
In my experience at an Ivy, these things often dovetail because of the types of sports they choose to recruit (outside of football & basketball) tend to be of the decidedly more squash, crew, equestrian sports, etc. that bias towards new england elites.
I mean what sports outside of Football/Baseball/Basketball/Soccer don't bias towards the elites? These most popular sports are cheap and easy to play except contact football. You can play them in every park, with less than $100 of gear. They're very accessible.
There's also Track and Field, which generally you can do cheaply and anywhere.
After that you start getting restrictions on where you can do them and what it costs to do them. So obvioulsy they'll be done more by the "elite"
Other college sports:
Hockey: Quite expensive gear, ice time. Maybe in Canada? In the US football pays for all the gear, in much of the US you buy your own hockey gear for like $1k.
Tennis: These days maybe not as elite, can be quite accessible, but historically quite elite.
Golf: Golf actually has a huge blue collar contingent, but still seems pretty elite.
Swimming: You need a pool, you need heat or an indoor pool, likely regionally dependent on elite vs accessible.
Wrestling: you can do this anywhere, I never see it in a public park. Well, most of the time.
Field Hockey / Lacross: These are new england elite sports for the most part. Wish I played LAX in HS actually, would have been less fat.
Skiing: Access, expensive equipment. Heck the northeast doesn't even have good ski slopes.
Sailing/Equestrian: lol, $$$$ for the "vehicle" and you need land or access to a large body of water, both quite spendy.
Hockey equipment is expensive once you get older. For young kids it is free/cheap. FYI, in most of the US, the NHL will buy your boy or girl their first set of equipment. Search for your nearest NHL team along with the words "Learn to Play" - sign up for a session at your nearest rink. Around me, it's the Chicago Blackhawks and they have sessions at rinks in Illinois, Indiana, Wisconsin, and Iowa. Some are even girls-only. But anyway, the used sporting equipment stores near those rinks will be overflowing with hockey equipment for really young kids.
In other words, it doesn't get expensive until after your kid has really decided they want to do it.
That's good on equipment. Smart of the NHL to subsidize like that... Ice rinks do seem to be more common the further north you go, and that's a significant expense as well, tho as you said may be subsidized. Is that true in less-affluent areas?
Also, the fact that they don't explicitly offer athletic scholarships in no way detracts from the fact that they offer scholarships carefully calibrated to what they think the parents can afford to every student they want.
Or how the alumni network will show up to give scholarships to prospects who are on the fence. “Oh, you’re thinking about that full ride from State huh? Well wouldn’t you know it, the Smiths just told me they really want to endow a scholarship…”
Thank you, you've grasped the point that the others missed: it's collusion and price-fixing that's illegal. Not whether failing to offer athletic scholarships was a good idea.
The courts didn't care what they were colluding about, just that they were colluding. If they independently come to the same decision, that's one thing, just like an oil company following the price decisions of another one is fine, but the two of them agreeing to raise prices is not.
> Then why the long rambling on the moral outcome?
Because monopolistic collision is bad, that's why.
Not just illegal. Also bad.
> if we want higher education to be about cultivating knowledge and intellect again.
If an individual college wants to get rid of all it's sports programs, or scholarships, or whatever, and decides to do that individually, then they should go ahead.
What they shouldn't do, though, is try and force all the other colleges to do the same thing, with monopolistic agreements.
To repeat, if a individual college wants to not have athletic scholarships, fine.
But no agreement that forces all the other colleges to do the same thing.
Let each college, individually decide how much they want to focus on this, instead of having monopolistic agreements.
> Then why the long rambling on the moral outcome?
The moral outcome the author is promoting isn't about anti-collusion, but diversity: "The need for diversity in education is as vital today as ever. But it’s not clear whether the Ivy Agreement’s ban on athletic scholarships actually promotes that end. One might even wonder whether, by not competing over sports stars, the schools are reducing the diversity of their student bodies."
Except, the author admits later that athletic programs simply promote more athletics and the claims of diversity through athletics is dubious.
How is this different from a HomeOwner's Association (HOA) enforcing community standards?
