Homophily in Collegiate Recruiting
This past weekend was one of three major recruiting weekends for the Cornell swim team. While spending time with the prospective students and reflecting afterwards, I noticed an interesting trend in the relationship between where an athlete is from and how likely they are to commit to a school. The more people from a swimmer’s home-state that attend the school the more likely they are to commit. This relates to our course in two ways, homophily and strong and weak ties. I found an article (that discussed homophily and how geographic proximity can create strong ties between people. The background knowledge of strong ties and homophily from class combined with some investigative work on a few Ivy League swim teams produced some interesting results.
Swimming is a close knit sport; people that are trying to get recruited most likely competed at all the same competitions in their home-state. Thus, it is pretty safe to assume that swimmers from the same state know each other. I went through the men’s swimming rosters of Harvard, Princeton, Columbia and Cornell and tallied how many athletes were from the same state. This accounting produced the following results: 36% of Harvard swimmers were from a state that had at least three members of the team from that same state, Princeton had 45% in the same situation, Columbia 46%, and Cornell 67%. These numbers illustrate that there are pockets of athletes that are from the same state at each of these swimming programs. They also suggest that people from the same area have some form a relationship with each other. It is a likely scenario (one that I have seen and experienced for myself) that when a prospective recruit knows someone from home they are able to create a strong connection with that person on a variety of subjects. Be it mutual friends, places they go to back home, or activities associated with that area, this relationship allows for the prospective athletes to make a connection in a foreign environment. Acting as a source of homophily, the swimmers are more likely to attend the given school because the know people there and are likely to have a more insightful experience on their trip and learn more about the inner workings of the team and school. Also, once a few people are from the same area a local bridge is formed which allows for this homophilic property to perpetuate and bring more and more people from the same area to the team.
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http://www.annualreviews.org/doi/pdf/10.1146/annurev.soc.27.1.415