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> if you get recruited to play Water Polo, Crew, Golf, Volleyball, or Beach volleyball at UC Berkeley, and ~95% of kids who play those sports come from wealthy families, and recruiting gave them an edge in admissions, does that count as "inappropriate?" I would say so, but I doubt this report would.

The report comes close: "the average grade point average for the bottom quartile of applicants whom UCLA admitted for academic year 2019–20 was 4.15, but the average grade point average for its admitted student athletes was 3.74. Similarly, two‑thirds of the admitted student athletes whom UC Berkeley evaluated through its holistic review process for academic years 2017–18 through 2019–20 received the lowest possible rating from its application readers—which is equivalent to a recommendation that the applicant be denied admission."

> the average grade point average for the bottom quartile of applicants whom UCLA admitted for academic year 2019–20 was 4.15, but the average grade point average for its admitted student athletes was 3.74

So the student athletes averaged halfway between an A and an A-? So did I in HS, 15 years ago, and I was a pretty good student! GPAs are really hard to make sense of with all the AP bonuses and whatnot. Standardized test scores strike me as providing a more apples-to-apples comparison. Of course that’s increasingly difficult to do in a test-optional world. (My recollection from an article about ‘The Chosen’ in 2005 is that recruited athletes tend to score 100-200 points lower on the SAT, on average, at Ivy League schools. I would double-check had I not exceeded my monthly free New Yorker quota: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2005/10/10/getting-in/amp)

The way I've seen it calculated is this:

For regular classes, A: 4.0, B: 3.0, C: 2.0, D: 1.0 (with some variance depending on + or - grades offered). For Honors/AP classes, every grade is essentially bumped up 1.0 point.

So yes, a 3.74 is around an A- average, but that's an A- average in less rigorous classes, without competition from top students. That's more of a B-/C+ average in AP/Honors classes (obviously the calculation is far from perfect, though, because every school has it's quirks- at mine, you couldn't get above a ~4.5 overall). For reference, I graduated high school with a 3.6 with multiple Cs and hardly any As, simply by virtue of taking the maximum number of AP/Honors classes. The point being, a 3.74 is not a terrible GPA, but good students are generally over a 4.0 these days.

Most schools do that, but not all. My school (a private school in the US) didn't bump up anything.

Colleges recalculate GPA's by high school to compare apples to apples. So even if your school doesn't, many colleges will use this weighting system.

I thought it was widely regarded as acceptable that athletes had lower academic requirements. You can meet the admissions criteria via academics or via athletics. This doesn't mean any sort of inappropriate behavior.

The article describes something actually inappropriate: falsely saying students are good athletes in exchange for money.

This only includes those admitted from large donors. The number of students admitted for being friends/family of staff/administration/faculty is probably the highest percentage.

When I worked for Stanford in admissions, it ended up making up about 10-15% of each incoming class.

People on "the list" could still be denied, but the admissions officer would need to write a letter to the Dean explaining why - and that never happened.

People think donating small amounts to the school or being a legacy student help admissions, but they absolutely do not have an impact. The most impactful variables to admission are grades, race/gender, test scores, and essays - roughly in that order.

Side note, but why are water polo and volleyball considered upper-class sports in the USA? I understand regular polo, rowing, etc, because of the cost of equipment. But at my school (on the other side of the world), volleyball was for the islanders, and water polo was for the misfits who couldn't make it in a more popular sport. What sports in the USA are for the plebs? Baseball?

>Side note, but why are water polo and volleyball considered upper-class sports in the USA?

Beach volleyball is more common in areas close to the beach. Beach and indoor players are also significantly taller than the average person-- in the league that my college was a part of, the shortest woman playing middle blocker was still 185cm. Height and beach access both have correlations to socioeconomic factors.

For various reasons, the US has huge racial disparities when it comes to swimming ability. Most African American and Hispanic children don't know how to swim.

As others have mentioned, football, basketball and to a lesser extent soccer/baseball tend to be the "pleb" sports. But even within a sport, you'll see class and racial distinctions when you compare different positions. When you look at pros and college, the majority of quarterbacks and centers are white. QBs also tend to come from wealthier families. Meanwhile, wide receivers and running backs are mostly black. The defense is mostly black, and I don't think there's a single non-black cornerback in the NFL (unless you miscount Tre'Davious White)

> Most African American and Hispanic children don't know how to swim.

Out of curiosity, how common is it for public elementary, middle and high-schools to include swimming lessons in (mandatory) PE class in general? How often do schools without their own swimming pools take their PE class at a nearby public pool?

A club might go elsewhere for a pool or track, but I don't think it's at all common for a plain old PE class to go off campus except perhaps to use a gym if the school lacks one. And I don't think having your own pool is very common for a high school or below.

Fwiw, I have never heard of this. Swimming wasn’t a part of PE where I grew up.

Water polo requires a pool which is an expense that doesn't make sense for non-rich schools. Volleyball doesn't have a major professional league nor one of the big college sports in the USA, so its not in the interest of poor students to take part in because they probably could also be playing Basketball which has a very high profile league and is a major college sport.

Basketball and football are for the plebs. You can usually detect which sports by taking Census race-income measures then comparing them against the visible racial demographic of participants in the sport.

This works well as a heuristic because visible racial characteristics are visible and the rich don't usually want to play with the poor.

Water polo requires a pool, which is expensive. Baseball requires a large field, also expensive. I believe basketball is so popular in part because of the (relatively) low equipment/space cost.

