To be sure, the more that highly selective liberal arts colleges relax academic admissions standards to get the best athletes they can, the worse the consequences on the intellectual life of the campus are, especially when they insist on having successful football teams (which require lots of players). But see the relevant comment in Gladwell’s “Getting In” on The Game of Life:

Male athletes, despite their lower S.A.T. scores and grades, and despite the fact that many of them are members of minorities and come from lower socioeconomic backgrounds than other students, turn out to earn a lot more than their peers. Apparently, athletes are far more likely to go into the high-paying financial-services sector, where they succeed because of their personality and psychological makeup. In what can only be described as a textbook example of burying the lead, Bowen and Shulman write:

One of these characteristics can be thought of as drive—a strong desire to succeed and unswerving determination to reach a goal, whether it be winning the next game or closing a sale. Similarly, athletes tend to be more energetic than the average person, which translates into an ability to work hard over long periods of time—to meet, for example, the workload demands placed on young people by an investment bank in the throes of analyzing a transaction. In addition, athletes are more likely than others to be highly competitive, gregarious and confident of their ability to work well in groups (on teams).

Shulman and Bowen would like to argue that the attitudes of selective colleges toward athletes are a perversion of the ideals of American élite education, but that’s because they misrepresent the actual ideals of American élite education. The Ivy League is perfectly happy to accept, among others, the kind of student who makes a lot of money after graduation. As the old saying goes, the definition of a well-rounded Yale graduate is someone who can roll all the way from New Haven to Wall Street.

This has to be true, as well, for highly selective liberal arts colleges, for several reasons: (1) while their endowments are large in a relative sense, they simply can’t approach Princeton’s $10.8B, for instance, so have to look at the bottom line to make sure they have long-term futures (and can continue to compete in the status game); (2) I would bet it’s harder to get into a Williams or an Amherst than a Harvard or a Princeton, not least b/c there are fewer seats, so there’s pressure on the smaller schools not to give in on academic merit (should such a thing exist and be measureable in an admissions process) too far; (3) moreover, being smaller, such schools would have to be more sensitive to potential negative effects on campus life, since athletes would make up a larger proportion of the student body than at larger schools, so again there’s pressure to keep admissions standards relatively high; (4) being competitive in DIII is very different than being competitive in DI (don’t tell me an Ivy League school wouldn’t love to make it to the second round of the NCAAs in basketball next year!), and there’s a wider range of high school athletes who can be competitive at that level, so the odds of being able to recruit academically as well as athletically talented people rise.

The bottom line for me is that athletes even at highly selective liberal arts colleges in DIII are not as different from the rest of the student body as they are at other institutions, so such schools should have an easier time integrating them into the cultural and intellectual life of the campus.

Even at a place like Fredonia, Music, Theater, and Arts majors put in as much time honing their artistic talents as anyone on a team does their athletic talents, so they are in as much danger of becoming segregated from the rest of the campus as athletes are. (I thought I was going to be getting a lot of artsy folks in my classes, but turns out they barely have time to take even gen ed courses b/c their major requirements are so stringent!) Why should we value artistic performances over athletic performances? Shouldn’t we encourage a diverse range of ways for students to contribute to campus life?

Distantly appreciated? Try openly resented. I think your plan, though, might actually strengthen town-gown relations since the investment in the community would be that more aboveboard . . .

“You learn things through athletic competition that you don’t learn in the classroom.” As a persistantly non-competitive athlete, I learned things through participation in sports. Competition I learned through academics. Go figure.

It is hard to figure out why spectators and fans treat this as such a bizarre proposition. It’s not hard to figure out why the NFL and NBA wouldn’t root for it–they’re getting their minor leagues free of any cost or hassle to them. But for the athletes and their families, this is a winner–no more of the crazy stuff they have to go through now to get a payoff, and no more exotic pretense at compliance with various rules and restrictions.