I don't understand the linked article (or your) point about this being some sort of illegal collusion. Can you help me understand how this is fundamentally different from an HOA enforcing things like "no boat parking"?
The schools offer competing services for the consumers. They've all agreed to not compete for certain consumers in the same way. Does that help you? An HOA is not an appropriate metaphor.
A university shouldn’t be in the business of competition for athletic stars. Let NBA and other sports organizations do that. They may open their own sports schools and whatnot.
College isn't supposed to be a farm league. Baseball has a workable system and they have the most grueling schedule of all professional sports. Nothing prevents the NFL and NBA from doing the same.
I don't see how this clarifies that it's not a appropriate metaphor.
There are hundreds of schools or more that _do_ compete for consumers in that way. Similarly, HOAs in some areas may restrict boat parking. Other HOAs however, will allow it. Why is the metaphor not appropriate?
The metaphor is not appropriate because a HOA isn't limiting competition in any meaningful or significant way.
Whether or not a couple houses in a couple block area, or 1 apartment building all "collude" to do something has very little effect on the competitive market of the massive housing industry.
But large, major players in the education space (each of which enrolls thousands of students), all agreeing together to do something, has a much larger effect, in comparison.
>Whether or not a couple houses in a couple block area, or 1 apartment building all "collude" to do something has very little effect on the competitive market of the massive housing industry.
This is not correct. There are HOAs spanning dozens of miles, with and tens of thousands of homes.
>But large, major players in the education space (each of which enrolls thousands of students), all agreeing together to do something, has a much larger effect, in comparison.
The vast majority of universities offer athletic scholarships, this is not really true either.
HOA's primary function is not to buy, sell and flip houses. They are not a market participant, they do not have any obligation towards the housing market.
Primary function of a univerisy is the education market.
It is shocking to see the nunber of 'free market' advocates that do not understand basic functions of a market
> How is this different from a HomeOwner's Association (HOA) enforcing community standards?
This is a horrible comparison. Ivy league schools are competiting businesses in a market. Much different than a group of homes, which really aren't directly competing in a market.
(even though, I am sure you can twist an argument that they are. They really aren't. Most people are not trying to sell their homes, and there are a lot of homes all around the world. 'market collusion' between a couple homes not a big deal compared to huge businesses doing it).
> from an HOA enforcing things like "no boat parking"?
Because 1 ivy league school should have no business forcing a different school on the other side of the country on how they run their business, thats why.
I am not sure if you were aware, but there are a lot of houses in the world.
In comparison, there aren't nearly as many high end, elite educational institutions.
I think that you are more than capable of finding a citation yourself that proves that there are quite a lot more houses in the world, than there are top educational institutions.
>I am not sure if you were aware, but there are a lot of houses in the world.
>In comparison, there aren't nearly as many high end, elite educational institutions.
The college enrollment rate is under 70%, and I am not sure if you were aware, but the percentage of people in homes is much greater than this.
I mean, you just proved the point I was making. High-end, elite, Division 1 schools overwhelmingly offer athletic scholarships, vs not offering them. Stanford, Duke, Northwestern, and UC Berkeley have greater student enrollment than all the ivy leagues combined. People always try to do mental gymnastics with some "any non-Ivy League is by definition not an elite school" but using any objective ranking measure, just add Georgetown, UCLA, Notre Dame, UNC, Michigan, and suddenly the enrollment of athletic-scholarship-offering schools are >10x that of the ones that don't offer them.
You're making rather wild unsubstantiated claims at this point ("# houses > # schools == ivy leagues have greater impact") after repeatedly failing to demonstrate how HOA is not a good analogy to this situation. Comically these claims are completely false - over 25% of the USA lives in HOA communities, but nowhere near that many D1 schools (and even less by enrollment) does not offer athletic scholarships. Congrats, you inadvertently proved that Ivies not giving academic scholarships has a negligible effect, especially compared to housing.
Cambridge, Oxford and Imperial College in the UK admit students and provide benefits, scholarships and bursaries to people that are considered world class rowing talent, quietly and unofficially.
