End Affirmative Action for Jocks
In the post-affirmative action era, the absurdity of athletic recruiting at elite schools is clearer than ever.
Dear readers,
There was lots of sports-and-politics news for us to choose from this week — and almost all of it was gloomy. Thanks to some clever digging by SFGates’ Alex Schultz, we learned that the Orlando Magic donated $50,000 to Ron DeSantis’ super PAC, becoming one of the first teams in NBA history to publicly throw its financial weight behind a presidential candidate. The news didn’t come as much of a surprise, considering the team is owned by the DeVos family — yes, that DeVos family — but it was nevertheless a stark illustration of NBA owners’ conservative leanings (and their proclivity for investing in overhyped prospects).
At the World Cup, meanwhile, a minor rhetorical skirmish broke out this week over former USWNT star Carli Lloyd’s criticism of the team following its nil-nil draw against Portugal. Commenting on the game as part of the post-game coverage on Fox, Lloyd ripped into her erstwhile teammates for dancing and taking selfies with fans after a lackluster performance that almost ended with the team being eliminated from the tournament. Lloyd isn’t wrong about the team’s abysmal performance, but as The Nation’s Dave Zirin pointed out this week, it’s impossible to separate Lloyd’s latest criticisms from the deeper rift that’s opened up between Lloyd and the USWNT — beginning with Lloyd’s refusal to join her teammates in kneeling at the 2020 Tokyo Olympics to protest police brutality. On the whole, we agree with Zirin: “If Lloyd wants to fit in on Fox and be a right-wing scold, that’s her business. But we should reject the idea that caring about, and connecting with, fans, is somehow a distraction from winning.”
For our main item this week, though, we’re going to step back from this week’s news to touch on a topic that we’ve been thinking about for a while now: college athletics in the post-affirmative action era. Happy reading.
-Calder and Ian
In July, a few weeks after the Supreme Court struck down race-based affirmative action policy at colleges and universities, a team of economists released a new study of college admissions at America’s most elite schools.
Drawing on admissions data from the “Ivy Plus” schools, the study substantiated some long-held intuitions about the advantages that wealthy applicants enjoy at top-tier schools. The top-line figures, though not exactly shocking, are still pretty appalling: Although only 7 percent of top-performing high school students come from households in the top 1 percent of the income distribution, over 16 percent of students at top-tier universities come from the top 1 percentile. Among students with the same test scores, students from the top .1 percent are 2.2 times as likely to gain admissions than are students from the bottom of the income scale.
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The authors of the study attributed the advantage that rich applicants enjoy to three factors: legacy admission, “private school polish” — the non-quantifiable advantages that students from expensive private schools enjoy in the admissions process, like better recommendations and stronger essays — and, finally, the influence of athletic recruiting.
Parsing the data on recruited athletes, the researchers found that about one out of every eight students drawn from the top one percent of the income scale is a recruited athlete, whereas only one out of every 20 students from the lower- and middle-income bracket benefits from athletic recruiting. In plain terms, athletic recruiting gives a leg up in the admissions process to a pool of disproportionately well-off applicants.
As we said above, these figures are not that surprising, but they’re receiving more scrutiny in the wake of the Supreme Court’s affirmative action decision — and for good reason. Regardless of how you spin them, the findings lay waste to the idea that the admissions practices of elite colleges and universities are in any sense fair or purely meritocratic — a central premise of the conservative case against affirmative action. Make what you will of the legal arguments against affirmative action, but the underlying moral claims made by opponents of affirmative action are bogus. College admissions aren’t fair, but limiting race-based affirmative action only makes them less so.
Before we go on, we should note that both of us attended swanky private high schools before going on to an equally-swanky private liberal arts college — meaning that we almost certainly benefited from the advantages laid out in the study. But our experience at these elite schools gave us a window into some of the ways that the advantages discussed in the paper actually play out in real life — dynamics that are easy to overlook if you focused exclusively on the qualitative advantage that rich applicants enjoy.
These dynamics were particularly pronounced in the area of athletics and athletic recruiting. Defenders of athletic recruiting often point to two high-profile college sports that draw lots of participation from non-white athletes — basketball and football — as proof that preserving admissions preferences for recruited athletes is consistent with schools’ broader goal of building a racially and economically diverse student body.
But at elite colleges like the one we attended (an 1800-person school that competes in Division III), the reality on the ground is very different. For every one athlete of color on the football or basketball team, there were dozens of rich, white athletes in obscure sports like sailing or squash. No one who has spent four years on an elite college campus could look at its sports teams and credibly conclude that they are bastions of racial and economic diversity on campus.
This dynamic is actually even more objectionable than the numbers show, since the so-called “private school polish” also has a significant effect on athletic recruiting. Wealthy parents learn quickly that if they can’t afford to donate a new library or serve on the board of trustees, the easiest way to get their children into a school is by teaching them to play a niche country club sport. (As you might imagine, the recruiting pool for squash is a lot less competitive than the recruiting pool for basketball.) This is, sadly, the way the game works, and elite colleges have little interest in changing the status quo. They want big donations to improve their facilities and to pad their endowments, and because they’re constantly competing with one another for those donations, the cycle continues.
The thinly-veiled advantages that rich athletes enjoy at elite schools also have more diffuse — but no less important — effects on campus life. On a campus like ours, where close to 30 percent of the student body were athletes (and a significant percentage of those athletes were recruited athletes), sports teams have a way of setting the tone for the campus at large. And from our conversations and interactions with classmates who came from less privileged backgrounds, it was clear that this tone was not particularly hospitable to low-income students. It’s sort of hard to describe exactly how this worked, but imagine for a second that you’re a first-generation college student from a public school in a big city, and on your first day of college, you see a caravan of BMWs and Mercedes-Benzs with bumper stickers from the school’s lacrosse and field hockey teams rolling up outside your dorm. (One of us heard this exact story from a college classmate, by the way.) In that moment, do you think, “Wow, college sports teams are an engine of equality and diversity at this school,” or do you think, “Holy shit, who are these people — and do I belong among them?” We think the answer’s pretty clear.
That said, getting rid of admissions preference for recruited athletes wouldn’t completely solve colleges’ diversity problems — and neither would getting rid of legacy admissions, for that matter. As the authors of the study point out, upper-middle class applicants (defined as applicants from families in the 70th to 95th wealth percentiles) currently stand to benefit the most from a move to a purely meritocratic admissions system, since those applicants are deprived both of the advantages that colleges give to very wealthy applications and the relatively more minor boost that they give to low-income applicants. Without a total rethinking of their admissions processes, elite colleges will still be for the privileged few.
But eliminating admissions preference for recruited athletes would go some way toward tamping down on the air of monied elitism that currently pervades selective college campuses. And in the post-affirmative action era, that’s not nothing.
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