Nimbl Makes My Head Hurt

A friend recently posted an article about a startup that provides an on-demand ATM service called Nimbl.

Now for those of you who know me, you know that I am deeply pessimistic about most startups, but Nimbl stuck out because it struck me as particularly unviable.

Here's the pitch: ATMs are annoying, because sometimes you need cash, but you don't have it on you.

What if there was a service that could make that cash appear, immediately? Enter Nimbl, a solution for a problem that uses magical cash-delivering unicorns that are both free and instant. But without the unicorns. So mostly just people on bikes who deliver cash with relatively high latency and decently high cost.

Rules of the Game

In general, Nimbl and ATMs are competing as consumers attempt to minimize the cost of accessing cash. In my model, I've used a simple world where the cost of an ATM is equal to the ATM Fee plus a variable opportunity cost that is unique for every consumer and represents the value of his or her time. Nimbl's value proposition is that in exchange for a higher fee ($5), it will reduce the opportunity cost that I have to pay to get cash.

With opportunity cost modeled as a multiplicative function of lost time and the amount I value my time, Nimbl can either reduce the time I need to spend getting money or make that time more pleasant. A great Nimbl, the one that has instantaneous cash delivery machines, delivers cash immediately, such that the opportunity cost goes to zero (no waiting).

There are two main scenarios where one might imagine Nimbl to be particularly useful:

• You need cash in the future, and you want to get it delivered to you without having to spend time getting it (an asynchronous cash request). 
• You need cash immediately, and Nimbl can provide it faster than you can walk to an ATM and back.

The Playing Field

It's pretty clear that Nimbl would struggle to work outside a large metropolitan area (the delivery time would be high, drivers would have higher transit costs, and request density would be low). As such, I've constrained my rudimentary analysis to the two markets where Nimbl exists currently, San Francisco and New York. 

Let's run through these two settings. There are about 370,000 ATMs nationally, or 1 ATM per 300 people. In Manhattan, with a population density of more than 70,000 per square mile, that means that there are more than 200 ATMs per square mile. Distributed evenly, that means that there should be less than 400 feet between you and the closest ATM at any given point in the city.For San Francisco, with just 18,000 people per square mile, there are only 60 ATMs per square mile.

As an aside, I'd be surprised if these Fermi calculations weren't slightly low given the fact that urban areas probably have more ATMs per capita than rural areas.

In any case, you'd probably only have to walk a couple of blocks to find the closest ATM (while you may have to walk further to find one that is in network and doesn't charge a fee, if you're worrying about fees, you shouldn't be paying $5 to get cash delivered to you).

Scenario 1: Future Cash

Let's say that this walk takes 15 minutes (worst case). In both SF and NYC, the median hourly wage is around $30, which means that the cost of this ATM trip is something like a $2 fee and $7.50 in lost time. And Nimbl charges $5, which means that in this scenario, it could compete reasonably well with an ATM. Go Nimbl!

If I value my time at $100 per hour, all of the sudden Nimbl is worth $27, which is starting to be some real value, and could offer a wedge into the market for ATM withdrawals.

Scenario 2: Immediate Cash

In the case where you need cash immediately, Nimbl is strictly less valuable. In this scenario, you are blocked from doing an activity until you obtain cash. Your opportunity cost accumulates linearly with time, so you want to minimize the time spent waiting. In this case, you pick the faster choice, which is almost certainly going to be the closest ATM (I don't think that it's reasonable to imagine Nimbl delivering cash more quickly than this).

The Catch

Unfortunately, in the case where you can plan ahead to get cash, you aren't constrained to choosing Nimbl. Instead, you can be more efficient and schedule an ATM stop while you're on the way to somewhere you have to go anyway. You can batch this with other errands or just stop by an ATM on your way home from work. By doing this, you can reduce the total ATM cost to something that asymptotically approaches the ATM fee, and you can do this on a sliding scale. Because of the high ATM density in a typical city, actually locating and using an ATM is relatively low-cost as long as you don't make a trip specifically for that purpose. 

Building a Business in the Real World

Finally, there are real world constraints that will hamper Nimbl's ability to grow sustainably. Firstly, all of their employees are going to be cash-rich targets, ripe for theft. Nimbl couriers are walking into each delivery with hundreds of dollars in cash based on a request from an iPhone app. It seems like Nimbl has forgotten about basic employee security in their rush to market.

