Admissions: A New Hurdle for BYU Athletics?

Recent rumors indicate that the admissions office is the latest institutional hurdle for recruiting student athletes to BYU.

Honor code woes have long haunted Cougar Nation. When the honor code isn’t a deterring recruits that are interested in a college experience that doesn’t include celibacy and stone-cold sobriety, it is suspending and expelling young adults who have the audacity to err, sometimes in things that are not criminal acts.

Countless pages have been written in the online Cougarnacle regarding the honor code’s effect on BYU athletics and the rightness or wrongness of those who land in the HCO’s crosshairs.

Now that a few years have passed since we stopped publicly announcing honor code infractions, rumors have begun to swirl that a new administrative force is emerging in Provo more powerful than the dreaded honor code: stringent admissions standards.

We tried an experiment on PrepScholar to see how likely an average student is to get into BYU. Now we recognize fully that BYU is not an average school, but for the sake of seeing what a student would have to do we ran these numbers.

• The average american high school student has 3.38 GPA and 20.8 ACT. That would give them normally a 1.73% of being admitted to BYU. Again remember that is the 50th percentile.
• For a student to have a 50% of admittance to BYU they would need at worst a 3.8 GPA and 30 ACT. And that is to be a coin flip chance!

Granted an athlete is going to have some help from the coaches to be admitted, but to get the AVERAGE student admitted, it would take some work, and if you are below average, forget about it!

A Clandestine Operative

In the old days, Carrie Jenkins was the name and face of honor code woes for BYU student athletes, but this new enemy has no spokesperson. It is unclear whether the rumored admissions woes are a directive from President Worthen or the Board of Trustees, or if the new Cougar enemy number 1 is a grid, an algorithm, or simply the caprice of a sadist amongst the saints.

Derik Stevenson’s  fandom  is purportedly crumbling under the weight of the admissions office, as Kalani’s recruits are increasingly turned away, often heading to Salt Lake or Logan to find respite in the Utes’ and Aggies’ academically friendly confines.