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Sports and College Planning

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by Garth Robertson

Sports and College Planning

In my experience as a counselor, I’ve been a bit surprised by the lack of interest that so many prospective applicants I work with have for college sports. Of course, plenty of people have no interest in sports, and that’s perfectly fine, but college sports are an excellent introduction to the incredible options one has when applying to college.

Everyone reading this post will have heard of the Ivy League, and many probably could even name all eight institutions that comprise this conference, but few people know what the Ivy League actually is. It’s a sports conference. It was established in 1954 as a collection of schools with a similar history who wanted to play football (among other things) against each other in a formalized fashion. In fact, earlier references to the Ivy League only go back twenty-some years prior, and refer to the schools founded during the Colonial period of American history, including seven of the eight contemporary Ivy League schools (all but Cornell) as well as the College of William and Mary, Rutgers University, the U.S. Military Academy, and the U.S. Naval Academy. (That’s right, Rutgers was Ivy League.)

Not only is the Ivy League a sports conference, it’s also not a particularly good one. Harvard gained fame for the explosion of Jeremy Lin with the New York Knicks last year (or rather, Linsanity was greatly enhanced because he attended Harvard), but it’s extremely rare for an Ivy League athlete to succeed at the professional level.

But the colleges that make up the Ivy League, that collection of schools who agree to compete annually in sports, are exceptional academic schools. The Ivy League, however, isn’t the only sports conference with great academic schools. The Patriot League boasts a bevy of elite private institutions. Lehigh, Bucknell, Colgate, Army, Navy, Lafayette, Holy Cross, and American are widely regarded as exceptional colleges, and apart from American (a great school, no doubt), no member ranks lower than 39th in U.S. News 2013 publication of Best Colleges and several (Army, Navy, and Colgate) are in the top 20. (I should note that U.S. News’ unfortunate separation of “Liberal Arts Colleges” and “National Universities” is clearly problematized by the Patriot League, a conference built on similar schools with strong shared goals, yet six of them are deemed “Liberal Arts Colleges” and two of them are “National Universities.”)

At the Division I level – the highest level of NCAA sports competition – the remaining elite academic institutions mostly fall in what are known as the “power conferences.” Northwestern, Michigan, Illinois, Wisconsin, and more call the Big Ten home, while Stanford, USC, UCLA, and UC Berkeley are four of the twelve schools in the Pac 12. Vanderbilt represents the SEC, and Notre Dame and Syracuse are about to join Duke, Boston College, Wake Forest, Miami, UNC Chapel Hill, the University of Virginia, Georgia Tech, and several other strong universities in the ACC (although Notre Dame’s unique history and football tradition have led to that school remaining unaffiliated with any conference for football – Notre Dame’s football team is the only collegiate team that has its own television contract). The newfangled Big East will feature Georgetown, Villanova (#1 North Regional University), Creighton (#1 Midwest Regional University), Butler (#2 Midwest Regional University), and more.

Even at the small school level, though, sports play a major role in campus life. The NESCAC (New England Small College Athletic Conference) – aka the “Little Ivies” – is a powerhouse conference for Division III sports as well as academics and includes Williams, Connecticut, Wesleyan, Bates, Bowdoin, Colby, Hamilton, Middlebury, Trinity, and Tufts. The NESCAC’s West Coast counterpart is the SCIAC (Southern California Intercollegiate Athletic Conference), which includes Pomona-Pitzer, Claremont-Mudd-Scripps, Caltech, Occidental, and more. (Note that the five Claremont Colleges are divided into two sports teams.)

At many schools, large and small, the sports scene plays a powerful role in campus life. My memories of autumn Saturdays at Northwestern are filled with images of Frisbee and football tossing amongst innumerable barbecues in the frat quads, followed by caravans of walking students up to Ryan Field (Dyche Stadium, for those so inclined). We stormed the field when we upset Michigan 54-51 to secure a piece of the Big Ten championship in 2000, and I turned down the chance to study abroad the next year because I refused to miss NU’s upcoming football season. While that may or may not have been a mistake, college sports are undeniably an integral part of the culture at a great many schools, including the most competitive academic schools, and as such should be taken seriously into account when searching for that perfect place to spend the four “best years of your life.”

Twitter and the Common App Crash

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Well, the 1/1 Common Application deadline has come and gone, and I wanted to share a few of the reflections I had on this oh-so-stressful day for oh-so-many applicants.

The first reflection is this: submission struggles are elevated to a particularly interesting level due to the advent and ubiquity of Twitter.

