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Before you start dreaming about athletic shoe endorsements or freeing up shelf
space for your Wimbledon trophy, you should start considering an athletic scholarship
as a viable means of paying for college. In order to do that, you’ve got
to start with the basics. There are three primary
organizations that govern collegiate athletics, and each of them vary in their
eligibility, size, and propensity for awarding scholarships. By understanding
what each one does and how they work, you can better determine what kind of school
might be right for you (and your killer jump shot, butterfly, or ability to bend it like Beckham).
NCAA
When you think of big-time college athletics, this is it. The granddaddy of college
sports, he National Collegiate Athletics Association (NCAA) has over 1,000 member
schools that are classified according to size, competitiveness, and ability to
award athletic scholarships. To make it slightly more confusing, these classifications
are referred to as divisions.
Division I: These are the schools that play before national television
audiences and have athletic departments with multimillion-dollar budgets. Notre
Dame, Ohio State, UCLA, and Florida State are all popular examples of Division
I programs with fan-bases numbering in the hundreds of thousands. Division I teams
are also subdivided into two divisions (Division I-A and I-AA) for football. Each
division carries certain stipulations regarding stadium size, required fan turnout,
and scheduling appropriate opponents.
Division II: These schools are smaller in size and with slightly smaller
scholarship allotments; no more than 60 scholarships may be offered in sports
other than football and basketball during an academic year. While there are many
talented athletes playing for Division II schools, the competition does not measure
up to Division I and these schools receive less media exposure. Popular examples
of Division II schools include Seattle Pacific University, Michigan Tech, and
The University of Alaska-Anchorage.
Division III: Most Division III schools have no more than a few thousand
students. You’ll find many of the nation’s renowned liberal arts colleges
competing at this level, such as Gustavus Adolphus, Amherst, and Washington University.
Division III schools do not offer athletic scholarships. But athletes may earn
financial aid awards that offset the high tuition of these schools. Division III
programs have very limited recruiting budgets, but the level of competition is
not much lower than at Division II schools.
NAIA
In addition to the NCAA, the National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics
(NAIA) governs the athletic programs and contests of its 360 member colleges,
all of which are small institutions. There is no limit on how many scholarships
can be offered by NAIA schools. But small schools have limited budgets, which
limits the number of scholarships available. The level of competition is typically
on par with that of NCAA Division III schools.
<"span class="ProductHead">NJCAA
An additional category of college athletics is the National Junior College Athletics
Association (NJCAA), which consists of over 500 junior colleges. NJCAA schools
offer full and partial scholarships in 23 sports. Often, athletes who are academically
ineligible to attend NCAA Division I colleges enroll at NJCAA colleges for two
years, become eligible, and transfer to NCAA schools during their junior year.
Junior colleges often have an “open door admissions policy,” which
means anyone may enroll who has graduated from high school or earned a General
Equivalency Diploma. Junior colleges have a wide range of athletes—from
future pros who didn’t have the grades to get into NCAA schools, to athletes
that were never recruited in high school.
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