By New York Post (Opinion) | Created at 2026-09-25 20:47:09 | Updated at 2026-09-25 22:56:12
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They’re gaming the system.
Seven years after the Varsity Blues scandal that saw parents like Felicity Huffman and Lori Loughlin scamming to get their kids into elite colleges by bribing coaches to recruit them as athletes or using fraudulent test scores, the wealthy are still using niche sports to give their kids unfair — though not illegal — advantages.
“Families definitely come to me and say, ‘You know what? I want my child to be a recruited athlete,'” boutique college admissions counselor Chris Rim told The Post. “They know [certain sports] require really specialized and expensive coaching and equipment, and I think they think that it’s going to make them stand out.”
Top schools need to fill their squash, fencing, rowing, sailing, golf, water polo, and skiing teams. And they do — often with recruited athletes who need to clear far lower academic hurdles than their peers thanks to their specialized athletic skills.
With Ivy League admission rates in the low single digits — for the class of 2030, Yale accepted just 4% of applicants — the ultra-privileged are exploiting this fact, signing junior up for fencing lessons and club water polo before he’s lost all of baby teeth.
Rim, founder and CEO of Command Education, says that clients now start their kids in hyper-specialized sports as early as third or fourth grade.
“It’s a strategy that families might use if they notice early on, like, ‘Hey, my child is not really gonna be the best academic student,'” Rim said. “They’re like, ‘Is crew really going to be the best thing? Or is it going to be lacrosse? Or is it going to be squash?'”
At Harvard, a full 86% of recruited athletes applying to the school ended up being admitted, compared with just 6% of non-recruited applicants.
One study of almost 400,000 NCAA athletes at more than 1,000 colleges found that the sports with the most disproportionate representation of players coming from top-1% income earning zip codes were squash, sailing, fencing, water polo, rowing and lacrosse.
An amazing one in four NCAA squash players were from top 1% zip codes, such as Greenwich or parts of Westchester. On the opposite end of the spectrum, with the fewest ultra-rich players, were football, wrestling, and softball — all sports that are much more accessible to the typical high school player.
The study showed that more than half of athletes from Ivy-plus schools came from private high schools. The researchers also found disproportionate wealth among student athletes was observable at “other elite private” schools they identified, including Georgetown, Northwestern, WashU, Rice, Carnegie Mellon and Notre Dame.
At my alma mater, the Lawrenceville School, a boarding school in New Jersey notorious for sending huge chunks of their graduating class to Ivy League universities, there were squash courts and swimming pools and even a golf course — allowing students to pursue the most niche sports possible.
Substacker and data scientist Joe Hovde recently analyzed the rosters of Ivy League sports teams to see how many students come from elite schools. He found that 28 of the top high schools, which educate just 0.14% of America’s high schoolers, made up 7% of Ivy League athletes — a roughly fifty-fold overrepresentation.
One in eight Ivy League ice hockey players came from one of those top schools, he found, and one in ten lacrosse and crew players could say the same.
It’s a pipeline well-resourced parents are aware of — and one that exacerbates inequality, Rim said.
“You need to have the resources and programming available… You need facilities, you need an incredible coach. So, if you don’t have the resources, you’re not really exposed to it and don’t have the same opportunities.”
Meanwhile, a study by Raj Chetty, David Deming and John Friedman in the “Quarterly Journal of Economics” found that, at Ivy-plus universities, only 5% of students whose families were in the bottom 60% income distribution were recruited athletes, compared with 13% from the top 1% wealthiest families.
We already know that rich kids disproportionately benefit from extra tutoring, help on essays, connections, legacy status, and parental donations. But being the right kind of athlete is perhaps the most niche admissions hack of all.
With enough money and the right strategy, Ivy League admissions can be transformed from a long shot to a real possibility.
