Reporter | Lin Zi people
Edit | Yellow Moon
1
This morning, Gu Ailing will launch a challenge to the second medal at the Winter Olympics in the women's steeplechase final of freestyle skiing. In the freestyle ski women's big jump final on the 8th, she completed a super difficult 1620-degree turn in the air in the third round of the competition and won the championship. This week she will also compete in the freestyle ski U-shaped track event.
In the past week, Gu Ailing's outstanding performance has caused quite a stir on social networks, and her personal experience and growth story have also sparked a lot of discussion. What makes many Chinese parents envious is that this skiing genius girl was also admitted to Stanford University with a SAT score of nearly full score.
Stanford University is not only the nation's top research university, but also the cradle of Olympic talent. Since the United States began participating in the Olympic Games in 1912, the school's students have won at least one medal at every Olympic Games. At the 2016 Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro, Stanford students won 27 medals, setting a new record for the university. At the 2020 Tokyo Olympics, Stanford and USC students both won 10 gold medals for the U.S. delegation, making them the two universities with the highest number of Olympic champions.
Stanford University Campus (Source: Visual China)
In fact, the U.S. Olympic delegation over the years has been made up of university athletes, for example, more than 75% of the 626 members of the U.S. delegation to the 2020 Tokyo Olympics were university athletes. This reflects the unique "collegiate model" of the U.S. Olympic talent selection system. On the one hand, the development of american college sports continues to cultivate talents for important events such as the Olympic Games; but on the other hand, the resources poured into college sports by top Universities in the United States, especially the out-of-line admission of sports students, have also repeatedly triggered controversies about educational equity.
Olympic champion on a college campus
Most of the university athletes who qualify for the Olympic Games are active in various sports leagues organized by the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA). According to the NCAA, more than 200 current or former NCAA athletes participated in the Beijing Winter Olympics. NCAA is the largest college sports association in North America, composed of more than 1,000 colleges and universities in the United States and Canada, organizing 13 ball leagues such as rugby, basketball, baseball, and ice hockey, and 10 non-ball sports leagues such as athletics, gymnastics, rowing, fencing, and skiing. Rugby, basketball, baseball and ice hockey are the four most watched sports and the most invested by schools.
Image source: ncaa.org
Based on the size of each school, the abundance of athletic funding, and the strength of the athletic program, the NCAA divides member schools from highest to lowest into Division I, Division II, and Division III. Each level is divided into a number of leagues (Conferences) that hold leagues, each of which consists of about ten schools. It is worth mentioning that the first level of schools usually attract sports students with scholarships to join, and the first level of the league is often a major event that attracts the attention of American university students and alumni.
Unlike many other countries, the United States does not directly invest in the Olympic Movement at the national level, so the U.S. Olympic Committee receives private funding and benefits in large part from the development of college sports. "We have the best [athletic talent development] system in the world, and the talent pipeline from the university to the U.S. delegation is well-functioning." Sarah Wilhelmi, senior director of university cooperation at the U.S. Olympic Committee, said.
According to Scott Stricklin, director of the U.S. Olympic Committee's University Sport Sustainability Think Tank, the average U.S. college spends more than $5 billion a year on Olympic sports. This allows university athletes to use the facilities and resources provided by their schools and the opportunities to compete in various leagues to grow into mature athletes with Olympic qualifications. As a result, U.S. sports officials don't need to hand-pick athletes for international events, they naturally stand out from college sports events. "It's an extremely efficient mechanism for the U.S. Olympic Committee, and the performance of U.S. athletes at the Olympics proves that it's also very successful." Stricklin said.
As the example of Gu Ailing reflects, the "university model" of U.S. Olympic talent selection benefits not only the United States. In the case of Rio 2016 and Tokyo 2020, athletes from more than 100 countries played in the NCAA system before competing in both Olympic Games.
That's because the United States is an attractive destination for top international athletes – almost the only place where young people can pursue a degree at one of the world's top universities while developing a career in sports. American swimmer Katie Ledecky was a freshman at Stanford University when she competed at the 2016 Rio Olympics; by 2021, she had earned a bachelor's degree in psychology and was the recipient of five Olympic gold medals and one Olympic silver medal. Chen Wei, the men's singles free skating champion in figure skating at the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics, is a Yale Undergraduate Student of 2024.
2022 Beijing Winter Olympics figure skating men's singles free skating champion Chen Wei (Source: Visual China) opens the back door for white elite kids?
But on the other hand, the resources poured into college sports by top Universities in the United States, especially the out-of-line admission of sports students, have also repeatedly caused controversy over the issue of educational equity. In 2018, Atlantic published a story titled "College Sports Help Rich White Students Get Admitted." Sports at top universities are almost "affirmative actions tailored to the children of wealthy whites." Despite years of calls for the promotion of student diversity, college sports still largely dominate America's top universities with white students from wealthy families.
While many black athletes can be seen in basketball and rugby, the most eye-catching basketball and football programs in the first division, "catty" actually exists in sports that are less publicly concerned but require a lot of money and resources to master. In the case of sailing, golf, water polo, fencing, and lacrosse in the Ivy League, urban high schools attended by a large number of non-white students often do not organize these programs, and they have long been considered sports in suburban country clubs. According to the NCAA, none of the 232 first-division league sailors in 2017 were African-American, and 85 percent of college lacrosse players and 90 percent of college hockey players were white.
