Old study originally published in 2010, then updated in 2017. Several NESCACs make the top 25 led by Bates College at #4 and Bowdoin College at #5, but Amherst College failed to make the top 25.
Need to scroll down to the bottom of the article to view the list.
Came across this after reading posts on another website which consistently described and discussed the highly visible presence of athletes at Middlebury College–which is #16 on the list.
Surprised that Amherst College was not on the list.
Williams College is listed at #8.
This is a bit more recent:
It has Amherst above Middlebury.
But overall, I am not sure you could really detect the difference between, say, low 30s, mid 30s, and high 30s. I think at that point the actual culture around varsity athletics and athletes would be more important than the exact percentage.
And yes, the NESCAC LACs tend to be rather serious about varsity athletics, at least relative to their academic peer LACs in most other conferences (aside perhaps from the D1 LACs, and even then . . .).
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That some schools - WIlliams, Middlebury, Amherst, Bates, Bowdoin, etc - are on this list should come as a surprise to nobody with experience - however tangential - with college admissions.
These colleges have decided as an institutional priority to offer X teams requiring a total roster of Y players. Their enrollment is capped at Z. Y/Z is a mathematical concept that has existed since ancient civilizations and remains unchanged to this day.
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That’s from 2017. It might be similar today, but it’s not at all recent.
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Yep. I do think the basic numerical logic skieurope explained is going to provide some general stability. But there could also be year to year variations within a range such that close colleges could be in varying orders over time.
And of course if, say, a college eliminated (or added) a major sport, that could change things.
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This is not a nuanced analysis. For example, a squash player at Bates will be quite a different version of a “jock” as compared to a football player at UGeorgia.
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It’s such an interesting thing that people are fixated on esp for the lacs. I bet if you did the same analysis for musicians it would be about the same (and at some participants inmusic and sports overlap greatly).
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At LACs, it seems like the athletes sometimes play the role of Greek life—exclusive, sometimes exclusionary, and they hold the social power on campus (like high school, where a good many didn’t like it there either). If you’re not an athlete (and particularly if you’re a male student), your social life might be quite limited as you are unwelcome at parties, may have difficulty breaking through the “team” dynamic to make real friends, etc.
This dynamic can happen with other kinds of activities (I’m thinking about the acapella groups in Pitch Perfect, the Treblemakers and the Barden Bellas, for example) but it’s usually the athletes since their high percentage of the population at small LACs makes it hard to ignore.
We cared about how much athletic teams dominated the population and the social scene for S26, who is not a jock, and who struggled for his first 2 years at a high school where athletes ruled the social scene (he switched junior year and is so much happier). As much as college is not like high school… sometimes it is.
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The advantage your son has at his NESCAC is that the social scene is shared by the one or two active athletic houses and by an entire department of future showrunners.
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Yep, it was definitely clear to us that Wes was the right mix of folks for him. I’ll add that most of the outreach he’s gotten from his post on the 2030 Instagram page has been about his music tastes, which are eclectic and wide-ranging. It’s perfect.
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As another poster also explained, and as I understand it, the concern is how sports in particular can potentially intersect with college social life. Of course performing arts kids, say, often socialize together as well. I ended up spending a lot of time with people I met through my college debate team. And so on. But I think concerned people have a certain image in mind of what sports-team-dominated social life in particular might look like.
Already, though, I think this is underscoring the importance of the observation that not all sports/teams/athletes are going to be alike in this sense. I think in many LACs, for at least most of the athletes/teams/sports, it really won’t be notably different from any other serious group activities, including performing arts, debate, and so on. But at some LACs, sometimes it might start feeling a little more like what people are concerned about.
So I don’t personally entirely dismiss this concern, but I think it is important to investigate in detail before ruling out an otherwise promising college idea. Like, talk to actual students if possible, see what they think, that sort of thing.
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I realize the Newsweek analysis is also looking at the number of intramural participants and spending on athletics, but I think the headline (schools stocked with jocks) has a much easier answer. Quoting myself from a December 2024 post in the College Closings thread:
If I could find my spreadsheet where I had pulled the data, there would be 18 schools composed of at least 80% varsity athletes, and then I’d pull the next 7 schools that are in the 70-79% bucket. All of those would swamp schools like the NESCACs where 26-35% of students are varsity athletes, no matter how many intramural participants they have. And when the bulk of a school’s students are athletes, I assume that they’re also devoting a significant chunk of their resources to that area as well.
From the lede of the Newsweek piece:
Among the in the top 10, two stand out:
For what had been a well-respected periodical, that flub is very saddening, and they haven’t fixed it over the course of many years, as the article was first published in 2010 and updated in 2017.
Do the 6 schools in the 90% group include the military academies,VMI, and The Citadel?
Personally, I’ve never had a problem with NESCAC athletes as dorm mates, classmates or even as the embodiment of a certain “vibe”. It’s worth noting that it does require a certain amount of money to acquire and maintain the equipment that comes with some of the more popular “helmet” sports and that skews their socioeconomic profile significantly. Skeptics will say that’s a feature and not a bug in terms of NESCAC’s whole approach to admissions. But I have yet to meet one who wasn’t outgoing, kind and respectful towards old people like me.
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I repeated this exercise. There were a surprising number (to me) of colleges that appear to have near 100% athletics participation. These are all small colleges I am not familiar with, mostly religious colleges. An example is Ottawa University (KS) which has ~800 residential students and ~800 student athletes. This figure seems verifiable from external sources, such as https://www.ottawa.edu/Ottawa/media/OUDocs/Consumer%20Information%20Documents/EADA%20Reports%20and%20Surveys/2024-25-EADA-Report-OUKS-Revised.pdf .
Among colleges might be known among typical forum members, some of the higher totals include the following. For reasons that are not obvious to me, many of these total seem higher than other sources, so take the numbers with a grain of salt. I expect all of colleges below have high athletic participation, but actual participation may be 5-10% below these figures in some cases.
- Webb – 53%
- US Marine Academy – 51%
- Bates – 44%
- Bowdoin – 41%
- