If they get rid of the athletes the average IQ will soar.
I feel bad saying that. I have family members who are athletes.
Interesting factoid about USC athletes:
Since 1904, there have been 451 athletes who attended USC before, during or after their Olympic appearance, more than any other U.S. university. They have collected 309 medals: 144 golds, 93 silvers and 72 bronzes. USC’s 309 all-time Summer Olympics medals would rank 14th most among all countries, while its 144 gold medals would be 13th most.
I think it’s this: we all realize there are buckets set aside for colleges for certain groups: AA, legacy candidates, athletes, true scholars, etc.
These buckets are more or less accepted, but in none of this is cheating supposed to be happening. If someone gets a spot on a track team who wasn’t even an athlete in HS, that means someone else for that bucket was not offered that spot.
One of my kids runs distance track for the NCAA right now, Division 1. He loves his school and he’s in the right place, but what if Stanford may have offered him a running spot, but didn’t because a rich parent cheated and superimposed their kid’s head on an athlete’s body and sent in fake running times?
Who this scam screwed is not the average high schooler, but actual athletes set aside for the bucket of athletes. The fact that that bucket exists at all is another question. It might not be fair that it exists (my son would not have made it to that college via his grades/SAT alone), but at least the athletes had to actually be star athletes in HS to get recruited. That’s a lot of work, even if not academic work.
College coaches aren’t paid that much so perhaps they are easy to bribe unfortunately.
By the way not all college athletes are low IQ morons—track and field athletes collectively tend to have one of the highest GPA of all athletes I believe—perhaps that’s not saying much :)