Rethinking fairness in sports admissions

“Students at foreign language high schools are working incredibly hard.”

That comment came more than a decade ago from an official at the Korea Rowing Association, when asked whether rowing was also being pursued as a recreational sport. At the time, the merger of the Korea Olympic Committee and the Korea Council of Sport for All was a major issue in the sports sector. The official added that elite athletes were also offering private rowing lessons to earn extra income.

The reason was straightforward: rowing could help students gain admission to top overseas universities. The sport has long-standing academic traditions, with Oxford University and the University of Cambridge holding their first boat race in 1829, followed by Yale University and Harvard University in 1852. Up to the 2024 Paris Olympics, 1,509 athletes from eight Ivy League universities had competed, with rowing accounting for 450 of them, or 29.8%, the largest share among sports.

At the 2026 Los Angeles Olympics, another sport closely tied to Ivy League schools, lacrosse, will also be added as an official event. Lacrosse is played with a stick called a crosse, which resembles a netted scoop, and a rubber ball slightly smaller than a baseball is passed between players in an attempt to score against the opposing team. Ivy League schools are not traditionally strong in major team sports such as basketball or American football, but lacrosse is an exception. Cornell University, an Ivy League member, is the defending NCAA Division I men’s champion.

South Korea also runs a high school lacrosse competition. The question is which schools take part. As expected, the answer is largely specialized institutions. In the 2026 Under-19 Lacrosse Division League, which begins on May 23, 10 schools will compete in the men’s and women’s divisions: Gyeonggi Foreign Language High School, Korea Minjok Leadership Academy, St. Johnsbury Academy Jeju, St. Paul Academy Seoul, Yongin Korean Minjok Leadership Academy, Incheon POSCO High School, Incheon Haeneul High School, Cheongshim International Middle and High School, Chungnam Samsung Academy and Hanmin High School. All are either special-purpose high schools, autonomous private schools or international schools.

It would not be surprising if some of the participants have taken private lacrosse lessons. That raises a broader question: is building these kinds of “specialized credentials” for overseas university admissions an example of excessive effort? And if so, is it any less intense when students pursuing athletic recruitment admissions focus almost entirely on training while stepping away from broader school life?

Hongik University has announced that starting with the 2027 academic year, it will rename its “athletic special admissions” track as “athletic excellence admissions.” Instead of selecting students solely based on competition results, the first round of screening will shift to high school academic records beginning next year. In response, parents of student-athletes staged a protest outside the campus, arguing that current high school students can still choose other universities, while those already in the system will bear the consequences. Whether parents demonstrating on behalf of adult children amounts to overreach has itself become part of the debate.

What is clear is that most students in South Korea, outside these specialized academic or athletic tracks, live largely disconnected from organized sports. As a result, even the phrase “sports is study” has effectively been claimed by those preparing for athletic admissions. In an era when artificial intelligence is expected to outperform humans in many academic fields, one question remains: could time spent in physical training offer a more tangible edge for the future than academic competition alone? Students in elite overseas preparatory tracks appear to think so.