Ga Tech's recruiting disadvantage (Warning: rant alert)

…but this is a controversial topic and has been struck from the Hive every time I have brought it up.

Could/should Tech have some easier majors to make recruiting easier?

Now, before we go any farther, I am not talking about “joke” majors and I am not talking about admitting academic nonqualifiers nor people who need to take the JUCO route for whatever reason. I’m talking about diversifying Tech’s curriculum to make recruiting easier.

While I have been thinking about this for a while, what really brought this to a head for me was a comment my georgie-fan brother said to me: “What’s Tech’s problem with recruiting? Stanford doesn’t seem to have any problems getting quality players and winning…?” Stanford is a well-respected university. How does Stanford do it?

Well, I looked at Stanford’s website. Besides the STEM majors that Stanford is famous for, there are a bunch of easier majors like sociology, various ethnic and gender studies, and even a design-your-own-major.

Am I suggesting those for Tech? Absolutely NOT!

But—are there some majors that would fit Tech’s general mission but not be as demanding as our current curriculum? Things like technical writing (if you are in IT, you know that tech writing is NO JOKE), scientific journalism (maybe with some sports journalism electives—take that, AUC), sports medicine and physiology, things like that.

This would at least stop the competing coaches who borrow a calc book from the math department and use it to scare off recruits for whom they are competing with Tech.

Would this approach help recruiting without hurting Tech’s esteemed academic mission?

And, secondly, would the Board of Regents let us do that ;-)

One of many is that the most common major for athletes is the second most common major on campus, not some “fringe” major created for athletes.

Management is second only to Mechanical Engineering, and has almost ten percent of the undergraduate student body with 1,323 out of 13,750 students (2010 Mini Fact Book, pages 10-11).

Quite frankly, if I had a son who considered himself a pro prospect in any sport, I would steer him towards management as a major whether he was considering Tech or not. The background in investments, business law, and finance would put him in a better position to actually keep the big bucks if he succeeds in the pros or to build a meaningful career in the real world if he doesn’t.

Another key factor in recruiting is that Tech is a legitimately challenging school. The freshman class of 2004 was the first where 80% of the cohort graduated within six years. There is a hard floor for recruiting in that the student-athlete must be able to do college level work.

The AJC’s study in 2008 showed Tech football players averaged 1028 on the SAT while the average all of the schools was 941. Tech’s average is pretty much the average for everyone who took the test, while the rest of the football players scored at the 33rd percentile for men. That means that half of football players scored in the bottom third of all students who took the test (actually, over half – the median will be below the average).

I’m not sure if adding majors would have any major benefit. I would wager that they would still be Bachelor of Science degrees and not Bachelor of Arts, so they would still have the same math and science requirements as Management. I imagine the Board of Regents would regard any degree that didn’t have the math and science requirements as “not consistent with our mission” and deny it.

It’s just not likely to have it happen. As bad as we would love to have a football team that wins 3 NCs in a row and makes the SEC look like a bunch of chumps, the Institute would place that way below sustained academic integrity on their list of priorities.

Also, as a current student (ISyE major), it would disappoint me to know that others (regardless of circumstance) were being held to significantly lower standards academically. That’s what makes me proud to go here as opposed to georgie or Auburn or what have you, is that every single person here gets challenged in one way or another. There’s really no sense coming here for an MRS degree or anything because nothing is worth the workload in that sense.

The simple fact, and it’s not going away, is that every GT major requires at least one term of calculus and at least two terms of mathematics to graduate. Student athletes generally will need three or four, since they’ll start in precalculus before taking the two management math courses. The least well-prepared start in “Learning Support” mathematics, which is basically fifth grade math through basic algebra crammed into one term. There are also LS options for reading and writing. Those courses count toward being full-time, but that’s it. Precalculus can be taken for a grade (but a lot of SAs take it pass/fail), but it doesn’t satisfy any degree requirements. Based on pressure from the AA, CoM will allow it to count as a free elective, I believe.