> If you had asked me yesterday what percent of students I thought got into UC schools due to personal connection or wealth, I would have estimated between 10-20%

I don't think it's in the double digits for any school. You need large amounts of wealth to donate your way in.

> what percent of students I thought got into UC schools due to personal connection or wealth, I would have estimated between 10-20%. But this report seems to suggest otherwise:

It's among the private schools, such as the Ivies, where this really comes into play.

Even (some) test scores like the SAT are getting disfavored by some colleges. Rich kids have more support (private teachers, mentors, test preps), sometimes their parents have more free time.

Nitpick, but undergraduate enrollment is over 31,000 (as of fall '19 [1]).

[1] https://opa.berkeley.edu/campus-data/uc-berkeley-quick-facts

Thanks, I was reading too fast and just took the first number I saw.

Since when were Water Polo, Golf, or Volleyball rich person sports? Costs are pretty cheap at public courses.

Beach Volleyball, I guess, kinda, but sand is pretty cheap even in cold weather climates.

Crew, sure. The 'field' is hard to get things to, typically. Lacrosse, well, maybe 20 years ago, but it's everywhere now.

Now, (horse) Polo and Dressage. Those are rich people sports.

Where on earth do you think inner city kids are playing water polo and golf? Just because golf courses aren't that expensive to play on doesn't mean they're accessible to poor people (plus there's the cost of clubs, obviously).

And water polo... even if there are public pools near you, they probably aren't dedicating space for competitive water polo.

Inner city kids would be considered poor, particularly time-poor (parents/caregivers have to work multiple jobs to make ends meet). There are the rich, the poor and the (majority) middling sort. For the majority, wouldn't water polo be affordable? I don't know about golf, though, but given that most cities have public golf courses, perhaps golf is also in the reach of most folks who want to play.

I played water polo at my public high school and only had to buy a swimsuit?

The vast majority of high schools where I'm from don't have public pools. Pools have also been less available historically to Blacks.

After segregation ended, many jurisdictions defunded public pools rather than fund desegregated pools. Instead, wealthier whites used private ones. For a brief history:

https://www.utoronto.ca/news/u-t-expert-troubled-history-bla...

Oh yeah, I don't dispute the history of pools in America in general of having a lot of racist gatekeeping behind them, that's absolutely true. I was just saying that swimming and water polo are super cheap sports to participate in as an athlete.

But to become a competitive student athlete accomplished enough to get into a school like Berkeley, you have to go to a high school with its own pool, coach, and roster of fellow competitive swimmers.

When it comes to who gets these coveted "easy" seats for college admissions, it's not enough to say that the sport is hypothetically inexpensive to participate in. You have to look at all the resources that make it possible to become an elite athlete in that sport. Most public schools--especially poor ones--don't have those resources.

Not always true.

One of the girls at one of the schools near us didn't have any of that (most likely). I think they shared their pool with a few teams though. I know they didn't have their own coach, and I know that she was the stand-out star of the team.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melissa_Seidemann

Their demographics are white, but not majority, with ~30% hispanic. I don't know the demo in 2006 though:

https://www.greatschools.org/california/pleasant-hill/466-Co...

Natural talent is still a thing. Though I do agree that more $$$ = better training.

David Epstein's Range talks a lot about training in your younger years. He has a much better argument than me, but the gist is that you have to have a 'trial' period before you commit (depending on sport conditions). In 'unkind' (his term) sports, if you overtrain early, you'll burn out. I'd say Water Polo and Volleyball are those kids of sports. Swimming, on the other hand, is a 'kind' sport where early identification and rigorsous training are beneficial.

It's a really good book: https://davidepstein.com/the-range/

> Not always true.

> One of the girls at one of the schools near us didn't have any of that (most likely). I think they shared their pool with a few teams though. I know they didn't have their own coach, and I know that she was the stand-out star of the team.

Of course it's not always true. However your rebuttal actually proves the point of this discussion. You can name one outlier, who is exactly that, an outlier. The issue isn't "athletic scholarships are 100% inaccessible to people outside of the top 10% wealth bracket", it's more along the lines of "the overwhelming majority of athletic scholarships for sports are provided to people who are already benefitting from systemic privelege, and the remaining slots will be filled by outliers"

Consider two equally skilled waterpolo players, one who has a shared pool and the facilities to go with it, and one who has a private pool, coaching staff, etc. Now consider who is more likely to be in that position in the first place. That's not to say that there are no minorities in the second group, but they are overwhelmingly more likely to not end up in that scenario in the first place.

I'm not so sure, but I'd need to see the actual data on how Pac-12/Olympic/NCAA/whatever break down in terms of economics.

Swimming is cheap only if there is cheap pool available.

Yeah, it's a pretty common HS sport on the west coast and in states that don't freeze. Any school with a pool nearby may have a team. My HS shared the pool with three other HS teams during after-school practice.

But what public high school was it? Public is by no means equivalent to located in a poor area or underfunded.

I think you'd know better than us, honestly. Did you play water polo in high school and only buy a swimsuit?

Your public high school had a swimming pool?

In California (or at least my part of it) it's pretty common.

I'll echo this. Most HSs that I know of in CA have pools. But I can't find any info online about percentages or breakdowns (urban, rural, suburban, etc). I'd say west-coast states and those that don't freeze have an easier time with pool upkeep and year round usage.

Yeah, I don't have hard information on this either, but I get the impression that it's a much different calculation if you're in a climate where the pool has to be indoors.

That is a very strange question