Lehigh Football Nation

It's funny: as soon as I'm just about ready to unveil my blog posting on academic indexes, the New York Times scoops me. With their article " Ivy League Crunch Brings New Cachet To Next Tier " (which highlights Lehigh as the prototypical school of this "next tier", right below the Ivies), Alan Finder reports that it's harder than ever to get into schools like Lehigh. A subscription is required to get the full text, but a key snippet of the article follows: At Lehigh, known for its strength in engineering and business, about 12,000 students applied this year. That is a whopping 50 percent increase in applications over seven years ago and more than 10 times the seats available in a freshman class of 1,150. The median SAT score of admitted students has climbed about 10 points a year in recent years, officials said. ... The result, said Jonathan Miller, a senior at Mamaroneck High School in suburban Westchester County, N.Y., is that many classmates perceive

One of the dirty little secrets of college admissions is that for athletes in many Division I schools, the admissions process is different than the maze in the picture right here. Athletes get treated, well, differently. A FBS school like Ohio State has a coach and athletic department who wants a certain player, and he goes out and gets that player. He goes through a special admissions process. It's a different process than a non-athletic out-of-state student might have to negotiate admissions, financial aid, and so on. In the first "New Realities" piece, I went through a bit of history on how the Patriot League's structure came about. One important part of that structure is "Presidential Control", but what it really boils down to is "the separation of athletics and admissions". That's what I'll be talking about in today's posting. Separation The 1945 Ivy Agreement formally enshrined the separation of athletics and admissions. It