The South lags far behind the rest of the nation in secondary education. As a result, more recruits for the colleges that don't value education, less recruits for the schools that do.
To make it worse, GT sits in the middle of SEC country.
Even attracting the academic athlete is no picnic. As good as our reputation is, it still lags behind Stanford and Notre Dame. Those two schools also offer a broad curriculum. Nerd athletes don't have to pick Engineering or technically based management at those schools.
Two things:
1. Our reputation lags behind Notre Dame? Admittedly, I live and work in the South, but in numerous contacts with IEEE people from all over the country I never got that idea.
2. Our school of business is now MUCH broader than it used to be. Want to specialize in HR? You can absolutely do that. Marketing? That too. It's a part of why they changed the name from Management to Business.
That also brings up an important point that may not be perceived by recruits, and which we as fans might be doing ourselves no favors in talking the way we do:
Getting a Business degree at GT on the Football team with all the support and handholding (if you want/need it) that that entails is really not the hardest thing in the world. Calc I is fundamentally different from the (****ty) way highschools teach algebra- it's about learning patterns and using them. Cognitively it has more in common with flappy birds or a jigsaw puzzle than algebra 'memorize this rule' drudgery. It's also highly visual and intuitive in a way that highschool math is not. I'd argue that any football player who has experience figuring out how to chase a runner has an intuitive grasp of normal vectors and instantaneous slope that puts him at a serious advantage to his peers. Hell, if you have the sort of brain that can follow an option offense or be a defender anywhere you have practiced all the skills you need to make an A in Calc I- Your brain handles "if qb falls back, attack gap X, if handoff, proceed to Y hauling ***" in exactly the same way it handles "if I see an odd power of trig functions, use the euler identity" or "if I see a known derivative, use u substitution"
Georgia Tech isn't only for people who can put up with a lot of pain now for a lot of gain later. Painting it as such to people who more likely than not have been pigeonholed their whole lives by teachers (probably well meaning) as Athletes who by that identity can't really cut it in the classroom, is only going to drive them away. And that's a damn shame, because I think anybody who has the guts to get smacked around by 300lb guys every day and twice on weekends has the guts to stick it out in an accounting classroom.
We ought to be painting the academic life at GT (especially the B school) as glamorous, and completely different and more fun than highschool anything. Yeah, you could go to B school at U(sic)gA or Bama, but they're not going to get you presentations in front of Fortune 100 executives (or something. I don't know- I'm just an Engineer with a minor in Business and Technology). Then lay on thick the comparison in average incomes of graduates. If they've got the NFL in their eyes, show them they're not dreaming big enough. Yeah, you can be comfortable on saved NFL earnings if you ration them well, but why accept living on limited money? Do you really want to be doing sad radio endorsements for South Georgia car dealerships like (name any famous UGA player old enough) when you're 45? That's a chump's game. A GT degree shows you how to take NFL earnings and keep on making millions- you can be a player until the day you die.
And then quietly, to the side, you show the parents the same thing, but with an emphasis on a 80k salary out of school vs. good ****in luck if they don't make the NFL.
