College Admissions Counseling Blog

It has long been know that many highly selective colleges relax their academic standards to recruit athletes. This has been true at the Ivy League colleges including Harvard but now it appears that Harvard is willing to relax their admissions standards even further to recruit basketball players. The New York Times is reporting on these relaxed standards as well as possible violations of NCAA recruiting rules.

While I understand the desire of Harvard to be competitive in basketball and the other sports in which it participates, this does not seem to be a reason to lower academic standards. With an admission rate below 10% and over 27,000 applications it is difficult to believe that academic standards need to be relaxed to find basketball players. Moreover, Harvard, as well as all other colleges, need to keep in mind that college is primarily about education, not sports. While sports are a wonderful addition to most colleges they are a sideline, not the primary focus.