Many European countries have special programs for sports talents to develop and receive economic benefits whilst serving military service and/or seeking higher education. Most people don't know anything about these programs as they are not advertised or generally published.
To be blunt as someone who attended Oxford and was friend with someone who ended up coxing the Blue boat, nobody gives an actual shit about rowing there. It’s just a funny tradition. Colleges boat clubs are nice because the sport is great, the two bump races are fun and the mixers are rowdy. The Boat race is seen as a funny tradition and an excuse to compete with Cambridge. It is in no way as serious as academic leagues in the USA.
it may be the case that the wealth and elitism of "growing up rowing", like "growing up sailing, horseback riding, and playing polo and squash" is sufficient to to keep out the riffraff and the highly athletic boats crewed with also academically gifted rowers; but humans both group identify and are athletically highly competitive, even as spectators, and there's no way you can have world class talent in a sport without either combing the hustings for talent, or keeping "those people" out altogether. Oxford and Cambridge are not magically different than every other place in the world, they are magically the same. If they are good at it, then there's an explanation for it, and it's not "being good at fluid dynamics turns out to make you a great rower".
For example, the Ivy League in American sports is not the elite level of sports in any sport that matters economically, but only because they're only willing to bend the academic rules so far and they restrict competition to other like minded opponents (but they do bend the rules because they care enough to do so).
So either: Oxford and Cambridge aren't world class at rowing; nobody rows outside Oxford Cambridge and some other similarly elitist schools; or they're bending some rules to obtain elite talent.
Rowing is certainly an elite sport dominated by the socioeconomically well-off. I was simply making the point to the GP that unlike US institutions where rowers (and other athletes) are specifically recruited for their athletic talent, athletic prowess plays literally no role in the admissions process at Oxford and Cambridge. Rowers are not admitted "quietly and unofficially."
Canada has them, but fewer, smaller, and students still need the academics. We don't have the religious fervour around university sports that we see in the U.S.
College application essays for undergraduate degrees vary a lot by country.
The UK UCAS admission system used for all undergraduate admissions requires an application text. It is much freer in its form than how I understand the US system with a very specific prompt.
As for Norway, to pick another random example, there is no requirement to submit any piece of writing to explain your motivation. Your grades do all the talking for you, so to speak.
I think it is common everywhere to require essays during the college evaluation process, but I don't understand well enough what is the US's "college application essay" to compare.
In the US you write an essay to send to the college with your application, about why you should be accepted. I don’t know of anywhere else that has anything like it.
Need blind admissions at my alma mater died 25 years ago. Were the Ivy's still pretending they weren't? That's actually good news.
Oh, you aren't blowing money on ancillary things like big time college football and other academics-undermining activiites? Sounds like a smart move by the Ivy League.
The Ivys have been admitting scions and the like under the table? You don't say. Does that provide the Ivys with prominent influential alumni and the like? Yep. Is EVERYONE else with even a remotely significant reputation doing this with rich Chinese and others? I know all the Big10 is.
Christ, the CARTEL is the NCAA not paying EMPLOYEES what likely is 1? 10? 100? 1000? BILLIONS that could have been made by revenue NCAA athletes over the last 50 years. Now THAT is a cartel worth writing about. In football, they likely left a million students or more with lifelong injuries with no healthcare or compensation that played big time football for the bowl schools.
This one has always been truly baffling to me. By all means, make sure that need-based scholarships are plentiful, but isn't great academics the entire point of the Ivy league?
I was never going to make it into an Ivy anyway, but I remember learning about that system as a middle-class high school kid and thinking "huh, sucks for me I guess." Too rich for need-based scholarships, too poor to pay full price.
Arguably. The legacy system exists to provide funding that can be directed to students of merit.
It is also unclear the extent to which legacy programs influence admissions. Legacy applicants have higher acceptance rates, but we would likely also expect this in a situation where there was no preference for legacy admission.
