At colleges and universities across the country, administrators, coaches and student-athletes struggle to find a balance between academics and athletics. For athletic departments in the Ivy League, known for high admissions standards and rigorous curricula, the challenge is all the more difficult. In the NCAA's fast-paced world of major-conference athletics, where celebrity players and million-dollar coaching contracts are commonplace, the Ivy League's lack of academic scholarships and rigid academic standards seem somewhat anachronistic.
On Nov. 6, 1869 Princeton University played the first college football game in the history of the United States against Rutgers University. The other members of the Ancient Eight took up the practice and the group was soon referred to as the Ivy League.
It was not until the middle of the 20th century that the idea of formalizing the union between the eight schools began to emerge. On Dec. 3, 1936, The Dartmouth, along with the student newspapers from Cornell, Princeton, Harvard, Yale, Columbia and the University of Pennsylvania, published an editorial entitled "Now Is The Time," which urged the seven schools to form the league.
"The seven colleges involved fall naturally together by reason of their common interests and similar general standards," the editorial said. "By dint of their established national reputation they are in a particularly advantageous position to assume leadership for the preservation of the ideals of intercollegiate athletics."
The First Ivy Group Agreement, signed by all eight schools in 1945 and limited to football, affirmed the league's rejection of athletic scholarships and articulated the colleges' high academic standards. The agreement was later extended to include all intercollegiate sports.
Despite this august history, there exist many doubts about the future of Ivy League athletics. In addition to concerns over coaching, facilities, funding and poor records, the question of how to attract quality athletes is central to the debate.
"Athletic recruitment in the Ivies is intense and competitive because we have very high academic standards," Dartmouth's Dean of Admissions Karl Furstenberg said. "As a league we are very competitive with each other because realistically the number of students that can be Division-I athletes but can also compete academically is pretty small, especially when you factor in competition with schools like Duke, Stanford and Northwestern, which offer scholarships."
In the 1980s, the Ivy League implemented the use of the Academic Index in an effort to streamline and regulate academic standards. The AI is a formula that combines GPA, class rank and standardized test scores to create benchmarks for an incoming class.
"The academic index was a formula created by the Ivy League to enable the league office to monitor the admission of recommended student athletes," Bob Ceplikas, associate athletic director, said. "For each Ivy school the academic index for student athletes has to be close enough to the student body as a whole."
The AI requires each recruited athlete to meet a minimum academic level and the total population of recruited athletes to fall within one standard deviation of the class average.
"The admissions office ultimately makes decisions on a case-by-case basis, using all the same admissions criteria they use for non-athlete applicants, but they also have to make sure that by the end they haven't created a subpopulation in the student body," Ceplikas said.
According to Furstenberg, schools rarely, if ever, publish their mean AIs. However, it is rumored that Harvard, Yale and Princeton consistently have the highest AIs, and that Dartmouth comes in fourth. Columbia, UPenn, Brown, and Cornell follow.
The problem with the AI system, according to some students, is that while academics are often sacrificed for recruits to high-profile sports, the quality of recruited athletes often suffers for sports that draw less attention from spectators and alumni.
"I have heard that in the last couple of years there have been some highly qualified recruits that have not gotten in because of their academics," said Andrew Berry '08, a member of the men's swimming and diving team. "Our team GPA is always high nationally, often the first in the country, so it seems like we could strike a balance and perform a lot better without any academic consequences."
