And when they are it’s because MIT pulled a prank at the game 
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Without sports, will those football stars become gang members and kill many more people? Gene plays a role in crime and sports and drug welfare can consume their energy so they become less harmful 
There is only one Harvard. MIT doesn’t even have a football team. Why focus on the handful of exceptions?
I explicitly mentioned big 10 schools like Nebraska and Ohio state. You don’t think their football programs drive alumni engagement and brand name recognition?
In the end I say school administrators are rational. (Almost) every school likes to accept athletes. Unless everybody is crazy there must be good reasons.
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I remember reading somewhere Wall Street likes to hire athletes for their trading teams. Someone who can make fast decisions under huge pressure.
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Asians are not good at Western sports?
Caltech is the most Asian school in US. I don’t see people here salivating over it. So being all academic may not be the “best” route for a school overall.
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Cal tech has too many useless or academic majors. They should merge with USC, that could compete Against Harvard and Stanford and Duke
Asians are useless?
are Asians college majors?
The schools that deliver the highest starting salaries don’t have prestigious sports programs. How can they achieve that without the marketing from sports? It’s amazing employers have even heard of them without a sports team on national TV.
The schools with the largest endowment funds don’t have prestigious sports programs. How is that possible without the sports to drive alumni engagement?
The vast majority of schools get more qualified applicants than they can accept. Just look at how difficult it is to get into UC and CSU schools as a CA resident. Do they really need more marketing from sports to get more applicants? Do engineering majors look at UC Berkeley and go, oh the football team sucks. I better apply to UW or WSU instead?
There’s literally not a data point among starting salaries, endowment fund size, and acceptance rate that would say prestigious sports programs make a difference.
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Tech salaries beat WS & law salaries since? 10 years ago? 20 years ago?
Perhaps, long ago, physique gives better “executive presence” in law and business?
In tech, brain counts more than physique 
The truth is non-CA resident pays full tuition
Yes they do. It’s just not football, basketball and baseball. Harvard/Yale/Princeton/Stanford take their sports very seriously. Excelling at a sport while being a capable student demonstrates a level of dedication and competitive spirit that students who are only academically talented lack. Athletic teams at prestigious institutions are also feeders to lucrative careers, esp. in finance/banking where a do whatever it takes competitive spirit is prized.
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By the way, I bet if you re-sorted this list as number of olympic medals per capita to correct for how much smaller the elite private schools are than the public universities, Stanford/Harvard/Yale would be the top three.
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Even if you just look at football programs, Stanford, USC and Michigan have top rated programs to name just a few. Yes, looking at sports in general like olympics the top school have very good sports programs.
I don’t like how Harvard artificially limit the number of Asian students. But I have to admit it does the school no good if all students are just bookworms who just know how to ace exams. You do need some diversity of skills and background to round things out. Stanford is prestigious in ways that Caltech is not. Even MIT grads like @tomato wants his not yet existent kids to go to Harvard instead of MIT.
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I’m not saying don’t have athletic programs. The admissions bar should be the same for athletes and non-athletes. Also, tuition money shouldn’t fund athletic programs.
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Does too!
If they did this, there wouldn’t be any (real) athletes. Harvard and Stanford student bodies would be more like MIT/Caltech. After all, there are only so many hours in the day. Athletes have some of the most grueling schedules out there. Nathan Chen had to make a few sacrifices wrt academics while he was training for the olympics. Yale wouldn’t be Yale if they only took kids who locked themselves in the library for six months trying to eke out the last 10 pts on their SATs by memorizing obscure vocabulary from Webster’s dictionary.
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Not everything has a profit motive attached to it.Say Facebook cut out all of the non-productive stuff they offer on campuses, like multiple food venues, ice cream parlor, volleyball court, poster studio, or woodshop… and only had cubicles for employees? Would it be cool enough a place to attract top talent?
I do think sports are such a big part of American life that they will maintain a presence on campuses (prestigious, established US universities in particular). Imo, college in America is seen as a place for students to gain a foothold in society, in a sheltered form. So, it’s valuable to have a broad range of activities and people around that will support a student’s personal and profession growth.
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Did they have to lower the admissions bar for him? He’s not an athlete on a school sport, so tuition money isn’t funding his sport.
“And then there were the athletes. After fierce pressure from the athletic department, I had to admit a highly sought-after French Canadian hockey recruit. He had crappy grades, dismal scores, and his essay consisted of one sentence scribbled hastily in pencil: “I want to bée a great hockey player.” To add insult to injury, he decided to go to Boston University.”
“Once the children of alumni, recruited athletes, underrepresented minorities or regions and students interested in underenrolled majors were considered, there wasn’t much room for your generic genius.”
So instead of eliminating useless majors no one wants, they admit sub par students to them. I guess if you want to get your kid in claim they want a useless major, then hope they can switch after they are there.
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Err… do they win any games at all? 
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