In addition, Nimbl is fighting against a significant macro trend as consumers utilize credit cards more heavily and begin embracing new POS technologies like Square and Apple Pay. Both of these options eliminate the need for cash at all, and as they gain market adoption, Nimbl will lose its value. While they may factor heavily in Nimbl's overall worldview, the fact is that cash-only merchants represent a very tiny segment of the overall retail industry. 

Pivot!

If I haven't been clear yet, I think that Nimbl is predicated on a bad idea. I don't think it will be successful, and I wouldn't work there or invest in it. That being said, I also think that it could be made into something more interesting with a little bit of pivoting.

Switching from a centralized system with couriers employed by Nimbl to a decentralized system where users could choose to be either an ATM or a client would be a relatively innovative decision. In this system, cash-rich individuals could charge fees to other people who wanted to get cash quickly. Of course, security might be harder in this case, but I think there's at least something interesting here.

Overall, though, I really can't believe that this is a thing.

Economist Redux #2

In keeping with the spirit of the new blog, I wanted to circle back on some of the more interesting stories from last week.

• While the article about gay marriage was a bit heavy on self-congratulation, a lot of the statistics about gay marriage, and how quickly the public's opinions have changed on the matter, were pretty incredible. In three decades, the opinion polls have gone from ~75% of the country opposing gay marriage to ~75% supporting it. Obviously there are still many areas where members of the LGBT community still face discrimination, but reading about the turnaround in historical context was pretty incredible. 
• Buttonwood's piece about aging populations was pretty absurd. It's incredible to think that pensions used to be an expected part of working, and how the rise of the 401k is really such a modern development. There were some interesting facts, generally around how people generally get paid more as they age regardless of their productivity, but the core insight of the piece was that in a world where life expectancy is rising, it's possible that many retirees just have not saved enough money to survive. Finally, there was an interesting aside about nursing and taking care of very old people that was fairly interesting.
• Finally, the piece on China's stalling growth was interesting from a macroeconomic perspective; I just finished Peter Thiel's treatise on innovation, and the article resonated quite well in that context. Basically, China's game of catchup is starting to slow down as they get caught up. In particular, the Economist article cites some interesting studies about productivity growth. The crux of the thesis is that China has been growing primarily by expanding the funnel (adding labor and capital to the economy) rather than increasing the productivity of the workforce. In Thiel's ideology, this is not unexpected. China, as a "pessimistic and determinate" country, will likely struggle to improve productivity, as there is an element of innovative spark that isn't dramatically incentivized by their style of government. I don't agree wholeheartedly with Thiel, and I have no professional experience here, but it sounds like there's something here that supports his theory.

In general, it was a fine, although not particularly wonderful week in the world of the Economist!

Medical students could do with an infusion

I have a lot of friends in medical school. Personally, I think that it sounds hard. Not deeply unpleasant all of the time, but certainly hard. Medical school also isn't free. Tuition is somewhere around $50,000, with a bit more on top for living expenses. Let's say $60,000 per year.

Now, despite a lot of articles talking about how doctors are going to be commoditized, disrupted, or completely eliminated over the course of the next century, the facts on the ground are that doctors are still the highest paid professionals in the US. For context, that's more than CEOs. There are plenty of other factors to consider here: lost wages, long hours, low pay during residency and fellowships, but salary is a good measure for compensation. And eventually, after a generous 20 years of post-secondary education, doctors can pretty easily clear $170,000 (the average salary of a primary care physician).

And yet, despite these facts, medical students feel poor. Constrained on time, many medical students ignore basic consumption smoothing principles and artificially constrain their purchasing power. What I find even more interesting, though, is that they could choose to finance a more expensive lifestyle with very little trouble. Simply taking out an additional $20,000 of annual debt would enable them to join gyms, take taxis, buy better food, and quite frankly, enjoy what little free time they have. Amortized with their lifetime earnings, it's a no-brainer. And yet many medical students don't take on this additional debt.

Economically, this is crazy. In exchange for increasing their debt burden from $240,000 to $320,000, med students could essentially spend as profligately as they could imagine throughout medical school. Given an 80 hour work week and 8 hours of sleep per night, this is the equivalent of ~$12/hour of additional spending money, an amount that could reasonably be exchanged for high-utility activities like eating dinner with friends or going to movies.

In terms of lifetime earnings, having 30% more debt would have a marginal impact on overall lifestyle (assuming 30 years of work before retiring as a doctor, it's still less than $3,000/year, or ~2% of a primary care physician's annual income).

