Agree with this. Lessons to learn and this tragedy is perhaps a warning. Ask questions, raise awareness, educate, reduce stigmas, provide support and/or professional help. The stats mentioned also seem accurate to me. Would be good to see a citation but I would think it's generally logical that a team environment would be supportive and helpful to team members with mental health concerns most of the time. Student-athletes are clearly vulnerable but they are rarely alone and are also some of the most supported students in these college environments regardless of Division or perceptions of 'academic rigor'. It's good to remember that young people are in highly charged competitive environments in lots of areas. Having to reconcile tremendous expectations with their own abilities, interests, and happiness. I hope folks realize kids in music, drama, math counts, academic team, etc. can also be vulnerable.
While mostly true, this is not altogether true. I know of student-athletes that were, for a fact, "helped" through the admission processes to Chicago, WashU, Emory, and Williams. All of those schools have stringent admission standards and U of Chicago, in particular, is one of the most difficult universities to be admitted to in the country regardless of athletic division. Additionally, their applications were probably enhanced in some respects due to being a student-athlete because all of those institutions prefer well-rounded candidates. By your logic, we should also throw Virginia, Michigan, Northwestern, Berkeley, UNC-Chapel Hill, and perhaps a few others in there as well. It's not going to happen. One of the mantras in my family is "work hard, play hard." For a lot of student-athletes, a component of fulfilling the "play hard" aspect is athletics. My kids all needed the competitive nature of athletics to balance their school lives. Athletics gives them an "escape" and takes away a lot of stress. Many student-athletes need the high level of commitment and competition that D1 sports bring. Others are OK with the level of commitment that D3 athletics bring (which depending on the school and program can still be substantial, BTW). If that level of competition is taken away from many then it will affect their overall experience. While this may seem like a good idea, be careful what you wish for. If the P5 schools take their football and leave the NCAA do they take the money with them and away from other athletic programs? Many athletic departments rely on the money that football brings in.
I'm going to guess here that you or your kids have been through this process at these sorts of schools. I'm not disagreeing with you at all. In my too brief extemporaneous add on, I left a fair bit out. I was hesitant to bring it up at all as I don't want to "blame" Stanford or anyone for this tragedy. On average, the difference between student athletes and non-athletes. In terms of quals looks something like this: Stanfords/Dukes/NUs>>>>Ivy>most selective NESCAC>most selective UAA. All of these schools are extremely selective. The meat and potatoes of each student body is top 1%-2% of all 18 year olds. At a Stanford we're talking 1 in 200 to 300 level kids. At a WashU, maybe 1 in 100. The differences a hair splittingly small, and the concept of holistic admissions definitely enters. What do you bring to the school outside of test score and GPA? A kid born in the batters box behind in the count with a dirty uniform because he was brushed off the plate will also not necessarily be held to the same GPA/test standards as a kid born on second base with a clean uniform. Kids who haven't had the resources of others while maintaining "strong enough" scores will be viewed as "high potential growth" candidates. How does this relate to athletics? Obviously at an "academically elite" Power 5 institution, the athletic department will need to dig much deeper because the pool of athletes who can compete at that standard is much smaller. And yes, at a WashU, there are athletes who are given a bump. There are also prospective athletes who project to upperclass starters with basic admissions data in the middle 50% who have been denied admission there. I've seen this. Not recently, but not too long ago either. Stanford student athletes are very smart. Some are as smart as the brightest non-athletes. Most are not. They are jumping into the very deep end of the academic pool. The hardest part of Stanford is getting in, but it is still very difficult academically. Organic chemistry (orgo as we called it) is where the rubber meets the road in biological sciences and pre-med. I can tell you that a WashU orgo exam is not the same thing as friends doing the same at a mid-tier Big Ten school or a comparable private institution. And that's perfectly fine. Same thing with social sciences coursework. If you're coming in as "merely' a top 10% or 5% 18-year-old academically, there is extra time required to bridge that gap. Work hard play hard is a good mentality. Work smart is even better IMO. Student athletes generally have excellent time management skills. But kids who lack time management skills don't get into Stanford or a JHU, WashU, etc. The bigger the delta between "average student athlete" and "average non-athlete", the more work required. The higher the general admission standards at a school, the less likely it is for a student athlete to make up ground through superior time management. There are also relatively fewer courses where one can find an "easy B" to free up hours, although they do exist. And the more hours an athlete is putting in (and D3 is not a joke in terms of commitment), then less time you have to make up ground. I don't really have a dog in the fight. I know