@hillcountryview No worries, it’s a shame we tend to make the incorrect mental leap based on your choice of words. Sadly, the club soccer world is full of parents with totally unrealistic expectations because they don’t know what they don’t know(and haven’t found CC yet ?). I’m sorry I lumped you in with the crazies.
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@BKSquared Thank you! This is is the path of information I’m looking for. It’s just crazy that so many websites say so many different things!
I would guess there’s flexibility with merit aid – merit aid is designed to attract a kid the school really wants (but the NCAA, I believe, looks pretty carefully at merit aid and athletics b/c it cannot be used to entice a kid they want only for athletics).
That said, another one of my kids had a very clear correlation with merit aid and academics – reach schools he got no merit; match schools he got about $10,000/year and safety schools he got $25,000/year, in every school’s case.
@GKUnion I completely understand and almost didn’t post my question, knowing that it can get a little crazy, but I couldn’t come up with a better way.
It would be super helpful if there was some resource that tracked the Athletic side of the financials for each college- what % of players receive $ and the avg $ amount in each of the categories.
If the universe is listening, I’d also like a ranking of how the top ranked academic colleges weight academics vs athleticism in each of the sports.
Maybe this is why there are crazy parents- they make it really hard to figure out if your being realistic!
@hillcountryview It makes things even worse that not every coach recruits for every position each cycle. Your child may not know if they’re 2nd on the depth chart, or 5th. Does the coach take very good athlete A with an exceptional SAT score, or extremely good athlete B with a lower score that needs admissions support? There are so many variables that parents and players simply don’t have line of sight to.
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If the universe is listening, I’d also like a ranking of how the top ranked academic colleges weight academics vs athleticism in each of the sports.
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Top ranked academic colleges – this isn’t 100% true for every school, but for schools like Amherst, Williams, Bowdoin, the University of Chicago and the Ivy League, e.g.the coaches first and foremost want the best soccer players they can find. From that pool, they want the players that can get admitted to their schools. So that means the player has to be close to the general admitted pool of students.
E.g. Williams/Amherst - they have such a low admit rate, and deny probably thousands of perfectly well qualified kids. Soccer is the thing that gets a kid that is qualified, but would otherwise probably be rejected (because most such kids are) admitted. Same with the Ivy League. There are differences around the margins, but that’s the basic situation.
Soccer is the thing that gets a kid that is qualified, but would otherwise probably be rejected (because most such kids are) admitted. Same with the Ivy League.
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@cinnamon1212 That’s what I am looking for! These are the schools I would like to identify. Guess maybe I just apply this to the schools with lowest admissions rates?
Now the question is, do the above schools you mentioned offer any type of Non-Need Based: merit awards or scholarships (any category of $ that does not have to be paid back or that is not based on family income) to the academically qualified, recruited student?
Where do you think Duke falls on the academic/athletic scale as a Div 1 school who I believe has slid toward the lower end of the division standings?
Duke - would need to be a top D1 recruit, I would have thought – my son isn’t in that pool, so don’t know the nuances of high D1 recruiting. I wouldn’t necessarily base my opinion of a program on one year’s ranking; historically, Duke is a strong program (I think).
Tippy top academic schools do not offer merit aid, as a general rule (they don’t need to – they attract top students without it. It’s the schools lower in the food chain that want to attract high academic kids that offer merit). That said, a school like Emory, I believe, does have some merit scholarships, but I would guess they would be used to entice kids away from MIT, Brown, Dartmouth etc, so the student would have to be in that academic pool (again, soccer cannot enter into the equation). For example I’d guess a kid with a 36 ACT and a 4.0 would be in the running for those Emory scholarships.
You really aren’t going to be able to figure this out at this stage. It is too soon to know where your son will fall academically and too soon to project where he’ll end up soccer wise too. When he’s in 10th grade, you’ll have 2 years of high school grades to work with, and 2 years of playing soccer hopefully at a high level, and coaches will be able to give you an idea of where he’ll project.
At that point, you come up with a list of schools where his soccer level would make him an attractive recruit, and also a list of where he fits academically, and then you see where they overlap. To oversimplify 
Schools with merit aid and men’s soccer – Connecticut College (finished in the top 10 in the country last year), Trinity (CT), Kenyon, Denison, Skidmore, Hobart . . . clearly this is not an exhaustive list. But you can see the tier of school that is using merit aid to attract strong students.
@hillcountryview All the Ivies have a formal process for admitting athletic recruits. Coaches get a limited number of slots that they can use on academically qualified recruits. Those recruits get a pre read from admissions in the summer and if there’s a green light and the coach supports the application (usually during ED), the recruits have a >95% admit rate and usually get a likely letter within a few weeks of applying. NESCAC schools also have processes in place. Other selective schools like Pomona, Carleton, Chicago do something similar. P5 schools are going to be completely different, and coaches have a lot more power at most of those.