In general, I think a lot of this is rooted in a deeply moral approach to debt; we accept student debt as an acceptable expense, and tend to consider it in terms of an investment, while taking on debt to travel or eat fancy food is seen as deeply irresponsible. For many people, this is probably good - taking on debt to improve short-term happiness generally comes at the cost of long-term indebtedness. But for doctors, and many other people in school, it's probably worth it. And as doctors begin to approach more of medicine through the lens of quality-adjusted life-years more seriously, its acolytes could stand to apply the same logic to their own lives.

Economist Redux #1

In general, I try to at least skim The Economist every week. Although I read the print version, I'm trying something out here where I post some quick thoughts about my favorite articles each week:

• In general, it's hard to be a politically literate and not have a strong aversion to mandatory minimum sentencing and the current state of the U.S. criminal justice system. These two articles, about overpowered prosecutors and their surprisingly coercive tactics when dealing with co-operators, reinforce this general theme.
• One of the smartest people I knew in college was a phenomenal orator who had studied the classics with a rigor that I found exceptional. We always used to joke that he was perfectly suited to be a philosopher king, and fortunately for him, it sounds like philosophy and classics may be the path towards being a better manager, at least according to Schumpeter this week. This is the second such article in as many months, so it sounds like someone on the staff is trying to incept us all with the idea that our liberal arts education was worthwhile anyhow.
• How do we reverse inequality in a world where fixed transit costs make computers, robots, and cell phones cheaper than the cheapest labor? Ah, I just love these special reports. They are never particularly ground-breaking, but they lay things out so succinctly. Specifically, the section about housing prices in high-demand urban areas was quite good. The most interesting section, though, ran through some fun facts about ICT (Information and Communications Technology). It sounds like there are a couple of economists at MIT (Autor and Acemoglu) who I should be reading about; they are doing some interesting work around classifying multidimensional complexity of specific jobs, and I should probably read a bit more about this; it's likely that their work will point towards a number of different areas for technology to displace people, and continue the inexorable trend of capital replacing labor (uh oh!). Many fun opaque references to Picketty were also funny, given their recent lambasting of Capital.

Overall, this was fun. Hopefully I can maintain this section, I think it will be helpful for me to remember fun facts, like the fact that the market is currently valuing Yahoo at roughly 20% of WhatsApp when you take away Alibaba, Yahoo Japan and its cash holdings.

Consumption Smoothing for the Masses

According to an old aphorism, there is a conservation law that regulates the distribution of health, wealth, and time. Young people are be poor, but they make up for that with good health and plenty of time. As we age, we slowly exchange time for the almighty dollar, and finally, once we have enough money to retire, we have limitless time but no longer have the physical constitution to make the most of it.

While there's a zen-like beauty to the progression and the inevitability of it all, in an age of Soylent, Flappy Bird and Cow Clicker, shouldn't we expect more from ourselves? Shouldn't we push forward and demand a world in which money, time, and health can all be maximized, where we finally find a loophole around the law that holds them in such strict equality?

Fortunately, the hero of freshwater economics, Milton Friedman, left behind an academic legacy peppered with some basic tricks to get around this problem. Read on for more!

Consumption smoothing, as it's name suggests, borrows heavily from both the medical study of tuberculosis and my personal experience with a pumice stone trying to fix my feet after hiking through three days of mud and water on the Appalachian Trail.

Just kidding.

In actuality, consumption smoothing is a fairly intuitive concept. According to a model that assumes perfectly smooth consumption, your spending should track your permanent income, not your current income. Boom. Fancy economics, complete. But what does this mean...for you?

If you were guaranteed to earn a salary of $50,000 every year for your whole life, it's fairly obvious how much you should spend. We can quibble about the specifics, but if it were actually impossible to raise your income above $50,000, no matter how good you were at stocks, you probably shouldn't spend more than $50,000 each year.

Unfortunately, however, we have not yet encountered any Borg-like race that would be able to ensure this level of consistency. In the real world, we face tremendous uncertainty and risk when predicting the future, making it very rational to save for rainy days and old age. Saving is good.

But in my experience, many people could do with a slightly smoother lifestyle. The fact of the matter is that in a number of very particular circumstances, I think that consumption smoothing can be a prescriptive, rather than descriptive, concept. It can enable a more liberated life, one free from artificial financial constraint and with the ability to take control of your free time. While this may sound too good to be true (and in the worst case encourages a life of hedonistic excess) there is a particular group of people who could stand to learn a basic lesson in consumption smoothing.

Next week, we'll take a closer look at medical students and their frustratingly irrational inability to effectively finance their present spending by taking out loans against their future income.

