Morty took great pride in claiming that athletic admission were very different now then when he started 8 years ago. This was clearly a great success, in his mind. I agree. He offered few details, but see our previous discussions. If Williams still had the same process in place today that it hard 10 years ago, at least 10% of the class we actually have would be replaced with dumber (perhaps) athletically more gifted students with lower academic rankings. You can claim that Morty has gone too far. You can claim that he hasn’t done enough. But there is no doubt that he has made major changes, that the Williams student body is significantly different than what it would have been if Morty had not become President.

A reader asks:

Have you seen this? A few articles on the Harvard basketball coach and his apparent attempt to lower, or at least recruit below, the established academic standards.

Yes, I saw this story in the Times but it is tough to discern a direct Williams connection. One certainly hears rumors that, say, the Amherst mens basketball team is not filled with Phi Beta Kappas, but the same sort of complaints were voiced about the Ephs five years ago.

Yet this is a problem that I have a simple solution for: Make public the average SAT scores and college grades for the team as a whole, weighted both equally and by playing time. This makes it fairly clear who is cheating and by how much.

This Chronicle of Education article from 6 years ago allows us to review the history of “tips” — significant admissions preferences for athletic excellence — and speculate on the future. Previous discussion here. Join us below.
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Jeff Zeeman ‘97 highlighted these two articles in a recent thread, but they both deserve their own post.

A story on Williams wrestling.

It’s only a formality now. Georgetown’s Ryan Malo will be continuing the St. John’s Prep connection at Williams College.

Malo, the 2007 New England champion with a perfect 58-0 record, began the year on scholarship at Boston University. But, after splitting 10 matches, he withdrew from school because he did not enjoy living in the city.

While taking classes at Northern Essex Community College for the last month, Malo has been mulling a transfer. Although he briefly considered Wesleyan and other schools, Williams was always the frontrunner and it looks like it will be his destination.

“It looks pretty good — I just have to wait for my official letter (of acceptance),” said Malo. “It’s a great school and having kids I know so well there just makes it better.”

Somehow I think that most transfer applications from BU, much less from Northern Essex Community College, are not so successful.

Despite Williams policy on tips, Dave Fehr asks “Will the Ephs ever catch the Jeffs?”

The last several weeks have convinced me that the men’s basketball teams of Williams and Amherst are miles apart - and I’m not talking about the 65 miles along Route 116 that separate the two towns. The Jeffs are 18-2 (as of Feb. 4), ranked second in the country and are, I believe, destined to return to Salem to defend the national championship they won last March.

The Ephs, meanwhile, started 12-0 but are finding it difficult to win in their league and have dropped a total of five games at this writing, including two to Amherst.

So, of course, I’m convinced the sky is falling and I’ll never again see these two teams competitive, much less Williams competitive on a national level. The only flaw in this analysis is that I felt the same way a decade ago and was happily proved wrong. When the Mike Nogelo Final Four teams of ‘97 and ‘98 graduated, I figured that was it for Williams and any further NCAA hoops glory. A short five years later, the Ephs were national champs, and they almost repeated in 2004.

One thing has changed, however, as back then there was no Nesbitt Net, which is director of Admissions Dick Nesbitt’s and President Morty Schapiro’s increasingly fine-meshed screen that weeds out applicants, including star athletes, with “low” board scores.

Wonder what the academic credentials of the Amherst mens basketball team are . . .

The rest of both articles is below.

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Want some insight into how the Williams “admissions process” works for elite athletes? Start here.

The injury couldn’t have come at a worse time for St. John’s Prep football player Danny Vaczy, who broke his foot on the first day of football camp in Maine last August.

The 6-foot-3, 255-pound lineman had been counted on to anchor the Eagles’ line last fall, but wound up missing most of his senior season. Finally, he returned late in the regular season and wound up starting both ways on Thanksgiving morning vs. Xaverian, playing offensive guard and nose tackle.

Not only was it extremely frustrating to spend so much time on the sidelines, but Vaczy figured it would kill his chances to play at the college level.

That didn’t happen, though. The Peabody native will spend the next four years on the gridiron for Williams College, following in St. John’s Prep tradition.

Former Prep teammates Trevor Powers, who will captain the 2008 Ephs squad, and freshman Tim Kiely are already fixtures in the Williams lineup.

“I went for my visit last month, and it was the first time I had seen the school,” said Vaczy. “I saw Kiely, but didn’t get to spend time with him because he had a wrestling match. Powers was one of the kids chosen to give a speech to the recruits.

