You guys are kidding yourselves if you think many, if any, of the admitted students with lower SAT scores are child prodigies in music, art, sciences, etc. Some, maybe. A few more with other desirable traits (e.g. demographics, life experience), perhaps. But common sense tells me the vast major are elite athletes in the revenue generating sports. Do they add value to the university as students? Maybe so.
I read once that the biggest source of "special admits" at prestigious colleges comes from the children of very rich alumni or very generous donors. In terms of Stanford, of 2,142 admitted students, only 3% had a GPA lower than 3.7, and only 3% did NOT graduate in the top 20% of their class. That's roughly 64 "special" admits for the 2015 class. That fits with my VERY unscientific research (searching the internet for recruits GPA and test scores) on the GPA and test scores of various high level recruits Stanford signed the past couple of seasons.
What's interesting in my VERY unscientific research was the lowest GPA for a recruit I could find for a Stanford recruit was....Christian McCaffery. The Heisman runner-up last season. Coming out of HS, he sported a 3.5 GPA and scored a 24 on his ACT (according to his Rivals recruiting profile). If the "norm" for a Stanford admit is a GPA 3.7 and above, then you would assume that McCaffery was a "special admit". In terms of comparison, CM is obviously below the "benchmark" for the general student population at Stanford, but in terms of the "average" (or however you want to classify it) recruited SA in a P5 conference, McCaffery is probably in the top 95% of his athletic peers. So did Stanford use the gifted "special" admit for CM...it's safe to assume that relative to the profile of the general student population. However, it's not as if Stanford had to stretch the boundaries of what's acceptable for the general population to admit CM. A 3.5 GPA is VERY good, whether you're a athlete or "normal" student. CM's parents are also prominent Stanford alums (father played football, mother played soccer for the Tree). Would CM get into Stanford without football? Debateable, but not necessarily out of the realm of possibility.
In comparison to GT, in my VERY unscientific research, the lowest GPA for a recruit I could find was 3.0 (an OL who is graduating this Spring). That's still a very respectable GPA, and pretty good GPA for a recruited SA. In comparison to GT's general population (
http://admission.gatech.edu/images/pdf/2015_freshman_profile_web.pdf ) it's tougher to make the case that the recruit (now a full fledged GT SA) would have gotten in without football.
The point of this isn't to denigrate GT's recruiting, because we're obviously finding SAs who can do the work (as the 90% grad rate attests to), but to make the point that even with "no minimum requirements", Stanford still has pretty high standards for their recruited SAs. Does playing football help with admissions? Without a doubt, much in the same way it does for recruits at pretty much every school (anyone thinks 90% of UGAs recruits get in without football?). It's pretty silly though, with all the evidence available, to say or insinuate that Stanford hides behind their "no minimum requirements" to admit SAs on the basis of their football ability alone.
