Abolish Athletic Admissions
Now that legacy admissions has fallen by the wayside, it’s time to address the next unjust vestige in the admissions process at Amherst: athletic recruitment. Legacy admissions was rightly eliminated for privileging nonacademic, arbitrary reasons for college admittance. Athletic admissions should be abolished for similar reasons, and because of its toxic cultural influence on campus.
The purpose of an academically rigorous college such as Amherst should be to create a studious environment and educate future generations. Admissions should aim to select those students who best fit this goal. This is not to say non-academic factors should not count towards admissions, or that athletics should not be a part of Amherst college. Bringing a diverse set of students to Amherst with a wide variety of talents is important for cultivating a strong community. However, having a separate recruitment process solely for athletes is at odds with promoting an academically rigorous environment. Being good at sports is not something that should feature prominently in the decision to admit students, especially not as its own special admission process. No other talent, such as acting, affords one a privileged admissions process. Athletic ability, while valuable for a diverse community, is not so valuable that it merits a special recruitment process. Athletic ability is just as irrelevant to academic success as the fact that one’s parents attended Amherst, if not moreso.
Some may argue that athletic admissions are just as academically demanding as regular admissions. Unfortunately, we have no way of knowing this, as Amherst refuses to publish statistics about academic records — likely because they know many of the results of these statistics would be embarrassing for the college (for example, by making public the absurd grade inflation here).
However, Amherst did publish one report on athletics admissions that can give us a glimpse into the recruiting process: “The Place of Athletics at Amherst.” According to the report, there are two different classifications for recruited athletes: athletic factor athletes, identified as providing “significant impact” on the success of teams, and coded athletes, who are both academically high-achieving but also considered “excellent” athletes. The report suggests that the admissions benefit for athletic factor athletes is “substantial,” contrasting the admissions benefit these athletes receive to coded athletes who look “like the rest of the student body” in academic qualifications. This is a clear admission that athletic factor athletes are subject to far more lax academic standards than the general admissions pool.
Yet, this same report has sometimes been cited in favor of athletic recruitment, due to its section on the “Academic Performance of Athletes.” Unfortunately, this section is highly selective at best and duplicitous at worst, violating basic ethical practices in data science. For instance, this section claims that “[athletic factor athletes] perform significantly better than non-athletes with similar credentials” and that “there is no consistent GPA difference between coded athletes…and non-athletes with similar academic credentials at matriculation.” Notice the key phrases I have italicized. Imagine an ethics committee was investigating police violence against civilians in a particular precinct, and found enormously abnormal levels of brutality. Now, imagine that in response this precinct stated that the levels of police brutality in their department were not significantly different to other precincts with similar scores on ethics training tests. It’s obvious why this is ridiculous. What is relevant is what kind of qualifications recruited athletes have and how well they do relative to the general admissions pool, not relative to the subset of that pool that start with similar credentials. In essence, Amherst is admitting that they cannot compare athletes to the general student population, and must control for the very factor that is relevant. Consider, also, statements such as the following: “athletic factor athletes graduate with slightly lower GPAs than coded athletes.” What does slightly lower mean quantitatively? Was this result significant? What about relative to non-athletes? This report didn’t answer any of these questions, make public the analyses they used to allow one to reproduce their results, or grant access to the data used to make these comparisons. Basic data science ethics demand that these statistics be made public.
Put aside the poor data on this question for the moment. Ultimately, whichever way the numbers come out, we should abolish athletic recruitment. Either recruited athletes have the same qualifications and academic records as the general pool of Amherst applicants or they do not. If they do, there is no need for a separate admissions process. Athletes would do just as well through general admissions. If they do not perform as well, then athletic admissions are unjustly using subpar academic standards for their recruits.
The problem with athletic admissions is not just academic, however. Athletics also create a highly toxic environment on campus. In addition to the pervasive student athlete divide, male coalitional groups, like sports teams, have a track-record of creating toxic and harmful environments for women. This is one of the reasons fraternities were abolished at Amherst. These groups implicity tolerate sexual assault and rape. If Amherst college wants to refute this impression, they should publish a report on the contribution of athletics to sexual assault, complete with statistics on the matter. But I have a feeling Amherst will remain quiet, since they would rather appease their wealthy, pro-athletic donors than create an environment of inclusion and safety on campus.
We have seen a number of public examples of the kind of corrosive atmosphere athletics has created over just the past few years. As just one example, the lacrosse team has been repeatedly sanctioned for incidents such as shouting racial epithets outside a black teammate’s room, drawing swastikas on blacked-out team members, and mocking LGBT staff in their GroupMe. While anecdotal, these appalling examples illustrate the kind of fraternity-like atmosphere athletics creates.
As a final note, we should remember that athletic recruitment is by no means a tool to lift up the disadvantaged. On the contrary, athletes are overwhelmingly white and wealthy compared to the general student population. Why does this final vestige of unearned privilege still exist in our admissions process? Enough is enough, it’s time to blow the whistle on recruitment at Amherst College. ■