“I honestly didn’t think college teams would be interested in me because I didn’t play at all until the last three games, and really only a lot against Xaverian. Coach (Jim) O’Leary called in five or six of us interested in playing college ball, and right after that I started getting calls. I owe a lot to him for taking time to tell schools about me.”

Once the process of looking at schools began, Vaczy was able to narrow his choices down to Georgetown, Wesleyan and Williams. He had originally thought about Boston College, but didn’t think he could play there.

As soon as he made his official visit to Wesleyan, though, things started happening quickly for him. Williams head coach Mike Whalen offered him a chance to attend school there that very weekend.

“I gave Coach Whalen my word, and we had to make sure my application went through without any problems,” said Vaczy.

Do you think that anyone in the admissions office even read Vaczy’s essays? If so, why? Was there anything that he could have possibly written that would have changed the admissions decision from Yes to No? I doubt it.

Best part?

Vaczy, who has a 4.13 grade point average, intends to major in business or law. He played rugby at the Prep, but will throw the discus in spring track this year.

“I’m just glad that everything has worked out so well,” he said.

Me too. The law and business majors at Williams are amazing. I have no doubt that Coach Whalen told Vaczy all about them.

Rant follows:
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PTC asks

David- Were you an Athlete in College? A lot of your posts suggest to me that you think sports is given too much emphasis when it comes to getting into Williams? I am just wondering.

1) Whether or not I was an athlete at Williams is fairly irrelevant to this issue. I was.

2) I am pro-athlete but anti-tip, or at least anti the current amount of emphasis on athletics in admissions at Williams. In other words, I think that Williams should place a lot of emphasis on athletics. If anything, I would like to see more done for Eph athletes.

For example, there ought to be a freshmen soccer team. Many male (and female?) Ephs come to Williams loving to play soccer but not skilled enough for either the varsity or JV teams. Such Ephs should have another option, at least for freshman year, a way to wear the purple and gold for the school they love. Even if this were a casual team, coached by a senior, with only a handful of games against local high schools, it would still be a wonderful experience for the Eph athletes involved. Williams should provide that experience. The same goes for JV baseball, freshman basketball and any other sports with enough interest.

3) But, even though I want more done for Ephs who are athletes, I would like to see less emphasis placed on athletics in admission. This has already come to pass in the 6 years since the Report on Varsity Athletics. There are many fewer athletes admitted to Williams with sub-1200 SAT scores than there used to be. Some folks, like former baseball coach Dave Barnard (and even I), predicted (and here) that Williams would no longer be able to compete, at least in the elite men’s sports which have often needed admissions help in the past. Fortunately, that prediction turned out wrong.

If Williams, even with more stringent admissions, can still win the Directors Cup, have football go undefeated and win NESCAC championships in basketball and baseball, there is no reason to think that we need more emphasis on athletics. If anything, I would like to see (and I expect Morty to take) another step in the opposite direction. Right now, there are Academic Rank 4 and 5 athletes who are admitted while AR 1 students, especially foreigners, are rejected. That ought to change, at least on the margin. I bet that it will.

I am pro-athlete and anti-tip.

Baseball Coach Dave Barnard writes on the need for an academic index for NESCAC.

In Support of an NESCAC Academic Index for Athletes
by Dave Barnard, Head Baseball/Ast. Football Coach, Williams College
May 18,2006

It has been 2 years since Williams College was won a NESCAC championship or even a NESCAC playoff game in a men’s American team sport (football, basketball, baseball, hockey and lacrosse).

Since it seems clear that we are not going to put the Jeannie back in the bottle in terms of admitting 7’s as athletic tips (SAT scores of 1150-1250), Williams should be leading the effort to adopt a league-wide academic index (minimum standards based on each school’s median SAT scores) and a NESCAC enforcement mechanism just as Harvard, Yale and Princeton did when Penn rattled off several consecutive Ivy League football championships in the 1980’s with kids who could not get into any other Ivy league school.

It has now gotten to the point where Williams has very little academic overlap with any other school in the league except Amherst in those sports (Amherst will go lower than us for an impact player and has admitted to taking 75 priority listed athletes for 6 fewer sports than Williams). We have no players with less than 1250 SAT’s and all other NESCAC schools except Amherst have no significant starters with SAT’s over 1250. Since the pool of players is much larger at the lower SAT levels (there might also be an inverse correlation between SAT scores and ability to play men’s American team sports) it stands to reason that the schools that take the lower academic kids have the best players and thus the best teams.

I don’t think it’s fair to our male team sport student-athletes to put them into situations where they are at a competitive disadvantage within the league.

