Ivy League Sports

The Ivy League institutions that began to admit women in the late 1960s and early 1970s faced many new issues regarding admissions. Yale, for instance, admitted its first women students in 1969, but placed a cap on the number it would accept. By 1973, recalls Margit Dahl, who was one of the first women graduates and went on to work in undergraduate admissions, “the admissions really became sort of sex blind … there was no longer any specific set number of males versus females who had to be admitted.” The changes during that time trickled out from the campus to recruiting efforts across the country. Dahl recalls “walking into a high school guidance office in Phoenix and checking in with the secretary, saying I was the Yale visitor. I was standing by the desk as the kids started to breeze in. One young woman came in and said, ‘Hi, I am here to see the guy from Yale.’ I turned around and said, ‘I am the guy from Yale.’ I looked at her face, and it was wonderful. It was a wonderful moment.”

Sometimes surprise at the growing presence of women in the Ivy League could more accurately be called dismay, especially among some alumni. But Dartmouth’s Dick Jaeger, who worked in admissions from 1964 until being named director of athletics in 1989, thinks that the early success of women in athletics helped even those alumni who were resistant to coeducation to accept it. Those women, he says, “established some real good teams and brought some recognition to the college. They were winning national championships and Ivy League championships. All of a sudden people realized that this is a good thing — this could happen as well on the women’s side as it can on the men’s side and that was very helpful.”

Very quickly after the introduction of coeducation, athletics become one criterion on which admissions decisions for women were made, but admissions officers had to be careful that they were adhering to the same standards in evaluating athletics in a high school girl’s background as in a boy’s. Harvard’s Fred Jewett, who was dean of admissions at the time such decisions were being made, explained that Radcliffe had not given much, if any, priority to applicants who were interested in athletics. With the combining of Radcliffe and Harvard admissions in 1975, however, the goal was to ensure that a man or woman “would have an equal opportunity to be admitted.” That meant admissions for women would take “the same kind of view of athletics” as for men, and the evaluation of prospective students would give the same weight to athletics for women as for men, a policy that remains in effect today.