March Madness: How important are sports and how important is the name of a school?

Should I quit sports?

I am on my school's varsity tennis team; everyday we have to practice to 6:30 sometimes to even 8. This is taking a toll in my life as I am already working 20 hours a week as an assistant manager at a well known fast food restaurant (won't disclose) and taking 3 AP courses while having to manage straight A's. My parents are extremely demanding and they expect me to go to a top 15 college despite being a first generation college student and in a low-income family. I am stressed up to the point where I have breakouts like girls have their periods. Should I just quit sports? How would I be able to explain this to my parents? They assume that sports exponentially increase your chance of admission. Please help me guide my dull life!

I was asked to answer this question on the website quora.com

First of all, you should proud of how you have managed to balance academics, a job, sports and parents who are putting far too much pressure on you.

I will not presume to state unequivocally what you should do, as there are too many things I do not know about your particular case and too many things that go on in each admission office to make any definitive statement about what might happen should you decide to give up tennis. In other words, I cannot say what the ‘truth’ of your situation is.

What I will say is based on my experience in admission but also on my understanding of the ways that many admission offices approach cases that are at least in some ways related to yours.

The first thing to determine is whether you have what schools call a special talent in tennis. What I mean by this: Are you good enough to compete for the varsity team? The admission office gives a significant edge to students who their coaches are recruiting. The number of these recruits is usually quite small and you have to have talent that rises (if you are applying to Division I schools) to the national or international level. If you are looking at small liberal arts schools that are highly ranked you will also get an edge in admission but not nearly at the same level as Division I schools.

Given that almost all the students who play a sport are not recruited athletes, then next question you might want to know the answer to is how important is the fact you participate in a sport to your admission. And the answer, in most cases, is not all the much. Recruited athletes are a big deal, but a student who does well or even ok in a sport does not have an activity that will stand out to the most selective schools. It is not that participation in sports will not teach you skills that extend far deeper than learning to serve, it’s just that having a sport on your list of activities is not all that big a deal. In other words, don’t think this one activity will be the thing that gets you in or keeps you out.  Therefore, giving up the sport is not all that big of a risk when it comes to admission to schools.

Given how you have described yourself, I would actually think that your part time job might be an activity you want to highlight in your list of activities instead of tennis. Why do I say this? There are many things you can learn from working a part time job whether it is at a fast food restaurant or at Google. I have read some great responses from students on how working at fast food places has educated them in certain ways about the people who work these jobs to support family and how hard this is. I have read others that have learned about how businesses need to work to be successful. To give one example: there was a student who wanted, after university graduation, to open up a coffee shop. I had him meet with a successful business owner in this field who went to a fancy school and had an MBA etc. His advice to the student was to take a year and be a barista. The reason was that the experience of learning about customer service and employees and costs from the ground up would be more useful than taking classes in graduate school, at least at the beginning of the process of creating a small business. There are many things you can learn in a job they don’t teach you at school.

The other part about your work I would want to know is whether the money you are making goes to help support your family or toward your college fund. If either of these is true, then you should certainly let the schools you are applying to know this is the primary reason you are working. The majority of students who end up at top 20 schools have never “had” to have a job to pay for their education or help support the family. In fact, many students who attend elite schools have not worked much, if at all. They may have had a chance to do internships or do summer study or travel the world but they actually have not been involved with the ‘real’ world that most people who are not from significant economic means live each day.  (Read the book, Nickel and Dimed for a great overview about this issue).

Most admission officers are sympathetic toward students who have to overcome challenges and being in a low-income family and helping to support yourself and them demonstrates grit and a willingness to do what it takes to try to succeed in life. You will find that most admission officers are anything but elitists when it comes to evaluating students who are outside the top income brackets. Some schools may be limited in the number of low-income students they can take because of limits on financial aid, but this is a separate issue from how the admission officers think and feel about low-income students. Most want to give them a break if at all possible. With all the talk in articles and books these days about how the top schools are bastions of privilege, this part of the story often gets left out.

What I have just written brings me to my next point. As a first generation low-income student who has taken strong courses, earned all A’s and who is balancing a set of expectations and activities, you have the chance to communicate what you have done that very few in your situation have been able to do. The odds are stacked against students in your situation and you have over overcome much to be where you are. The essay questions that schools ask may be a place for you to talk about this. Schools really do want to bring in students who have beaten the odds and will add to the mix of students at the school. I am not suggesting you brag about what you have done. Instead, giving details about how you spend your days and nights will let readers draw their own conclusions about your personality and potential for success.

Having parents with incredibly high expectations is both a curse and, at least to some degree, a blessing. People like Amy Chua have been blasted for telling how she pushed her kids to be the best, but in so doing her children ended up with great options. On the other hand, these expectations come with a huge psychic cost to you and for that I am sorry. I guess I would put it this way. If you had to choose between parents who don’t care a whit about how you do, or ones who push you too hard which would you pick? It would be nice to have parents who were in the middle of these extremes but life does not always work out that way. The amount of pressure being brought to bear on students is far greater than it has ever been. Parents who have had to struggle economically often see that education is the door to opportunity in life. They care so much about performance as they are scared that your not getting into a top ranked school will limit your options.

What they do not understand, and this applies to many parents in the highest economic brackets too, is that the name of the school you attend does not matter nearly as much as the fit of the school and how you do when you are there. There are hundreds of great schools out there for you and if you do well at any of them you will have options after you graduate that will let them change their belief that the name of a school your destiny. They may not see this right now. I would encourage you to have them read Frank Bruni's book, just published this week that addresses this issue in great detail. I will end with a quote from this book. Tara is a friend of mine and she knows from personal experience the world you are from. She works at one the elite boarding schools in the US, but her heart is with students like you and what she says is all true.

And that’s what keeps Tara Dowling, the Choate college counselor, moving forward, despite all of the parents who ask her why their kids didn’t get into an Ivy, despite the cynical games that some students play, despite their insistence on looking past and down on so many terrific but underexposed schools, despite every other facet of the frenzy. “Every year I ask myself: ‘Do I want to do this again?’” Dowling said. “‘ Do I want to do this one more year?’ But in the end, as a first-generation college student who got no help from a counselor and whose life was changed by college one hundred percent, I believe in the transformational power of higher education and the self-awareness and self-actualization that comes from the process of applying to college.” If students are steered through it correctly, if at least some measure of calm can be made to prevail, “kids become aware of who they are,” she said. “Kids become aware of what they want.

 I love being part of that process: watching the light bulb go on, watching them work their buns off. And in the end they all go to college, and their lives are changed.”

Bruni, Frank Where You Go Is Not Who You'll Be: An Antidote to the College Admissions Mania (Kindle Locations 2560-2561). Grand Central Publishing. Kindle Edition.