When an academic index has been brought up by Williams coaches internally or by Williams athletic administrators at league meetings we immediately hear opposition from the biggest offenders of the two standard deviation rule, schools who not coincidentally don’t require SAT scores. “How can we have an academic index when we don’t require SAT scores?” is the standard retort. Of course, the main reason those schools don’t require SAT scores is so they can admit players who wouldn’t otherwise academically qualify.

Rules without enforcement are meaningless, evidence the 14 slot rule in football and the 66 NESCAC athletic priority admit agreement. Amherst had 28 freshmen football players on their roster last year. At this point I don’t think that the other NESCAC schools even pretend to adhere to 66 athletic priority admits.

Several years ago in a position paper entitled “It’s All About Who Gets In,” I predicted that if Williams unilaterally reduced athletic priority slots while eliminating low band admits it would “simply be a matter of time before our teams are significantly less competitive.” That statement has certainly come to fruition for the men’s American team sports. If we don’t push for league-wide minimum SAT standards and enforcement of those parameters I don’t see how that situation is going to change.

UPDATE: First draft contained a mistake with regard to the number of years since a NESCAC championship. It is 2, not 3. Thanks to Rory for pointing this out and to Barnard for the correction. See comment thread for full details.

My comments below:

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Did you hear? Williams is really good at sports. The Ad Hoc Faculty Committee on Athletics was formed at the behest of President Morton Schapiro to explore the status of athletics at the college. A part summary, part discussion of their report follows.

Varsity athletics have a profound impact on Williams College — even moreso than at Division I colleges, because there only 5% of the student body is composed of varsity athletes, and here 30% of students are varsity athletes. Over half of Williams students say that their status as an athlete or a non-athlete defines them at Williams, and 70% of students believe that athletics are significant or dominant in organizing social life — a feeling that is much more pronounced among students that are not varsity athletes. Only 30% of students feel that varsity athletics enhances the educational mission of the College.

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When I saw Morty speak in New Haven, he said that the question he is asked about most by alumni is the emphasis on athletics at Williams. Sure enough, Morty was asked a few questions about athletics despite his preemptory oratory. Seemingly, alumni are ambivalent about winning 7 of 8 Sears Cups: while they are proud of the accomplishment, they are worried about the effect athletics has on the campus culture. I think a couple of common arguments need to be addressed:

#1: Tipped athletes are less academically able. I don’t think this is really a matter of debate. If a coach has a limited number of tips, why spend it on an athlete whose academics are strong enough to ensure admission? Why not use the tip on an athlete whose academic credentials are significantly weaker? Coaches aren’t stupid and put their tips to best use.

#2: Tipped athletes change the culture of the campus. Again, I’m not sure there can be much serious debate about this topic. While I met some extremely smart athletes at Williams, would anyone seriously argue that the hockey team is a bastion of learned discourse? If you were forced to categorize the football team as intellectual or anti-intellectual, which of the two categories would you choose? Many of the tipped athletes know they were admitted despite questionable academic credentials and adopt the identity of a dumb jock. [Note: In my entry, the football, hockey, and basketball player got into an argument as to whose SAT scores were lowest -- it wasn't clear whether the winner had the high or low score.] This anti-intellectual culture spreads through the team and the athletes’ social circles making the culture more pervasive. At my reunion, I was struck by the degree to which our class was bifurcated: athletes on one side of the room and non-athletes on the other.

#3: Tips are necessary to maintain the quality of the sports teams. Anyone who argues otherwise is seriously underestimating the skill of the athletes at Williams. Dartmouth is considered the jock school of the Ivies, but they routinely lose to Princeton and UPenn teams that admit better athletes (with questionable academic resumes). Trinity and Connecticut College have lower admission standards than Williams and routinely lose to the Ephs. Sure, Williams has good coaching, but good athletes are a must (unless you are Jerry Sloan — but even he missed the playoffs this year).

I think these three “facts” can be used to construct three models/archetypes for elite liberal arts colleges. I’ll attach a name to each model, but the name is intended to be impressionistic. The goal is to illustrate what Williams might look like under different admission regimes, not seriously compare different schools.

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There are a couple of plausible arguments for large investments in sports at large universities:
1) Alumni donations;
2) Free advertising.
[Note: People sometimes offer the argument that sports pay for themselves, but athletic departments generate revenue in very few universities.]

Do these arguments apply to NESCAC type schools? To get a quick read on this question, I created a small dataset. The observations are NESCAC member schools plus Swarthmore, Carleton, and Pomona (the broader peers of Williams). I coded the 2000 endowment for each school, the number of hits I got in Google when I typed the school name, the US News & World Report 2004 Ranking, and the average Sears Cup performance over the past four years. [Note: Tufts is listed by US News as a University, so the ranking is not meaningful.] You can see the dataset by clicking the link here.
Download file

In answer to the endowment question, there does not appear to be any systematic relationship between Sears Cup performance and endowment size. So, it is unlikely that Alumni give money to Williams based on the performance of sports teams.