Why I Hated the Debate Scoreboard

There has been plenty written about the debate in terms of the relative performaces of President Obama and Governer Romney. There has been far less written about the green and yellow lines beneath them that responded as they talked. According to CNN, these lines were instant polls - they were created by a studio audence of undecided voters watching the debate.

Those two lines bothered me more than anything that was said by either candidate. I found myself constantly having to turn my eyes away from the instant polls to try and figure out what the candidates were actually saying. There were a couple of times during the debate where I actually realized that I had been watching the lines and completely missed a sentence or phrase that had just been stated. So from a personal level, the lines bothered me as a viewer.

But as an American citizen, the two lines bothered me even more. I think that they represent everything that is wrong with our political system - an inability to think broadly about the problems facing the country, a focus on soundbites and gaffes over specific policy positions, and a short-term view that is always cast in terms of winners and losers rather than any hope for progress.

Why do we need to know what other people think about what each candidate is saying in order to decide what we think? Why do we need second-by-second updates from a room of people whose choices are no more valid than ours? And how do we know that this group of randomly selected people is actually representative of anything whatsoever. It is a truth proven in academic literature that an experiment that relies on a smalle sample of people can actually sometimes be worse than no experiment at all. Simply put, we are bad at understanding the differences in certainty between a small sample size and a large one. Without any information about the sample size of the instant poll, viewers likely overestimated the validity of the results that were presented on the graph below the video feeds of the two candidates.

CNN should be embarassed for trying to turn an important democratic event into a sports game. It was a decision that may have been in the best interest fo their ratings, but that certainly was not in the best interests of our republic.

Some thoughts on admissions

In many ways, college admissions can be reduced to a fairly complicated multivariate resource allocation problem. Colleges select their incoming classes from a cohort of very talented students, trying to identify the high school seniors who are most likely to impact society in a meaningful way. While not every college states this mission explicitly, the goal of identifying and educating an extremely talented cohort of people is what drives universities to take admissions so seriously.

Past a certain size, this problem of selecting each subsequent class of students becomes prohibitively complicated, and so almost every university has a dedicated staff of admissions officials. Their role is to evaluate the pool of applicants and make the impossibly hard decisions about who to admit. While admissions officers are obviously still subject to the politics of any large organization, they are traditionally given the distance to operate with minimal external pressure. Essentially, admissions offices are structured to act as a sort of black box, taking a set of applicants as input and returning a set of admitted students as output. This process depends on the role of individual admissions officers being able to see the broad set of applicants and make decisions informed by this bulk population.

Currently, the system works as intended for the vast majority of applicants. However, when it comes to athletic recruiting, college admissions is broken. The preferential treatment of athletic recruits is unfair to other applicants, corrupts the overall system, and is not necessarily ideal for the athletes themselves. I understand that any discussion of this topic fundamentally challenges the legitimacy of athletes who currently attend top universities, and I also appreciate the defensiveness of many commentators when the subject is broached. However, in analyzing the current situation, I find very little justification for athletic recruiting in its current form. Furthermore, I think that majority of arguments supporting athletic recruiting are derived from a number of misconceptions about the zero-sumness of college admissions. This post, therefore, will take the form of a rebuttal to a number of common arguments given by defenders of the status quo. The responses will be centered around the Ivy League given my experience, although the trends driving recruiting are relevant to almost every university.

1) Questioning the legitimacy of the current admissions process is unfair to the many hardworking student-athletes who already attend the university.

While it may be true that questioning this policy is unfair to a number of students, this argument has been made historically in defense of a number of university policies. Similar arguments were made prior to the admission of Jewish students, black students, and women. Furthermore, this argument presumes that the current policy is fair to student athletes. It is not. Because of the existence of recruiting policies, even the most academically qualified student-athletes are viewed as less competent than their peers. In essence, belonging to an athletic team acts as a negative signal for academic talent. As a result, far from being unfair to current athletes, these policies have failed the cohort of very academically qualified athletes as well as the university in aggregate.

2) Athletics provides financial benefits to the university.

This argument was refuted categorically in the book The Game of Life. While it is true that certain sports, such as basketball, can provide enough revenue to offset operating expenses, this argument ignores the extraordinary costs that athletics require of the university. The operating expenses for athletics programs vastly outweigh any money they bring in from ticket sales, and when facilities costs are accounted for, the expenditures that are required to maintain a completive athletic program at any level outweigh the costs. Obviously this isn't a reason not to have athletics; the university at a fundamental level is structured around subsidizing unprofitable activity. This argument, however, is not unique to athletics, and the fact of the matter is that running a large athletics program is expensive.

