Following on last week’s post about the college-admissions bribery scandal, I’m sure it’s no surprise that this has been a frequent topic of conversation in my little world. In particular, this whole mess has fed into a larger conversation about non-academic factors in college admissions decisions as a general matter. That is, since one of the “side doors” exploited in this scandal involved bribing coaches to pretend that students were recruited as athletes, this opens the question of whether there should be any preference given to athletes in the first place.

This is, as you might imagine, a common bugbear in discussions among faculty, many of whom feel that there shouldn’t be any preference given to applicants for being good at sports. As is often the case, I’m more conflicted.

Some of this is because even though I was never good enough at anything to benefit from an athletic preference in admissions, playing rugby was an enormously important part of my college experience. I wouldn’t want to deprive current and future students of the same sort of experience that I found meaningful as a student.

Of course, you could have sports at the collegiate level without giving a boost to the applications of recruited athletes, but things just work better on the sporting side if you can have some idea of what sort of team you’re going to put together. And that makes the experience more positive for the students involved, which is a good thing.

I’m also generally okay with some admissions boost for athletic performance because I think that’s a factor that reflects well on the student. That is, competing in sports at a high level requires a good deal of persistence, concentration, and discipline, all of which are also factors that contribute to academic success. Putting in the hours of practice needed to succeed in sports while also maintaining good enough grades to be a plausible candidate for elite college admissions says something good about the applicant’s personal character.

(I should probably note here that for the most part, my experience with having athletes in my classes has been positive. They do miss the occasional class due away games and the like, but those absences are made up for by generally having better discipline and time management skills than many non-athletes. They’re used to being given orders, so when you tell them to do something, they do it. The good ones also accept that failure on a first attempt is part of the process, and keep at it longer than some students who are more purely academically oriented.)

The same is true of students who benefit from most of the other non-academic factors that come into play– music, arts, community service, etc. are all activities that take time and dedication, and a student who can do that while also doing well in school is, to my mind, more impressive than a student with slightly better grades who does nothing outside of class.

Of course, the obvious objection to these is that doing those things also requires free time and as a result gives an extra advantage to applicants from affluent families over those who might have to be working jobs to help support their family. That’s true to a point, but as these things go, talent-based preferences (be it for sports, or music, or arts) are much less bad than many of the other options– there are at least some mechanisms out there to identify talented students from underprivileged backgrounds and give them opportunities that they might not be able to afford otherwise. And if nothing else, all of these extracurricular activities at least require the applicant to take some concrete action on their own to get the benefit.

This is in stark contrast to “legacy preferences” which are probably the second most objectionable kind of preference given in admissions decisions. This is a boost given to applicants whose ancestors previously attended the school in question, and there’s really very little you can offer as a defense of this, other than the financial incentive to keep your alumni happy. If you put a gun to my head and asked me for a non-financial justification of legacy preferences, I’d seriously question your life priorities, but about the best I could come up with would be that children of alumni are more likely to have a sense of what they’re getting into when enrolling at an elite college, and thus are less likely to freak out and withdraw after a semester or two. That’s really weak, though, and I’d fully expect a bullet.

(Of course, even legacy preferences are more defensible than straight-up big-donor preferences, for people with no pre-existing relationship with the school who write a large check to get their kids in. As noted in the previous post, this is harder to arrange in reality than in the popular imagination, but there’s really no non-financial justification of it.)

And, of course, from a purely logistical standpoint, most elite colleges need to consider something other than “pure” academic matters, because most of these schools could fill their entering class several times over with students whose grades and test scores are “good enough” to get in. Unless you want to do a straight-up lottery among those passing some threshold level, you’re going to need to look at something else to winnow the applicant pool down further. I’d prefer for that to be based on something that the kids have done themselves, rather than just where their parents went to college.