The Ivies and adjacent elite colleges are more than capable of giving out academic scholarships—they simply refuse to because that would lead to a race to the bottom in terms of how much money they'd be able to extract from top talent (who could easily negotiate colleges against each other for lower and lower tuition). And, from experience, Colubmia's defection hardly counts for much (which is why, I suspect, it's permitted): even their "prestigious" Rabi Scholarship yields no reduction in a mind-boggling $90,000 tuition—just a minute research stipend. They want to make you feel special while ensuring you still pay full price.
This is totally ridiculous; virtually all of the Ivies offer need-blind funding; if you're admitted, then you're going to get whatever amount of scholarship you need to go.
No, I'm criticizing their decision to only offer need-based scholarships when they could just as well provide both—if they really cared about academic strength, then they could put their money where their mouth is, and provide meaningful merit-based scholarships.
Princeton, for instance, is capable of letting in every student for free, and still not dipping into their endowment [0]. Why don't they do so? Because it would lead to lower tuitions across the board, and that's intolerable.
> if you're admitted, then you're going to get whatever amount of scholarship you need to go.
No, you get whatever amount of scholarship they think you need to go. Their understanding of your financial situation will be unsurprisingly self-serving.
As usual, Malcolm Gladwell looks insightful but it’s all surface gloss. Do some basic reading about the structure of university endowments: it’s not one big pot of money, it’s thousands upon thousands of individual gifts that often have specific purposes (like: a particular professorial chair, or a particular library) that are limitations on use.
I don’t even really understand the point about merit scholarships. Surely the purpose of a merit scholarship is to help someone who can’t afford to go to a school but who is academically outstanding? If you’re doing need-blind admissions and financial aid, that’s the empty set, isn’t it? Since everyone who is admitted can afford to go?
As to your last point, please go take a look at that Yale page I attached to the last post and tell me that you think the scholarship amounts look unfair to higher income households.
I only brought up the Gladwell post to clarify the scale at which these institutions operate. There is no question that they have the money, and, if they chose, could sustainably provide scholarships to some subset of the particularly meritorious. Nothing stops them from soliciting donations for a new merit fund just as they do for their chairs and libraries.
I'm not saying everyone deserves a merit scholarship—but if the point of university is to nurture the best and brightest, then the best and brightest shouldn't have to pay such exorbitant fees. Afterall, they're the reason the colleges maintain their sterling academic reputations.
If you have a household income of 250k—of which your take home is ~160k—and Columbia subtracts another 90k, that leaves you with 70k to pay for everything else. In expensive locales, that's not nearly enough to pay for the education of two children without mortgaging your house. If said best and brightest are unable to attend due to such circumstances, a merit scholarship seems in order—otherwise, you, as a college, are admitting that money means more to you than education, and that you're willing to take someone who isn't nearly as good (there's a reason you didn't admit them initially) simply because they're capable of paying. Not everyone who is admitted can afford to attend at the price of admission demanded by these colleges. Again, I speak from experience.
> the purpose of a merit scholarship is to help someone who can’t afford to go to a school but who is academically outstanding
No, that’s not the purpose of a merit scholarship. A merit scholarship is to encourage someone of merit to go to your school in particular by providing them money
That doesn't seem consistent with e.g. the National Merit Scholarship program, where the scholarship funding can be used towards an undergraduate course at any accredited school.
I think the parent commentator would reject that you need to pick between need-based and merit scholarships. I have no idea how it would impact spend and whether it would be sustainable or not to provide full-need & merit scholarship.
I suppose this is the “middle class” family taking home $600K per year and with a couple of million in a brokerage account. Yes, that family is probably not going to get much financial aid. I have no problem with that; speaking as someone who is in the broad vicinity of that category and will be paying for college in due course.
1. A group of smart people to sustain the academics and ranking.
2. A group of elites to benefit from the brand mostly created by step 1.
3. Adding some diversity to shut up complaints, for political correctness too.
This is called holistic strategy and has been working all the time.
After graduation they help each other to keep the brand, for those who become more "successful", they donate back to keep this pattern strong and probably feed their own next generations to step 2 above.
It was always baffling to me that collusion on financial aid wasn't illegal (also note that it's not just the Ivies that are involved.)
