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I think the difference is in how it's approached. Admissions never say, "We need 20 bassoon players every year," but they absolutely look for 20 football players every year.

And it's a known way to game admissions. How many people do you know who row or fence? Because top schools are looking for a set number of people who are good at those sports each year and wealthy parents can get their kids top coaching for such boutique sports, knowing that.

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Rowing is actually a fairly popular activity from what I see. (Caveat that I have some availability bias living outside of Boston.) It's also quite popular at the high school level, especially in the sort of private schools we have around here.

You can also join the rowing team at certain “elite” colleges without having any prior experience (besides knowing how to swim).

There are multiple levels of crew at schools that take it even halfway seriously. I imagine I could have gotten on freshman/JV crew undergrad had I wanted to in spite of not having rowed before. (I was interested in high school but my school never got it organized.)

And I played club rugby undergrad without having done it before. Lots of people play various non-intramural club sports without prior experience.

> but they absolutely look for 20 football players every year.

Yeah, out of a freshman class size of about 4,000 students. It’s negligible.

You took the largest incoming class size of an Ivy and compared it to a single sport to suggest the discussion, whether the admission criteria is optimally correct or just, is not important enough to talk about?

What kind of argument is that? "Yes my client hit that person but look at it in terms of percentages."

I used the average freshman class size of colleges that have deep sports cultures (i.e. large student body, wins championships, spends a lot of resources on recruiting, etc). Notice the emphasis on “recruiting”.

MIT and Ivy League+ schools do not have such deep sports cultures.

You said you were speaking in general, right?

Then, it doesn’t make sense for you to keep harping about MIT or other Ivy League+ schools because your argument falls flat when schools with sports-heavy cultures are brought up. Admitting athletes at the average school really is negligible.

(Unless you edited your original comment to specifically mention these schools? I only read your reply to me that said you weren’t talking about MIT and that you were speaking in general)

Also, I only used a single sport (i.e football) as an example because you used a single sport (i.e football) as an example. I quoted you. I know you were speaking in general. But so was I.

If you have specific concerns with MIT or Ivy League+ admissions as it relates to sports, then just say that! Don’t try to generalize your argument because it’s not helping your point.

(Also, if percentages don’t matter as much as you think, then why were they brought up in the recent Supreme Court case?)