You’ll need to learn more about the intricacies of all these different systems in a few years but just to be clear: the admit rate for the school really isn’t relevant for recruited athletes. The athlete will know before applying if the coach is supporting the application and should know what that means in terms of likelihood of admission.
For an eighth grader, right now I’d just focus on enjoying the sport and keeping the academics on track for an academically selective school. And if the latter part is difficult in 9th and 10th, then that’ll help you filter out a lot of these schools as not good academic fits.
@cinnamon1212 Agreed. I think the college tours with his sister and having taken the SAT this year just got him excited to think about the possibilities. Most importantly, I think it has motivated him- which is not always easy to come by. Thanks again.
Agree with @cinnamon1212. As an 8th grader, it is way too early to try to narrow your focus and anticipate options. It is important to understand the general lay of the land and how the process works, but your options will simplify and self narrow based on your son’s athletic and academic accomplishments over the next few years. The most that he can do for now is to do the best he can in soccer, academics and other areas of interest. If soccer is like baseball and softball, it is important to play at the highest club level he can (and you can afford $wise and timewise) for purposes of reaching his maximum potential and understanding the level of play at which he needs to compete. You also never know, 2 years from now, soccer may be completely off the table as far as your son’s interests are concerned.
It also may be a good idea to decide - does he want to go to the best school soccer can help him get into or the school with the best soccer? You might not know the answer to that now but it will guide your process. We have been surprised with the number of people we know who would pick the best athletic school they know, say unc or UConn or Baylor, over a top nescac or ivy. To me that seems crazy but it is a different mindset and totally valid.
Does your son play on the highest level club team in your area? Is he one of the hardest workers on the team?
Oh! I meant to add - do you have a club coach you trust and you can talk to about this? I straight up asked recently because I was tired of guessing. I basically asked if I was crazy to be committing to something. The answer was basically inline with what I thought. This is a trusted coach who does not bullsh*t so I was comfortable with the answer. I do know coaches I wouldn’t trust to give a straight answer.
In our experience, the parents/kids who chased the sport without careful regard to school/academic fit have had the most issues. The sport doesn’t pan out because of injury or playing time, and the kid is stuck at a school that doesn’t fit. They then waste a year on transferring, oftentimes to a school that is not as good academically as one they could have gotten into straight out of HS. In the absence of a situation where your kid can realistically play at the professional level for decent money, the point of using the athletic card is as an “in” to get into the best school that fits for your kid, one that may be much harder to get into as a non-recruit. Of course it needs to be for a coach/program that they would enjoy playing for.
@hillcountryview, if you are asking be enlightened “on where to go, who to trust, and what to look at” for D3 soccer programs that give merit aid, I am going out on a limb and refer you to @Midwestmomofboys.
@gointhruaphase Thank you! My D3 soccer player is graduating this year and, while watching his Senior day match was bittersweet to know that something so central to his identify was coming to a close, he had a great academic, athletic, social, and every other kind of experience at his school. @hillcountryview I’m happy to help in any way I can.
Upthread you asked about need based and athletic being stacked. It is rare at a D1 or D2 school.
Once the student takes athletic aid, any need based aid the student takes from the school is counted as athletic aid against the team, so basically once the student takes athletic aid, the need based aid isn’t going to be offered. D1 and D2 students can take merit scholarships if they have a certain gpa, test score or class rank (NCAA sets the requirements). Once they clear that requirement, they can accept merit on the same terms as all other students at the school. At a school like Duke, that merit aid is extremely hard to get for any student and the athlete has to compete for it. At my daughter’s school, the merit aid was given out to all students based on a gpa/score/rank grid so easy to figure out which athletes would get it. They also had merit for things like being on a robotics team or an eagle scout. Again, easy to see if athletes qualified.
D3 schools can only give need based and merit aid. The aid has to be the same as would be given to any non-athlete students. The NCAA checks.
There really is no smoke and mirrors, and the best soccer player in the world will not be given a band scholarship or history scholarship if he doesn’t play an instrument or never took a history class. Leadership can be shown through soccer, but the facts better be there that he really was a leader.
It’s an interesting phenomenon now that if you are middle class ($100-150k) or lower and are an athlete, particularly in an equivalency sport, you are likely better off financially going to an Ivy. Ivies are pretty competitive in secondary sports like lacrosse and ice hockey and have won NCAA Div 1 titles in recent years.
“It would be super helpful if there was some resource that tracked the Athletic side of the financials for each college- what % of players receive $ and the avg $ amount in each of the categories.”
You might want to check out these sites for some data on athletic teams, financial aid, merit aid, etc: