“I think it’s got to be a special kid who’s going to come in unrecruited and work at the level they need to, to be a Division I athlete,” she said. “But certainly it’s possible.”
Reviewing Outcomes, Not Just Incomes
Bowen also suggested that recruited athletes be tested not only for admission, but also for their academic performance once they are already on campus.
Bowen said he was “the principal inventor” of the academic index, a computation of several factors used to determine an incoming athlete’s eligibility. This helped answer the question of who was qualified for admission, but it didn’t answer the problem of representativeness.
“It isn’t enough to look at the credentials of people when they come in,” Bowen said. “You have to look at how people do after they’re there.”
“I think it’s critical to chart success once on campus—and more than just the graduation rate,” Stone said. “Just as we go over these kids’ profiles with a fine-toothed comb before they come in, it’s great to see how they do once they’re here.”
According to Reclaiming the Game, recruited athletes—especially male athletes who play the “high profile” sports: football, basketball, and hockey—are not academically representative of their classes. They concentrate disproportionately in the social sciences, and their class ranks are, on average, disproportionately low. Though Bowen and Levin argue that the time commitment teams demand of their athletes should be further reduced, their statistics show that other groups with similar commitments—including non-recruited, “walk-on” athletes—do not under perform the way recruited athletes do. Musicians, for example, over perform, they said.
But for some critics, a more fundamental problem is the terms of evaluation.
“It’s a very narrow spectrum across which students are measured,” said men’s tennis head coach David Fish ’55. “I see a lot of different expressions of intelligence, [and] it may happen that if you play the piano or the violin that there might be a closer alignment with what is tested,” he said. “But I don’t think that comes even close to describing the whole story, a whole person.”
Delaney-Smith said she has received hundreds of angry e-mails from alumni regarding the book.
“Athletes at elite universities may have lower SATs and GPAs—a previous study of Bowen’s proved that—and they may not be as involved in student government or the orchestra, but that does not translate into a ‘lack of connection to student life,’” Kelly Kinneen ’99, a former basketball player, wrote in an e-mail.
“My teammates were post-graduate scholars, Phi Beta Kappas, Radcliffe Leadership Award Winners, led community groups at Phillips Brooks House, were prefects and tutors. Out of the 17 women I played with, 12 have post-graduate degrees. I think that the Harvard community was a better place because we were a part of it.”
Deep Impact
Orleans, the executive director of the Ivy League, said the Ivy presidents have long wrestled with the issues raised by Bowen’s books, even before they existed. The Ivy League first reduced recruiting numbers in 1993, eight years before The Game of Life.
“What’s important to us is that we’re trying to do the right thing whether the books were written or not,” Orleans said. “There’s been a sense in some reports that it’s the books that have driven the Ivy presidents, which I think is not true—it’s their own independent sense of responsibility to respond to any developments in the league.”
Bowen said he is aware that the books don’t necessarily drive changes in policy, like the recent reductions in recruits and implementation of forced rest rules.
“Would that have occurred in any case?” Bowen said. “Maybe, who can say? Certainly the presidents with whom we’ve spoken credit the evidence, the facts in the book.”
—Staff writer David B. Rochelson can be reached at rochels@fas.harvard.edu.