Over the next few weeks, the NCAA’s “March Madness” will give some of the best men’s college basketball players the chance to shine on the national stage.
At the same time, however, some of the players participating in this tournament are part of a major problem with the higher education system at large: an unfair admissions process. Put simply, colleges don’t always admit the best students available. Alongside race-based affirmative action and legacy admissions, college sports affords America a broken college admissions system.
Even though most college sports teams are a fiscal drain for their respective schools, those schools still allow talented athletes to attend with academic marks that they wouldn’t tolerate from a nonathlete.
An Atlanta Journal-Constitution study found that out of 54 teams that were primarily ranked in the top 25 in men’s basketball or football, there was a 220-point SAT gap between the average football player and the rest of his peers (on a 2,400-point scale); for men’s basketball, the gap was 227 points.
So, not only do most athletic teams drive up the cost of tuition and fees at their respective schools, but they also take away spots from more qualified students. This was also part of the so-called Varsity Blues scandal in 2019. Some of those fraudulently admitted to elite colleges got in as fake members of sports teams.
Meanwhile, race-based affirmative action is another atrocious way that schools keep the best and brightest out. It results in discrimination against white and Asian students in favor of black, Hispanic, and Native American students with lower test scores. It’s a racist policy in that it deliberately harms members of two racial groups and denies qualified students the academic opportunity they deserve for the benefit of other groups.
For example, from 1995 to 2013, the average SAT score among Harvard admits (out of 800) was 766.6 for Asians, 744.7 for whites, 717.6 for Hispanics, 712.3 for Native Americans/Native Hawaiians, and 703.7 for blacks.
Once affirmative action students get into a school, they’re less likely to graduate than their peers. The reason for that: If someone gets accepted to a school because of affirmative action, he or she is not qualified to be at that school. And when someone drops out of college, even an elite college, odds are that person will never get a college degree from anywhere.
Additionally, legacy admissions are a form of affirmative action for rich people. Legacy admissions give preference to people with family connections to a school. If someone’s parents went to a school, the school may give that student preference — especially if the parents have donated to the school over the years. On a 1,600-point SAT scale, legacy admissions students receive the equivalent of a 160-point advantage over their peers, according to the New York Times.
Top line: Athletic ability, race, and family connections don’t have anything to do with academics. In turn, academic institutions shouldn’t use them in their admissions decisions. They should simply take the best students.
Tom Joyce (@TomJoyceSports) is a political reporter for the New Boston Post in Massachusetts.