I find this particularly interesting:
"But the 3rd Circuit’s 1993 rationale isn’t helpful to the Ivies today. Back then, the court rejected the government’s accusation that the schools’ cooperation on financial aid increased tuition for other students. But subsequent work has concluded that the government was probably right."
Over the past 30 years, universities have absolutely continued to raise tuition and fees beyond the rate of inflation. They have increased the size of university administrations and enhanced campus facilities and services to some extent, but the educational benefit isn't as clear, while student loan debt has ballooned.
Tuition at Yale (for example) was about $15K in 1993 (equivalent to around $31K today.) In 2023 Yale's tuition is more than $64K.
I'd like to hear Yale's explanation of how this is possibly sensible.
Good point - $32K per student is actually lower than it was in 1991, and that is likely due to including grad students, whose numbers have increased and whose tuition is often covered by assistantships.
Grad students are still paid poorly however, especially when one considers the amount of money the research they perform brings into the university.
As far as I know the Ivy League football has attendance well below 10k a football game in general. They have no significant TV contract money compared to the "P5" conferences.
I suspect many of their football programs barely, if at all support themselves with the income they have for that given sport.
I doubt their other sports are much more profitable...
So what then? Force them to offer athletic scholarships?
I feel like this lawsuit is trying to squeeze blood from a stone.
I follow college basketball a good bit and one interesting development is that the NCAA now allows student athletes to make money independently from scholarships (ie NIL name, image and likeness). Soon a lot of athletes (and programs) won’t require the schools funding for scholarships. Of course they will still fill up applicant spots
if we're talking about cartels, The NFL using the university system as its private farm team system seems like far more of a problem. Especially given that student athletes are often bringing in large amounts of income to the schools they represent.
I like to joke that sometimes it is hard to tell the difference between the mafia and the government, they both demand you give them money in return for protection.
Which is why the government goes after the mafia, they hate the competition.
The difference is the legitimizing force of accountability to the people (at least, in principle.) It's a big difference. Pre-liberalism govts basically were mafias.
Omer Moav mentions in a recent Econtalk episode how you can say that the emergence of the state in human society can be considered the transition from road bandits to organized crime.
If you think about it, large criminal structures need to become like governments, otherwise they are unstable, so it’s in their best interest to have rules and be fair within themselves.
One interesting limit case is what happens if everyone is a member of such a criminal organization? There’s no practical difference between a government.
And if they grow large enough, they typically start providing welfare to the population, to pacify normal citizens. They even police their bad actors, see the cartel giving up their own in the recent murders of American tourists.
I don't have personal experience with it, maybe it's all fantasy, but a popular trope in mafia stories is the mafia serving as a parallel or backup government to otherwise law-abiding people. For instance, The Godfather opens with a man, not part of the mob, asking the Godfather for vigilante justice because the American criminal system failed to punish the man who disfigured his daughter.
This is basically the opening scenes of Goodfellas.
Henry Hill : [narrating] All they got from Paulie was protection from other guys looking to rip them off. That's what it's all about. That's what the FBI can never understand - that what Paulie and the organization offer is protection for the kinds of guys who can't go to the cops.
It must be really difficult living in an area of the world where the Government tortures your child, dismembers them with a chainsaw, and dissolves them in a barrel of acid if you don't pay your taxes.
You act as if governments throughout history haven’t committed atrocities a thousands times more gruesome than this. I’m fact, I can think of a fairly famous example within the past hundred years.
Come on, give examples please don't leave me hanging! I think the Mafia are sick fucks, but lots of governments have been too. No shortage of violence in this pit of animals on this stupid space rock.
But thousands of times more gruesome than that!? That's wild. I've watched Cartel vids where they slice open and expose the vocal cords laterally as their victims wail, creating otherworldly sounds.
But that's like... MAYBE 0.5x as gruesome as torturing some poor helpless child or tossing infant into a barrel of acid. So if you've got stuff that's 1000x as gruesome, I can't even comprehend! Please post.
Take china for example, How many families/people/children were tortured and killed when the japanese invaded manchuria. That is an invasion, you may say, it does not count, ok, Now look at how many more than that were tortured and killed in chairman mao's cultural revolution.
