In middle school, Amanda Grady played golf because her parents thought it would get her into a good college. She didn’t stick with it. Then she discovered rowing, which was offered at her public high school in a well-off Orlando suburb.
Though relatively small for an open weight rower at 5-foot-9 and 130 pounds, Grady qualified for the U.S. junior development rowing program, which gave her direct access to college coaches. Such programs can now charge more than $5,000 for summer training camp.
That exposure, along with her high school team’s reputation as one of the best in the country, gave her a leg up when it came time to apply for college. She took official recruiting visits to four Ivy League schools, and the coaches at Yale, her top choice, helped walk her through the early admissions process.
An international baccalaureate student and merit scholar, Grady was a good candidate for Yale on academics alone. But she isn’t certain she would have gotten in without crew.
“I really think it comes down to the roll of the dice at that point,” she said. Grady, who now works in Silicon Valley at a mobile technology startup, graduated from Yale in 2012.
Varsity Blues
This month’s Varsity Blues scandal demonstrates the tremendous power that college coaches can wield. Prosecutors allege that a few dozen wealthy parents bribed coaches at schools including Yale, Georgetown and the University of Southern California to set aside spots for their children even though some didn’t even play the sports they claimed on their applications. But the affluent also use legal ways to take advantage of a system that favors athletes in college admissions.
Every year, tens of thousands of high school seniors from all walks of life compete for a limited number of spots on college basketball, football, baseball and softball teams. Ivy League universities and other elite schools also reserve a sizable slice of each class for kids with more exclusive pursuits, such as skiing, sailing and crew. While schools are trying to diversify the rosters, the sports remain overwhelmingly white, sporadically offered at public high schools and can require expensive equipment. The result is an admissions boost for the most privileged applicants.
Crew especially exemplifies how elite colleges tilt admissions toward the affluent. In the cutthroat game of college acceptance, an interest in rowing can offer a significant edge. It’s an open secret among some parents.
‘Chatted About’
“Rowing became a sport that was chatted about within certain athletic circles –- exclusively within these white upper-middle-class communities,” said University of Oklahoma education professor Kirsten Hextrum, who studies college sports recruiting.
A popular sport at East Coast prep schools, crew is harder to find at public U.S. high schools, with most concentrated in wealthy suburbs on the coasts, like Greenwich, Connecticut and Bethesda, Maryland.