Leveling the Playing Field on Aristocrat Sports Preferences

What group is prioritized more heavily in elite college admissions than children of alumni or beneficiaries of affirmative action? Recruited athletes.

Controlling for differences between applicants, athletes are thousands of times more likely to be admitted than similar non-athletes. Recent research finds that only 11 percent of admitted athletes at Ivy League and similarly elite schools would have been accepted without athletic preference.

We’re not talking about just a couple spots. Harvard has the most Division I sports teams in the country, with recruited athletes accounting for about 11 percent of recent incoming classes.

I’ve read plenty of articles discussing legacy admissions and affirmative action, but I could hardly find any recent Crimson opinion pieces discussing athlete preference — despite the significant preference given to athletes.

Maybe athletic preferences are so self-evidently legitimate that they’re beyond discussion. Indeed, many of the acceptances for recruited athletes can rightly be celebrated as meritorious.

But certain athletic preferences do not deserve to escape such scrutiny. Former University President Lawrence H. Summers recently coined an excellent term for these cases: “aristocrat sports,” where membership and success are sharply defined by familial resources. In light of recent research detailing the systematic bias toward wealthy applicants at Ivy-plus schools, Summers is right to call for scrutinizing aristocratic athletic preference.

Think of sports like squash, rowing, and fencing. Data do not exist on the average wealth of Harvard athletes by sport, but a recent Wall Street Journal report found that nearly 90 percent of Ivy League squash players attended private high schools with fees of around $30,000, and two-thirds of Ivy League lacrosse and crew athletes attended similarly expensive schools. Even the public school students who do play these sports often come from very rich districts. In line with these statistics, a recent study found that nearly a quarter of the admissions advantage for wealthy students in the Ivy League is due to athlete recruitment.

Because class and race are closely intertwined, athletic recruiting also serves to favor white applicants. A senior staff attorney at the American Civil Liberties Union called such preferences “informal discrimination” and the Atlantic labeled them “a quiet sort of affirmative action for affluent white kids.” Indeed, Harvard’s recruited athletes pool is substantially less diverse than the school as a whole.

It’s not that those incoming athletes haven’t worked incredibly hard or aren’t incredibly talented. They have and they are.

But the very opportunity to participate in these sports — much less to receive personalized coaching — is available to a very select few who are lucky enough to be born to wealthy parents, and so giving preferences to these sports tilts the admissions playing field towards the privileged. If you don’t happen to attend a handful of rich prep schools mostly located in the Northeast, this entire admissions channel is largely off limits to you.

While our admissions department should attempt to cultivate excellence in the incoming class, it should not sacrifice fairness to do so. World class rowers are world class. But that doesn’t mean they deserve a spot at Harvard.

It may be unfair to single out these sports when so many parts of the admissions system — from essay writing to extracurriculars — can be gamed by those with the resources and time to do so.

But there’s a spectrum to how much income can affect certain opportunities, and aristocrat sports are an especially egregious example. Having rich parents is nearly a prerequisite to playing some of these sports, whereas the financial barriers to having impressive extracurriculars or an outstanding essay are much lower. (But if I thought those metrics were as wealth-dependent as elite sports, I would call for a reconsideration of them too!)

Moreover, the inherent unfairness of admissions is actually a positive reason to prioritize more objective and accessible metrics of talent, like test scores, whenever possible. The alternative — to simply surrender to the unfairness of admissions — is inadequate.

Even if essay writing or extracurricular opportunities were as stratified by income as sports recruiting, those categories don’t have their own separate admissions system like athletics does. No one gets a designated liaison lobbying to admit them for having a really outstanding personal statement. Harvard has taken one of the activities most subject to income disparities and made it into an admissions backdoor.

What’s to be done?

Even if you aren’t on board with abandoning aristocrat sports recruiting entirely, there are a number of pragmatic solutions that can achieve similar ends. One approach, proposed by Harvard Economics professor Raj Chetty ’00, is to diversify recruitment for these teams.

Our University could also follow in MIT’s footsteps by subjecting recruited athletes to the same admissions standards as other students. This change would reduce but not eliminate the preference for such teams.

However we choose to proceed, the current system is clearly broken. As I’ve written before, Harvard is dominated by the rich by design. If Harvard is serious about improving its socioeconomic diversity, reforming aristocrat sports is low-hanging fruit.

Aden Barton ’24, an Associate Editorial Editor, is an Economics concentrator in Eliot House.