3) People arguing against athletic recruiting want to end college athletics.

Very few people actually want to end college athletics. Speaking personally, my ideal outcome would be to restructure college admissions in order to promote the type of athletics that was common forty or fifty years ago. During this period, athletes were true amateurs and being a student-athlete meant that in general, athletes were more academically qualified than their peers and spent less time engaged in sport. Without reforming the current structure of recruiting, universities face an athletic arms race in which competitive coaches and schools continue recruiting more highly talented athletes and the American ideal of the multitalented student-athlete fades from reality. We already have schools which specialize in training artists and musicians; the athletic recruiting that happens at top Division I schools (obviously not the focus of this post) could be better served by a similar structure.

While I am very open to a rebuttal, I have not yet heard a first-principles argument which suggests that the university is the proper place to foster preprofessional athletic talent. Just as certain very talented musicians choose to go to college over conservatory, so too would certain athletes. Unlike now, such a system would allow those individuals whose sole goal was to eventually play at the professional level to forgo the burden of attending four years of college rather than being enabled to dedicate themselves wholly to their sport. College athletes should be a place where the participants are students first and athletes second, not the other way around.

4) Recruiting is necessary if we want to ensure that we are able to compete for top athletes.

This argument is based on two assumptions: first, that we want to recruit the best athletes regardless of other characteristics, and second, that we are interested in competing directly with those institutions that do. I have no objective rebuttal to this question; more than the others, it speaks to a fundamental disagreement in values that will not be reconciled via my short exposition on the subject.

However, I will take this time to explicitly state that I disagree strongly that the absolute athletic skill of a given team is what makes athletics valuable for the university. Rather, I think that it is the sense of camaraderie, loyalty to a common cause, dedication to self-improvement and commitment to others that make athletics such a positive aspect of the university experience. I believe that the quest for top athletes has become dominated by the unsupported assumption that it is absolute, rather than relative, athletic talent which allows these virtues to be exposed most clearly. I think that those who defend athletic recruiting by using this line of reasoning will have difficulty explaining why universities, rather than postsecondary athletic schools or semiprofessional athletic leagues, should have a responsibility for nurturing budding athletic talent. If the sole goal is to optimize for athletic skill, why maintain any impediments for athletes to reach their top potential? One could imagine a restructured post-secondary experience where the best athletes postpone attending college and instead focus entirely on sport for one or two years. This would allow for optimization along a single parameter, and would clearly yield a set of schools or leagues with the top athletes from a given year. It would also open the opportunity to experience college athletics to the many people who are not willing to commit as much time or don't have the raw skill to compete currently, providing real choices in the market for athletic talent.

5) Athletes are already academically qualified enough to get in without existing recruiting policies; they are merely a formality.

If this argument were true, changing the current policy would not have any measurable effect on admissions rates for athletes or non-athletes. In the Ivy League, each and every student-athlete must meet minimum academic standards in order to receive an offer of admission. Generally, defenders of recruiting argue that this standard is the academic bar that should guarantee academic competence. They envision a straw man - a bookish, nerdy, socially awkward student with a 2400 SAT score - and contrast that image with the well-rounded student athlete. What this argument fails to consider is that according to many admissions officers, roughly 50% of the applicants for admission to top universities are academically qualified. In the real world of college admissions, the brilliant athlete would probably be admitted regardless of his status as a recruited athlete, and the brilliant, one-dimensional student would get rejected. Most top schools could create between two and five statistically identical unique classes of students. Given this fact, how can one justify being above the bare minimum (a 1160 on the 1600 SAT) as good enough? The SAT is imperfect, but does remain a good predictor of future success according to numerous studies. The simple fact is that there are a subset of athletic recruits who would not get into a top school without recruiting, regardless of whether they met the bare minimum set of academic standards. Recruiting arbitrarily manipulates their potential for admission and artificially inflates their value in the market of admissions.

6) Athletics allow alumni to stay collected to the university.

There has been a decent amount of research done about whether this is true, and while it may be true in the context of a large public university, longitudinal studies covered in detail in The Game of Life indicate no quantifiable relationship between athletic spending, athletic success, and alumni opinion. While there is certainly a vocal minority of alumni who do care very much about athletic success, this minority is simply not representative of alumni on the whole. Additionally, many of these alumni were varsity athletes themselves, and so have a much more personal attachment to the institution of varsity athletics that is not generalizable to the overall alumni pool.

