Will Fitzhugh

Cold Prospects
August 14, 2009
 

Today’s Boston Globe has a good-sized article on “Hot Prospects,”—local high school football players facing “increasing pressure from recruiters to make their college decisions early.”

That’s right, it is not the colleges that are getting pressure from outstanding students seeking admission based on their academic achievement, it is colleges putting pressure on high school athletes to get them to “sign” with the college. 

The colleges are required by the AAU to wait until the prospect is a Senior in high school before engaging in active recruiting including “visits and contact from college coaches,” and, for some local football players the recruiting pressure even comes from such universities as Harvard and Stanford. 

Perhaps Senior year officially starts in June, because the Globe reports that one high school tight end from Wellesley, Massachusetts, for example, “committed to Stanford in early June, ending the suspense of the region’s top player.”

The University of Connecticut “made an offer to” an athletic quarterback from Natick High School, “and a host of others, including Harvard and Stanford, are interested,” says the Globe.

In the meantime, high school football players are clearly not being recruited by college professors for their outstanding academic work. When it comes to academic achievement, high school students have to apply to colleges and wait until the college decides whether they will be admitted or not. Some students apply for “Early Decision,” but in that case, it is the college, not the athlete, who makes the decision to “commit.” 

Intelligent and diligent high school students who manage achievement in academics even at the high level of accomplishment of their football-playing peers who are being contacted, visited, and recruited by college coaches, do not find that they are contacted, visited, or recruited by college professors, no matter how outstanding their high school academic work may be.

In some other countries, the respect for academic work is somewhat different. One student, who earned the International Baccalaureate Diploma and had his 15,000-word independent study essay on the Soviet-Afghan War published in The Concord Review last year, was accepted to Christ Church College, Oxford, from high school. He reported to me that during the interview he had with tutors from that college, "they spent a lot of time talking to me about my TCR essay in the interview." He went on to say: “Oxford doesn't recognize or consider extra-curriculars/sports in the admissions process (no rowing recruits) because they are so focused on academics. So I thought it was pretty high praise of the Review that they were so interested in my essay (at that time it had not won the Ralph Waldo Emerson Prize).”

There are many other examples from other countries of the emphasis placed on academic achievement and the lack of emphasis on sports and other non-academic activities, perhaps especially in Asian countries. 

One young lady, a student at Boston Latin School, back from a Junior year abroad at a high school in Beijing, reported in the Boston Globe that: “Chinese students, especially those in large cities or prosperous suburbs and counties and even some in impoverished rural areas, have a more rigorous curriculum than any American student, whether at Charlestown High, Boston Latin, or Exeter. These students work under pressure greater than the vast majority of U.S. students could imagine...teachers encourage outside reading of histories rather than fiction.”

That is not to say that American (and foreign) high school students who do the work to get their history research papers published in The Concord Review don’t get into colleges. So far, ninety have gone to Harvard, seventy-four to Yale, twelve to Oxford, and so on, but the point is that, unlike their football-paying peers, they are not contacted, visited and recruited in the same way.