At Selective Division III Colleges, a Gap Between Athletes and Nonathletes

…and I wonder how many of these schools feel it is perfectly legitimate for them to omit these athletes’ academic records on surveys for U.S. News, Princeton Review, etc.

rcalexander – Division III athletics has changed since the time you were in school – even just over the past 10 years recruiting activity and the pressure to win have increased tremendously.

No doubt the new pressures on the coaches of these teams and the lack of jock friendly majors is one of the reasons why the gap is widening between athletes and non-athletes at these schools. Good time management and organizational skills will only help unprepared students so much.

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I am currently a student-athlete at Oberlin College. I play basketball, and last semester I decided to investigate the role that athletics plays in admissions. Here is a small excerpt of my conclusions.

In 2001, an investigative study was published describing how athletic recruiting affects college admissions. The Game of Life: College Sports and Educational Values, written by James L. Shulman and William G. Bowen, compared admissions rates, college performance, and post-college activities of 30 schools ranging from Division IA private universities(Duke), Division I public universities(University of Michigan), Division IAA Ivy League Universities(Princeton), Division III Universities(Washington University), Division III women’s colleges (Barnard) and Division III coed liberal arts colleges (Oberlin!). Their goal being:
“In order to understand how intercollegiate athletics, in its various forms, affects the ways in which colleges and universities discharge their missions, we decided to study a set of schools that are, in many ways, similar as educational institutions but that have chosen to compete athletically at different levels of play…permitting us to compare the nature and effects of radically different kinds of athletic programs (for example, football at Vanderbilt versus football at Oberlin College).”(xxvii and xxix).
Comparing academic institutions that are equally competitive in the classroom, but far different on the athletic field, Shulman and Bowen hoped to prove that despite the difference, “there is more continuity along this gradient than is generally understood, with, for example, pattern of recruitment, admissions, and coaching spreading from the big-time programs to the Ivies, and then on to the Division III coed liberal arts colleges” (xxix).

After comparing admissions statistics and college academic transcripts over forty years (the latest being 1989, with limited information available from 1999) what did they find?

They were right.

No matter whether the school was an athletic powerhouse like the University of Michigan or a sports bottom feeder like Oberlin College, recruited athletes were accepted into these highly selective colleges despite having lower academic merits(GPA, test scores) than the admitted student population. These athletes, while still graduating at a similar rate to their classmates, significantly underperformed throughout college (lower GPA, class rank). So, athletes had an easier chance getting in than non-athletes and performed worse academically. And most unexpected, “the recruitment of large numbers of athletes can have more serious effects on admissions and on campus ethos at smaller schools” (xxix). Thus, small schools are not only vulnerable to athletic recruiting, but are most affected by the recruitment.

Shulman and Bowen argued that as athletics continued to gain importance across divisions, college coaches at all levels intensified their levels of recruiting. In addition, women’s sports have grown more popular over the years so more and more athletes are being recruited to bring their skills to campus. Furthermore, at small liberal arts colleges, athletes are more prone to quit after one or two seasons. To counteract this effect college coaches must over-recruit, and bring in more athletes than they may actually need in a given season.

Quite simply, more recruited athletes means less open admissions spots.

The impact, is that:
“Every spring, valedictorians with straight A averages, and applicants with stellar SAT scores who may have conducted original laboratory research or made a full-length documentary film, are rejected because there are only so many spots in a class” (29).
Colleges all over the country turn away smart, talented kids because there just isn’t any room for them after athletic recruiting.

My freshman class included 253 recruited athletes (130 men, 123 women). Eight of these athletes were men’s basketball players. That was eight less spots for other students, who may or may not have been more qualified. More startling however, is that only two of us remain on the team. After two years the retention rate is 25 percent! And the retention rate for sports across Oberlin College is notably bad. Through 2008 the four-year retention rate for athletes is 45.6 percent (51.7% for men, 39.3% for women). Fewer than half of student athletes play their sport all four years at Oberlin College, proving Bowen and Shulman’s argument regarding over-recruiting! Oberlin has approximately 2200 students enrolled in the College of Arts and Sciences. As of 2008-2009, 364 student athletes (15% of the student body) represented 22 varsity athletic teams. Odds are that half of those athletes will quit playing their sport while at Oberlin.

So with all of this newfound data I decided to confront the head of the beast–Oberlin College’s Athletic Director.
***
Joe Karlgaard, Oberlin’s current Athletic Director, ran track at Stanford and attended the University of Minnesota for graduate school. He is well spoken and still looks every bit like a college athlete. And surprisingly, of every person I met with, he was the least guarded.

“I think if you’re going to have varsity athletics,” he says matter-of-factly, “you’ve got to have some process that adds some weight to an athlete. Otherwise, in any given year we may or may not have a men’s basketball team.”

It turns out athletics is not much different from being a legacy, a minority, or a 1st generation college student, “We call them hooks,” he explains, “There are a lot of different ‘hooks’.” And the fact is that nearly every student at Oberlin College has some kind of “hook” that makes him or her special. It is this combination of “hooks” that creates a diverse campus, a formula that Karlgaard passionately believes in.

“I think that admissions is about building a community,” Karlgaard says. “Assembling a group of like-minded individuals does not help any of those individuals grow.”

And he is right. Many students choose to go to small colleges far away from home to meet people who are different and to become part of a diverse community. But in order for Oberlin to fill this need for a diverse campus, one that includes varsity athletic teams filled with varsity level athletes, the school must continue to battle with its low retention rates. Thus, athletes applying to the school are always in greater and greater need, and it’s not a stretch to believe that a premium is placed on their applications.

So, while basketball may have not literally been the only factor that got me into to Oberlin, it looks like it helped. A lot. My ability to play basketball at the collegeiate level may have been the “hook” that pushed my application over the hump and into the accepted pile. But then again, I will never know for sure.