7) There are specific athletes who clearly deserve to be at the university based on their intellect, moral character, compassion, commitment to their team, and raw athletic talent.

This is absolutely true. This is also a sweeping generalization with no bearing on the discussion of recruiting. Firstly, it assumes that these student-athletes would not have been admitted without athletic recruiting, which I find to be a very convenient assumption. Even assuming that some of them would not have been admitted, and that a top school would have lost some exceptionally promising young students, the argument ignores the fact that they would have been replaced by students who, in the judgement of the admissions committee, would have in some way contributed more to the university community. I don't think that it is justifiable to assume that every exceptional athlete would have been rejected and that every student who hypothetically would have replaced them would have been categorically worse. 

8) Varsity athletics fosters a sense of community in the student body.

In my experience, limited as it was, athletics fostered a sense of community very similar to other activities which involved the same number of students. While it is valid to argue that many students attend their friend's sporting events, it was difficult to see how this sense of community was any different than the community formed by any other group on campus. While the validity of my statement can be challenged, I would press any defender of athletic recruiting solely on these grounds to consider the sense of community that athletics forms in high schools, small towns, and large cities. Even assuming that athletics fosters a sense of community that is unique, I simply cannot accept that that sense of community depends on whether or not the athletes themselves were recruited or not.

9) Getting rid of recruiting would make individual teams less competitive.

While this would be a likely outcome, the role of the university is not to play host to the most talented athletes. According to mission statements of many leading universities, the goal of the university is to primarily serve as a space for creating and sharing the cumulative collection of human knowledge. I think that athletics can help teach skills of leadership and of teamwork, but I worry that single-mindedly focusing on competing for the sake of maximizing the level of competition corrupts the goals of the institution. There are other places for the best athletes to train and push their bodies; the university is built to be a place where the primary mission is meant to be focused on training the mind.

10) Without recruiting, our athletic teams would be unbalanced, particularly in rare positions.

While this is a valid point, I fail to see how this is different than the analogous argument for a band; without actively recruiting musicians, we would never have enough oboes to have a functioning ensemble, much less a great one. This argument assumes that without recruiting, coaches would have no input in the admissions process. I think that a more realistic scenario would be similar to the current process for gifted artists and musicians, where coaches would provide a valuable, frank assessment of the applicant's abilities in a specific area, in this case athletics, which would be used by admissions counselors to accurately assess the relative talents of individual applicants and match them with the unique needs of each subgroup within the university.

11) Admissions is not a zero-sum game.

At the end of the day, every single student admitted to a school represents close to twenty students who were rejected. Even assuming that only half of those were academically qualified, the opportunity cost of an individual admitted student is extremely high. Many advocates focus on the negative effects that eliminating recruiting would have on individual applicants, but ignore the thousands of students who are rejected as a result of these policies. While I remain uncertain about whether the most elite schools are, in fact, the best places to go for college, given the widespread assumption that they are, I think that it is unfair to focus so heavily on individual athletic recruits getting rejected without thinking about those who would be admitted in their stead.

12) Recruited athletes commit early to schools, which means that they have to make a decision and probably are committed more to an individual school.

Many rational high school seniors would immediately commit to their top choice university by mid-fall. Arguing that a recruited athlete shows dedication to a school by accepting some sort of preliminary likely letter ignores the fact that almost every other applicant would happily take that opportunity to both commit to their top choice school early and skip the incredibly stressful period of college recruiting, which, without such a commitment, can last from October-May of their senior year.

Each of these defenses points to the implicit assumption that college athletics is fundamentally different from any other extracurricular activity. More generally, it rests on the normative claim that college athletics should be different. While I have addressed each of these issues individually, each defense relies on this assertion. Additionally, defending a policy of athletic recruiting assumes that these talents could not be priced into the admissions decision. Similar problems are faced by every other non-academic organization on campus. Outside of recruiting, we have developed processes which allow non-expert admissions officers to factor in expert analysis from specific experts in music, art, theatre, and the Faculty when making difficult admissions decisions. It seems to be an untenable claim that admissions decisions would not be able to identify high-quality athletic talent in the same way.

In what is essentially a multivariate optimization problem, final admissions decisions should rest in the hands of the admissions committee. Among actors in the system, they are the only ones that have an unbiased perspective and the largest amount of information. We trust in the judgement of the admissions committee to map the university's values onto the selection of the next class. As such, we should also trust that they would treat athletic talent in the same way as any other talent - evidence of passion, of leadership, of dedication and of future potential.