“In those 66 cases, the athletic input controls the decision,” said Parker. For Amherst, that number is 66 recruits, or athletic factors (AFs). He said that every NESCAC school currently subscribes to the process. By 2002, a group of admissions deans had successfully modified the nascent system of the Little Three to be uniform across the league.Īs explained in Bowdoin’s 2006 reaccreditation self-survey, the NESCAC’s target-based athletic admissions model aimed to “reduce the number of recruited athletes admitted…and raise the academic profile of athletes.” The overall volume and competition of D-III sports had increased significantly in the past few decades, which at Bowdoin brought about “legitimate questions about the opportunity costs of admitting athletes to fill 31 teams at the expense of other highly qualified applicants in the Bowdoin pool.” The plan in actionĪccording to Parker, each NESCAC institution is allowed a maximum of 14 recruits for having a football team, with an additional two per remaining varsity sport. First, Amherst and Williams brought in Wesleyan, the third member school of the NESCAC’s so-called “Little Three.” Then the topic of these schools’ recruiting caps came up at a meeting of NESCAC presidents, who asked for admissions representatives from the whole conference to collaborate on reformulating the system. Implementing these new regulations conference-wide, however, was an arduous process. “Amherst and Williams lined our athletes up and said, ‘We’re virtually identical schools academically, so our athletes should be identical,’” said Parker. He explained that Williams’ and Amherst’s presidents were both interested in re-evaluating the number of recruited athletes and their academic calibers. “There was virtually no regulation or oversight of the relationship between admissions offices and the athletic departments,” he said in an interview with the Orient. When he arrived at Amherst in 1999 from Williams-where he had held the same position-the conference’s recruiting was very different from what it is now. Parker was integral in formulating the current NESCAC-wide system in the early 2000s. When it was on the table exactly what we do, it wasn’t as bad as some faculty thought.” History of new guidelines “The real danger was in not acknowledging that we give preferential treatment to athletes,” said Parker in the article. The NESCAC’s highly regulated recruitment system was first widely revealed in a December 2005 New York Times article featuring Amherst’s dean of admissions and financial aid, Thomas Parker. Multiple Bowdoin coaches declined to comment to the Orient on the specifics of the process, and according to Ryan, school policy dictates that numbers not be distributed publicly. Though a set system has been in place since 2002 and admissions and athletic administrators are generally open to talking vaguely about it, access to the specific information remains guarded and there are few means through which laypeople can find explanations. “With that, a system has been put in place to help ensure that institutions are able to develop athletic programs that are competitive within the conference.”ĭiscussion of the role of student-athletes in liberal arts academia is a common conversation topic, but this admissions process is widely unknown. “NESCAC institutions recognize the important role that athletics play on our campuses,” said Ashmead White Director of Athletics Tim Ryan. This system is not confined to Brunswick, and for the last decade, the entire NESCAC has used a process to ensure that its sports events are perenially competitive, enabling uniformity in the 11 member institutions and establishing a mutual understanding of how rosters are filled. Admissions gives many of these students’ application materials early reads to alert coaches to the likelihood that the student-athlete will be accepted. And of the admitted students slotted for participation in athletics at Bowdoin, many were given preferential treatment in the admissions process.Ī set number of students are endorsed by Bowdoin coaches each year even though their high school grades and test scores do not necessarily meet the standards of the average accepted Bowdoin students. With last week’s acceptance letters out, a total of 1,032 students have been offered spots in the Class of 2018.