Originally Posted by 22B
I'm trying to understand how and why "elite" colleges (not necessarily just Ivies) select students to admit using not just academics, but also "Extra-Curriculars" (ECs).
Why Are Ivy League Colleges So Sports-Crazed?
STEVE SAILER • OCTOBER 17, 2019

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Ivy League athletics are the new "Moneyball"
Daily Princetonian
By Liam O'Connor
October 10, 2019

Athletes from rich towns are siphoned into elite colleges

The fraudulent college admissions scheme that the FBI uncovered this past spring shocked the nation. Parents who were bankers, celebrities, and lawyers got their children into top colleges — including Yale — by buying slots on coaches’ recruitment lists.

But the scandal raised larger questions about the role of athletics in higher education and who benefits from them. “Sports recruiting is the real college admissions scam,” Slate declared.

I dug into the online 2019 team rosters for all eight Ivy League universities to see who’s playing for them and where they came from.

The vast majority were likely recruited. The Daily Princetonian previously reported, “recruits dominate the rosters of the other 33 varsity Princeton teams [besides rowing], which typically include one to two walk-ons.”

My results show that sports pump hundreds of students from America’s richest towns and private “feeder schools” into elite colleges.

Cities

The homes of the Ivy League’s more than 7,000 athletes were clustered around the suburbs of major cities. They mostly lived in the Interstate 95 Corridor, which extends from Washington, D.C. to Boston. Other hotspots included Atlanta, Chicago, San Francisco, and Los Angeles. One in 10 American players lived in a hometown featured on Bloomberg’s 2018 list of “100 Richest Places.”

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