However, one does find evidence that the US News Ranking and Endowment are correlated. I take this to mean that schools with large endowments can hire the quantity of faculty and build the lush campuses that do well in the ever changing US News formula. That is, large endowments cause high rankings. However, one shouldn’t be so quick to discount the converse. I bet alumni would rather see #1 in US News than a #1 in the Sears Cup despite the fact that the latter is an objective and the former is a subjective measure.

Well, what about advertising? Here the story is mixed. The best advertising for a liberal arts college is the US News ranking, but there is no relationship between the ranking and Sears Cup performance (which isn’t surprising since we already know the formula US News uses does not count sports victories). However, there does appear to be a little evidence that sports does serve as advertising when looking at the Google Hits. Williams and Amherst receive more hits than Swarthmore, Pomona, and Carleton who are comparably ranked schools. History and tradition play a role, but sports might be in the mix as well. Middlebury offers slight confirmation for this argument.

However, the two NESCAC schools with the largest number of Google hits are Tufts and Wesleyan. Both schools are Universities with graduate programs. Perhaps adding academic programs is a better way for a small college to generate press than winning the Sears Cup. Winning an obscure award may not generate the amount of press that a good graduate program can (which publishes papers, receives grants, holds symposiums, etc.). Of course, it could be that a graduate program simply generates web pages or fails to advertise to high school students.

I wouldn’t put any stock in a dataset of 14 schools, but the quick glance suggests that Division III schools do not gain much revenue or advertising from top flight sports teams.

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If “tips” are students that would not have been accepted to Williams were it not for their athletic ability, we need a term for students who were accepted to Williams because of their academic ability but whose athletic experience at Williams was negatively impacted by the tip system. Perhaps “tip-offs” or “untips” or . . .

Whatever you call these individuals, Nate Foster ‘01 was one:

I think you hit the nail on the head with your last blog post on tips.

I was a decent, though by no means outstanding, baseball player at my high school and captained the team my senior year. Many of my teammates went on to play at small colleges. So when I showed up at Williams, I thought I might be able to “walk on” to the baseball team, even though Barnard didn’t know anything about me. There were a few of first years (3-4?) in the same position.

Barnard ostensibly gave us a fair shot at making the team, but it soon became clear that in his mind, we were fighting for the last 1-2 spots on a 26-man Florida roster (it’s 32 now?). After a few months of training where it was clear that even if we did make the team, we would probably never play in our 4 years with the number of people who were being tipped/recruited, all of us quit.

I like to think that I could have played baseball at the DIII level. And I feel ashamed to have bailed out before finding out for sure if I could have made the team and/or played. But at the same time, like you, I wonder why we need to have a baseball team that dominates NESCAC when there are people who get into Williams without tips and with whom we could field a competitive baseball team. All of this about needing tips to keep the balance of culture at Williams and prevent us from becoming Swarthmore is total crap (and, given Sam Crane’s recent comments about the intellectual culture at Williams, becoming more like Swarthmore might not be a bad thing!) We could certainly field competitive (if not dominant) teams without using so many, if any, tips.

What he said.

Oren Cass ‘05 has lots of interesting things to say on the topics of tips. Just keep scrolling. Cass asks:

But why do we admit people who are good at sports? Wouldn’t it be better to let our brilliant “academic admits” fill up all those varsity rosters and benefit from the experiences? Absolutely… if that’s what they were good at.

I guess it all depends on what you mean by “good.” I don’t see Cass, or any other defender of tips, squarely confronting one of the most important — and immutable — aspects of athletics at Williams: there are only so many spots on a given team, there are only so many minutes of playing time to go around.

How would Cass feel about tips if he hadn’t made the baseball team, if all the wonderful experiences that he correctly ascribes to varsity athletics at Williams were not available to him?

There are people like that out there of course. Cass might even know their names. Baseball coach Dave Barnard certainly does. There are 32 spots on the baseball roster. What about the 33rd, 34th, and 35th best baseball players at Williams? Where are they now?

Answer: They didn’t make the team. They were cut. They, presumably, were not tips and got into Williams without reference to their speed on the bases. They don’t get to go to Florida with the team. They don’t get to play Amherst. They don’t get to talk about varsity athletics at their job interviews. They never wear the purple.

How would Cass feel if he were in their shoes? How does he explain to them — good high school baseball players who love the game and who would get as much out of the experience of playing for Dave Barnard as he does— that the tips policy makes sense?

I don’t think that he can.