Rugby match (Image source: Figureworm)
Kirsten Hextrum, a professor at the University of Oklahoma, said in an interview with The Atlantic that access to these niche and highly specialized sports often requires abundant financial resources. To become a college sports league athlete, a child needs to have his own coach, attend summer camp, travel around for tournaments, and buy expensive sports gear. According to The Harvard Crimson's annual freshman survey, 46.3 percent of recruited athletes in the class of 2022 come from families with annual household incomes above $250,000, up from 1 in 3 of all 2022 undergraduates. It is worth mentioning that because Ivy League universities and small third-tier colleges do not provide athlete scholarships, athletes from low-income families studying at these schools cannot receive funding.
At the same time, many top universities lower their performance requirements when admitting athletes. It is no exaggeration to say that recruiting athletes is often an applicant's greatest admission advantage in addition to academic performance. Take Harvard University as an example: The Atlantic pointed out that all students applying to Harvard university will be ranked from 1 to 6 according to academic qualifications, and up to 70% of athlete applicants ranked 4 will be admitted to Harvard, but the acceptance rate of non-athlete applicants in the same ranking is only 0.076%; 83% of athlete applicants with the highest academic performance will be admitted to Harvard, but the acceptance rate of non-athlete applicants with equivalent academic ability is only 16%.
The U.S. college admissions scandal that broke out in 2019 exposed the space for college sports team coaches to operate in a black box when selecting athletes, resulting in more serious educational injustices. In what prosecutors described as the largest ever investigated case of admissions fraud, 50 people were charged with bribery to college athletic team coaches or admissions inspectors to get their children into prestigious schools like Stanford and Yale. According to the New York Times, the university sports with a large black box space are not really high-profile sports such as football and basketball — which, if there is a money transaction, often flow from coaches to the athletes they want to recruit — but rowing, volleyball, tennis and soccer (which are often referred to as "Olympic sports"). The most common means of fraud is to fake a "recruited walk-on" identity for a student.
Source: Visual China
The above reports point out that fraudsters choose these sports for a reason. The membership roster of the university women's rowing team can be as high as 125 people, which means that many rowing teams have a quota to recruit temporary team members. Such a large team is usually designed to help colleges balance out the number of men's football teams and comply with the provisions of the federal affirmative action. But in reality, many of the temporary team members may never have had the opportunity to play, and in the case of college admissions fraud, a small number of temporary team members may not even be on the program at all.
In the view of Rick Eckstein, professor of sociology at Villanova University and author of "How Intercollegiate Athletics are Hurting Girls' Sports: The Pay to Play Pipeline," the drama of being admitted to a good university by forging athlete status can work. This is largely because the mechanics of college sports itself have caused unfair college admissions. College athletes are early decisions — schools often want to be able to get the best sports talent before other opponents. This means that the greater the number of college athletes admitted, the higher the proportion of admission places locked in advance.
In addition to securing the sports talent they want for schools, this mechanism has an additional benefit: since early admission students are not recorded in the admission rate, the early admission mechanism can help schools artificially reduce the admission rate and create a brand image of "difficult to apply" for the school. This operation will attract more applicants and in fact reduce the acceptance rate. In this way, universities can effortlessly (without worrying about improving the quality of teaching and research) to give students and parents the impression that "this university is difficult to apply for and therefore a good university". Given the very limited number of scholarships for athletic specialty students and the large number of students who can afford to participate in niche sports, the inclusion of a few average but wealthy athletes on the women's rowing team or soccer team has little to lose to the school. Eckstein argues that while prosecutors investigating college admissions fraud emphasize that "a separate admissions system cannot be created for the rich," it is more critical to fundamentally reverse the already biased college sports and admissions mechanisms in favor of the wealthy than to catch a few fraudsters.
Resources:
“NCAA Student-Athletes at the 2022 Winter Olympics,” NCAA, February 3, 2022.
https://www.ncaa.com/news/ncaa/article/2022-02-03/ncaa-student-athletes-2022-winter-olympics
“The Universities with the Most U.S. Gold Medalists in the 2020 Olympics,” Forbes, August 9, 2021.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaeltnietzel/2021/08/09/the-universities-with-the-most-us-gold-medalists-in-the-2020-olympics/?sh=28e2466e326e
“College Sports Proves Integral to Olympic Movement,” NCAA, July 23, 2021.
https://www.ncaa.org/news/2021/7/23/general-college-sports-proves-integral-to-olympic-movement.aspx
“This University’s Athletes Will Dominate the U.S. Olympic Team in Tokyo 2020,“ The Profile, July 22, 2021.
https://theprofile.substack.com/p/tokyo-olympics-college-student-athletes
“Admissions Scandal Stokes Hard Questions on Recruited Athletes,” The New York Times, March 19, 2019.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/19/sports/college-admissions-scandal-athletes.html
“Who Gets the Largest College Admissions Advantage? Let’s Look at the Athletes,” The Washington Post, March 13, 2019.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2019/03/13/who-gets-largest-college-admissions-advantage-lets-look-athletes/
“College Sports Help Rich White Students Get Admitted,” The Atlantic, October 23, 2018.
https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2018/10/college-sports-benefits-white-students/573688/