COLLEGE ADMISSIONS

Sourdough cranberry and pecan bread. We ate half the loaf for lunch.

Soon after I entered the University of Washington in the 70s, my mother returned to work. She was an admissions officer at the UW through the 80s. Foreign students were a significant and invaluable presence when I was there. That diverse presence ended soon after I graduated because the State insisted on favoring local students. I was alarmed to hear someone blaming foreign students for the difficulty of getting into college. I learned as much about the world from Nigerian and Haitian students as from my professors.

After graduation I taught for three years in a private prep school—ALL my students got into their first-pick colleges. This year I retired after teaching in a small, rural, and poor school district for 40 years. Over those years I was teaching high school English, I wrote recommendations for students who went on to graduate from high-prestige schools. Sometimes, the school they chose was predictable reflection of their families’ social standing and privilege, but not always. A doctor’s son went to the state school (not even the Honor college) and the daughter of a teaching assistant went to Brandeis. Some students of modest means went to Duke and Reed.

One student confessed that during his adolescence he feared he would not be allowed to attend college. His impression was that playing sports was necessary to enter college. By his senior year, he knew better and laughed at his previous naiveté. But he was not alone. A girl who would go one to earn a Masters of Fine Art in writing was bullied by her parents into playing sports—they did not think she would be accepted without extra-curricular sports on her résumé. A boy believed that winning on the football field would make up for Cs in English—maybe for a handful of students each year, but not for him. My community emphasizes sport at the expense of nearly everything. Extracurriculars can help a student gain admission to college, but almost never when the tradeoff is academics.

First generation students—those whose parents never entered college—have the hardest time. There is rarely anyone in their family who can encourage or guide them. An educator who has written on this explains that there is no reality for such students. Teacher may be the only people these students talk to who have a college education, and teachers are not models for their futures. Their siblings play sports, but sport is not the model they need.

The recent scandal concerning parents paying to get their students into college is nothing new. When I was at the UW, there were separate admissions requirements for athletes. That policy has changed and today many colleges require football players and wrestlers to meet the same standard as the PolySci or Econ major. That’s not true everywhere.

The excuse for spending millions on basketball and football and golf teams is that these sports bring money into the educational institutions. That is often true. The flip side is that nearly all of these programs cost more than they earn. College sports programs cost a great deal of money for facilities, coaches, travel, educational support, and so forth. I went looking for an article I’d read a few years ago about how seldom colleges actually benefit from their pre-pro athletic programs. I Googled: “how many universities profit from athletics?” 170,000,000 results. Suffice it to say: Not many.

The NCAA reported a couple of years ago: “Only 24 FBS schools generated more revenue than they spent in 2014, according to the NCAA Revenues and Expenses of Division I Intercollegiate Athletics Programs Report. That figure jumped from 20 schools in 2013, but it has remained relatively consistent through the past decade.”

Athletic teams are a prestige thing, a show-off thing, and largely divorced from any overall monetary benefit to the colleges and universities that maintain them. Hundreds of millions, sometimes billions are spent on glorified entertainment, and only a tiny minority of these game programs even break even. The vast majority lose. They are often partially financed through mandatory student fees, and often through the general fund at the expense of academic programs.

They also often fail to benefit the athletes themselves. These players may graduate with a weak academic record and provide a pool of potential professional athletes. Few will be fished out of that pool. They played for four years and then they were done. If they counted on a life in sport, too often they are disappointed.

I attended a fine program for writers at Pacific University, earning an MFA in 2007. When Pacific surveyed alums about opinions about beginning a new football program, I said no. My education was not a game, and I did not attend in order to watch others play. I knew the odds were that my alma mater would spend far more than it gained from a football team and I resented that. I have not sent them a dime since. Let the football alums help them with this.

One of my students searched colleges and universities across the entire nation before attending Bard, chosen specifically because it had no athletic program.

It was never easy for “ordinary” people to get into “top” schools when I was young, it is still not easy, and that is unlikely to change any time soon. But some of my students worked hard, had impressive resumes, and great stories to aid their admission. And luck. All had luck, all had persistence and support. I know three who went on to become professional athletes. One of those was in rodeo. Another played handball. I am more proud of the doctors and lawyers, the nurses and teachers, the personal trainers and parents and shopkeepers and bartenders and hairdressers and biologists.