We must insist that recruited college athletes actually play

A Pennsylvania player dunks against Harvard University during a NCAA men’s college basketball championship game in the Ivy League Tournament in 2018 in Philadelphia. (AP)
Another bomb has struck the college admissions process. Rather than a Supreme Court decision, this time it’s research from a group called Opportunity Insights consisting of Harvard University economists who study inequality. Their research found that recruited athletes have an advantage in college admissions by virtue of being needed on the playing fields — and those same applicants tend to be wealthier, sometimes very wealthy.
The connection between wealth and superior athletic performance isn’t that hard to trace. Participating in sports can cost quite a bit and price out poor families. Research from the Mott Children’s Hospital National Poll on Children’s Health at the University of Michigan found that “only 30% of students in families with annual household incomes of less than $60,000 played school sports, compared with 51% of students in families that earned $60,000 or more a year.” Just participating in sports is out of reach for many, much less excelling at them.
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While most people will decry this as an equity problem, I see another wrinkle: a character consideration. Recruited college athletes actually don’t have to play. Yes, they’re expected to, but if they’re not tied to playing because of financial need, in other words, because of a sports-based scholarship, then they can quit and remain on campus as any other student would.
Schools in the Ivy League don’t offer and have never offered athletic scholarships. Neither do Division III colleges. If their families can swing the tuition, any recruited athlete to these schools doesn’t have to spend a day on the pitch, the ice, the mound or in the pool. And there’s no consequence for skipping out on their agreement.
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If recruitment confers such an advantage in admissions, then it should be a binding contract that comes with liability like all other legal agreements.
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The numbers on this are hard to track, mostly because elite colleges and universities don’t report how many athletes quit. The Harvard Crimson, Harvard’s student newspaper, reported that as many as 25% of athletes in the Class of 2020 quit their teams, but that number included recruited and nonrecruited athletes.
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As of 2019, approximately 8 million students play high school sports, and only about 2% of them will be offered a scholarship to play, a rough proxy for the number of recruits, leaving out Ivy League and Division III athletes.
College is a time when students explore areas of study and activities that were previously unavailable to them. Many recruited athletes play another sport that wasn’t available at their high school. Or they discover a love for a subject no one’s taught them so far, or an activity they hadn’t thought of before. Expanding one’s knowledge and experience is central to the intellectual and spiritual growth we want for college-educated students.
At the same time, it’s unacceptable to make a promise to secure an advantage and then break that promise when it becomes inconvenient. But that behavior is reinforced again and again on elite campuses when recruited athletes quit.
That’s one of the worst lessons an institution of higher learning can offer, not just to students who make these commitments but also to other students who may see that wealth and entitlement confer advantages with little accountability.
College sports generate billions of dollars, but they’re not the sole mission of higher education institutions. Colleges create citizens. Letting recruited athletes bypass their pledge to play teaches a very bad lesson to young people who are lucky enough to be recruited.
Leelila Strogov is CEO and founder of Atomic Mind, a college admissions consulting company.
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