Noah Feldman, Columnist

Coaches Have Too Much Power Over College Admissions

It’s a scandal how much admissions power universities give to the athletic department.

March 12, 2019 at 8:47 PM UTC

Noah Feldman is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. A professor of law at Harvard University, he is author, most recently, of “To Be a Jew Today: A New Guide to God, Israel, and the Jewish People."

Who controls the ball?
Photographer: Vincent Laforet/Getty Images

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Look beyond the juicy stories of rich people and celebrities paying to have their children cheat on the ACT and SAT exams and buying their way into college. The real scandal behind the admissions indictments unveiled Tuesday is the way universities — including some of the greatest on earth — hand off to athletic coaches the power to decide who can attend.

This is a key element of the whole brouhaha: The people who run universities have decided that not every applicant should be weighed on the holistic scale that’s supposed to measure and balance a student’s abilities, efforts, talents and diversity.