my experience, those of friends/exes/family/work colleagues at other schools across that spectrum of schools with the benefit of sufficient time to look back through what I think is a clearer lens. Freeing up 10 hours when you have an abundance of time isn't much. But when you're "time poor" as an athlete--especially at a rigorous school--it is huge in terms of mental and physical health, social life and campus integration. It's the difference between giving 10 bucks to a homeless person or an average Joe. I don't think a de-commercialization of athletics at a Stanford or a Duke is currently realistic. Not even remotely. And it certainly isn't feasible at a UVA or UMich. However, it could happen at the former due to the lack of public funding pressure and the high returns on their already huge endowments (which actually reduce the influence of future alumni/donors). And at many of those academically elite D1 schools, there has been a bit of a widening rift between athletes and non-athletes as sports have become more commercialized in the last 20 years, the institutions have become even more selective, and SES diversity in admissions has become more of a focus. Revenue sports aside, student athletes tend to have less SES diversity than the non-athletes. More kids are bristling at that today than they were 25 or even 10 years ago. I'm not prepared to say it can't happen because forever is a long time. And I won't blame Stanford, but despite having a best-in-class support system, they've lost two female athletes to suicide in the past decade and another female grad student Olympic athlete who was utilizing their athletic resources to juggle the demands of training and an extremely rigorous education. It's not limited to athletes or to D1s. WashU lost a helluva kid less than a month ago. Not an athlete. Super involved all over campus. All around great kid. Students today have more academic pressure. The additional pressure has grown more at the most rigorous schools. Athletes today have more pressure. The pressure has grown more at the higher levels of play. Something will give. I just don't want it to be kids whose prefrontal cortex is still developing. That's all I was getting at.
Katie's parent's have publicly said they believe, in part, that this could have been the result of disciplinary actions by Stanford. Does anyone have more information? "In their search for answers over Katie's death, the couple said they believe she received an email regarding a potential disciplinary action from the university. "Katie, being Katie, was defending a teammate on campus over an incident and the repercussions of her defending that teammate (were possibly resulting in disciplinary action)," Steven Meyer said on TODAY."
A couple of things: the office of community standards has an adjudication process for conduct/disciplinary issues. They try to handle those things without a formal hearing. They’ve been criticized in the past for the process being unduly drawn out/stressful. I don’t know if they’ve made procedural changes. I know nothing of the allegations, but the fact that the office continued to pursue to the level of a hearing when a student has three months left would suggest this wasn’t a “lesser” allegation. That must have been especially difficult. Imagine coming back as a 5th year, contributing to the school culture, right at the grad finish line. And you want a career in national security. And now you’re in a hearing which presumably could lead to extreme disciplinary action. Possibly up to expulsion. It may have been possible that she already had met graduation requirements and the only reason she was even enrolled this year was to get another year of soccer due to Covid. That said, a person losing his/her life to mental illness is never one thing.
Nobody, anywhere, has said this is about "one" thing. But her parent's are making Stanfords involvement public and on a national platform, The Today Show. I disagree with your assessment of the magnitude events which could lead to disciplinary actions. I know students, first hand, who have been written up, put on academic probation and threatened expulsion for giving classmates who happened to be 20-years-old alcoholic beverages. The list is long and many for institutions who intimidate students for nonsense.
I think it best to give the family their privacy and it is not our business. Better to focus on the discussion about supporting policies and protocols to encourage the mental health and suicide prevention of student-athletes rather than digging around about details. I know the parents shared this in a highly public way but they are also in extreme grief and shock and may regret sharing those personal details.
Thank you for your thoughts and clarification, Chicago76. It is appreciated. I have some additional comments, below, in bold. While speaking of prefrontal cortex development, there was something that Nick Saban once said at a press conference that always stuck with me about second chances and giving a guy a "break." I'm not the biggest Nick Saban fan but he is spot on here and it says a lot about him. There are obvious instances when a second chance can't be given, but there are also instances when second chances should be given and they're not. Skip ahead to about the 2:00 mark of the video
From my post, above... *"Stanfords," obviously, not "Standfords." That is what I get for knocking out a post in a few minutes and not proofreading it. I don't like the feature on this forum that posts can't be edited after 30 minutes but in one respect it is helpful in that someone can't edit a post later to reflect something that was not said in an effort to make someone else look bad or untruthful.