The presence of athletics at these institutions clearly demonstrates that it's part of their purpose, just as the sciences, humanities, and arts/music are.

Not sure if you’re being serious but that is indeed how it works at many places. I was straight up told that I could get a spot on some schools’ track teams over others who were faster than me because my test scores would increase the team average

What makes a western education so valuable is that it has produced the rounded character that enabled the culture. Athletics was and is education. In countries where there are no athletics, education is just rote indoctrination. Someone who has played a team sport is more equipped to lead - e.g. scale their capabilities - than someone who has not because it's about tacit knowledge and physical experience you can't just memorize. An athlete is necessarily more educated than a non-athlete, just by definition. The most dominant organizations in the world recruit from athletic programs for this reason.

Thanks to the replication crisis, statistically, probably half your professors were frauds anyway, especially if you went to a top tier school in the last decade or two, and almost none of them would have been athletes. They don't have the character required to succeed in a physical discipline, and they hate athletes because people from physical culture are difficult to bully and decieve.

Want to learn how to work on a team? Sail a boat with a crew. Want to learn to push boundaries and take risks? Race downhill on anything. Want to solve coordination problems? Play football/soccer. Want to appreciate nature? Surf. Want charisma? Ride a horse. Want to understand cumulative effort and long term strategic goals? Powerlift. Want to understand endurance? Run marathons or be a triathlete. Want to learn ego discipline and humility? Play tennis. Want to read people? Try fencing. Want to learn what performance really means? Do any of these at a serious level. Dismissing athleticism is just farcically ignorant and effete.

Maybe the argument against these is that they require class, but I know poor kids who have achieved at the highest levels of most of them, and they earned the class distinction and respect for their skill that comes with the competence. Merely learning to call things problematic and fall into line commands no respect from anyone, and it has created a layer of anxious impostors driving institutions into the ground.

I didn't say anything about legacy admissions. In fact, I'm all in on not-exclusively-academic-merit based admissions for private universities. I will happily trade a few bottom-of-the-rung merit-based admissions in exchange for students that either benefit me in some way (by subsidizing my education and/or providing good networking opportunities) or try and make up for the mistreatment of disadvantaged groups.

It boils down to this: If you have some fraction of your students who get in, not on their primary merits as students, but for some other reason that benefits the rest of the student body in some way, eliminating that fraction of the students benefits a handful of students who were at the very top of the waitlist to get in, at the cost of the benefits those preferentially selected students provided.

In both athletics and the kids of rich donors cases, I'd be happy to defend that being a bad trade-off. The networking value of the rich kids going to the same university as me far outweighs the slight increase in average academic prowess of the university (emphasis on slight: remember, these are students who ranked below every other student in the merit-based application pool).

Athletics is a smaller effect size than the rich kids, but at the end of the day by providing very valuable labor to the university for approximately free, they completely pay for the sports programs (some of which the merit-admitted enjoyed, such as having a very large gym open 24 hours a day), in addition to feeding money back into the university, subsidizing everyone else's education. Couple that with the fact that these students are disproportionately NOT taking up seats in the most competitive programs, and it's still a net positive for the student body.

But schools will also take into account things like being a concert pianist, volunteer activities, etc. You can argue that they should just admit the "smartest" students as well as they're able to determine same but basically no university does that. Selective schools do obviously look at academics; it's just not the only thing they look at.

> the skill becomes functionally useless once you enter the workforce.

This is laughably false and makes me think you've either never participated in organized athletics or have never had a job. The most important trait for success in the workforce is grit. The same is true for athletics at the highest level. Yes, some of the athletes made it on genetics alone but the vast majority had to work incredibly hard to become a college athlete. Being a successful athlete translates very well into the workforce.