Picture yourself in this scenario. It’s 11:45pm and the application is due at midnight. You have one remaining college application to submit, and it’s the dream college app. Why have you waited so long? Maybe you procrastinated, but maybe, because this is your dream college, your perfectionistic tendencies took over and you read and re-read the essay countless times throughout the hours and days and weeks preceding this moment. You’ve deleted the contractions for formality before reinserting them for conversational voice countless times, and even now are paranoid about whether you’ve used too many semicolons. But now it’s 11:45pm and you have to give in – you have to submit. And then you try to log in to your Common Application account…and you can’t.

Since Twitter entered our world, the following reaction has increased in size and vigor. As that same high school senior, research colleges and submitting applications via the wonders of the Internet, you certainly have a Twitter handle. What do you do when you see the clock clicking down on your chances to submit your application to your dream college on-time, and over and over again, the Common Application website tells you that you’ve entered the wrong login information, or that the page you are trying to load has, once again, failed to load? If you haven’t done so already, you open your Twitter account in a new tab, share your feelings, and absorb the commiseration of your thousands of peers experiencing the exact same problem.

From 11:45pm till about 2:35am (both EST), the Common Application website was in a gridlock, with students frantically refreshing and reloading pages until eventually, they were able to get through. Or, as the swarm on Twitter revealed, not. But what Twitter provided – even for myself, a counselor who feels very invested in not only my own students, but in the coming-of-age thought processes that the application process can trigger for every student – was a community of support. Yes, often angry raging, but the kind of angry raging that feels like someone understands me, that I’m not the only person going through this, and that somehow makes it better. As one applicant wrote:

The second reflection is this: you’re not the only one. For counselors like myself, of course, it’s also a stressful day. However, I think that the people for whom it’s most stressful are the people who work at CommonApp. In the early afternoon on January 1, Common App tweeted that it was receiving 7-10 requests for assistance per minute. At that time, honestly, I can’t imagine what sort of help students were seeking. There were no problems with the website and the early application periods had given Common App the chance to fix the glitchiness of CA4. But if 7-10 requests per minute were happening at that point, I can’t fathom how many requests they were getting when the website crashed at 11:45pm EST. The level of hatred directed at Common App was pretty impressive during those dark (literally) hours. I don’t know how many people work for Common App, but I’d guess that it’s a large number, and I’d also guess that at least one night per year, many if not all of them are required to work through the night.

I find it sad that the very people who were working frantically all day and into the night to help as many students as possible are those most demonized on Twitter. Through Twitter, one group bonded over their shared struggles, but at least as a part of that bonding, lambasted others. It’s both sad and amazing, the power of alterity in it’s ability to create a bond.

But these reflections aside, there’s another important piece of the puzzle at play here. High school students aren’t privy to this because they only work on applications in a single year, but counselors like myself, people working at Common App, and admissions officers around the country all know that the deadline is never strict. There are always glitches, always mistakes, always technical problems that unfairly impact one or another student’s ability to submit on time. And everyone wants successful submissions.

The 1/1 deadline is a deadline. But if disaster strikes, the whole team will be sympathetic.

A side product of the increasing competitiveness of college admissions is the vision that admissions officers are “gatekeepers” who are more interested in judging and rejecting 90% of their applicants than in grudgingly accepting 10% who barely pass their rigorous examination. For many schools, those numbers are accurate, but (most) admissions officers could not be less like that description. Most admissions officers, in fact, are saddened when they know they’ll have to reject a student. These admissions officers go to battle in committee to convince their peers to accept students, sometimes successfully, and sometimes not. Admissions offices want their applicants to succeed, and they’ll do what they can each and every year to help students become applicants through successfully submitted applications.

This year, even with the new CA4, was no different. And Common App set the tone by offering a statement in partnership with all member colleges that January 2nd applications would likewise be accepted.

But then school after school poured in with their terse, but sympathetic offerings.

 

 

 

 

Takeaway points:
1) Don’t procrastinate.
2) Stop your perfectionism at least the day before the deadline. Such over-analysis really does not help.
3) Take responsibility for #1 and #2.
4) Remember that Common App AND the colleges that you’re targeting are really, authentically, working hard and sacrificing any semblance of a New Year’s celebration to help you.

I love my work. It’s powerfully rewarding because of the deep relationships I get to build with talented high school seniors, hopefully guiding them to deepen their understanding of their value systems and goals. But with those rewards come negatives. Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year’s all fall in the busiest weeks of the year. For me, these are always holidays, but never vacations. And the same is true for the people working at Common App. Give them some respect.

But if at some level, you really, viscerally need to see some venting, you’ll have a friend (or a hundred) on Twitter.

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