The scale at which modern governments operate makes all of organized crime look like child's play. The quote "A single death is a tragedy, a million is a statistic" Is particularly apt here.
But, the Mongol government creating mountains of skulls that appear to travelers in the distance to be snow covered mountains with such a trail of human remains that the “grease” renders their horses immobile is pretty darn brutal.
For some reason I can't reply to a comment that said
> Author is biased, probably couldn't get to one of those schools...
Ad hominem attack, but I was amused even though the facts don't precisely support the accusation.
It is technically true that Prof. Carter didn't attend an Ivy League school as an undergraduate - he went to Stanford, which (currently) plays in the Pac-12 and NCAA division I. Of course that doesn't tell us whether he received admission offers from any of the Ivies at that time - it seems likely that he would have.
But the reason I rate the implication "false" is because he subsequently attended and graduated from Yale's law school and currently teaches there.
Hmm, I don't think I would have been quite as quick to hit the flag button. The (now missing?) PP comment to me read "probably couldn't get into an Ivy" with the crux being that Stanford is of course not part of the Ivy League. (But Yale Law School is certainly part of Yale, though iirc it's rare for graduate or professional students to play in the NCAA due to eligibility.)
Sometimes people forget that the Ivy League isn't a classification of elite schools but actually an athletic conference; this is of course directly relevant to the issue of athletic scholarships which is under discussion.
As the premier Ivy League authority on the inner-workings of Cartels, I can definitively say that our illustrious Ivy League institutions only happen to appear like a Cartel to the very, very stupid and uneducated (eg. People who couldn't attend).
It is quite an amazing psycho-social phenomena, inextricably linked to a low SES and impoverished social capital; I hope to secure a grant to make my PhD students shit out a bunch of papers with my name on it soon.
Don't worry, all the confounding variables have been accounted for. We can't release any raw data though, so sorry but it's to protect confidentiality. Could we reasonably anonymize the data? Oh nooooo, I'm so sorry you're breaking u --
"Stephen L. Carter is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. He is a professor of law at Yale University and was a clerk to U.S. Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall. "
Hate the headline as it downplays the terror and brutality that cartels inflict on the people of Mexico. Nobody is holding a gun to a football player head and forcing them to play for Harvard.
Is there price fixing going on? Probably. But I don’t have very much sympathy for student athletes who had to pay full price to go to an Ivy league school… I’m sure they had more opportunities in life than the cartels give they people the rule over.
The article doesn't mention the Mexican drug cartels at all. Maybe you're just not aware, but the word cartel has a meaning outside of organized crime and the drug trade. OPEC, for example, is a cartel of oil producing states.
> Hate the headline as it downplays the terror and brutality that cartels inflict on the people of Mexico
The word "cartel" is not exclusive to the criminal Mexican organizations.
> I’m sure they had more opportunities in life
But that reasoning applies to academic scholarships too. Every single person smart enough to get into a top school, will have more opportunities throughout life.
Just because the term is used to describe groups of organizations participating in price fixing activity doesn't mean all groups performing price fixing are equal. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cartel
There are a lot of problems with the Ivy League, the lack of athletic scholarships are one of the few things they do absolutely right. The thing is that athletics are less, not more democratic as a distribution mechanism for admission slots. The author seems to be under the mistaken belief that most of these slots would be available for your football and basketball players, where stories of rising from poverty are commonplace at the highest level. That's simply not the case at Ivies. You think underrepresented and the economically disadvantaged are rowing or playing squash or fencing or golfing or diving at the level where this would matter? Sure, there are ways of making this equitable, but that's not solved by the scope of this argument.
The fact is that athletics has been a backdoor for admissions, and always used to exclude, not to include, those outside the upper class. The college admission scandal showed as much, with the Stanford sailing coach. It has historical roots in excluding Jewish students, and it's currently used to exclude Asian students among maintaining a proportion of elite students.
Certainly, it looks like price fixing, and I don't have a problem with that argument, but I would prefer is more universities took courage to actually focus on academics like chicago, caltech, mit, etc.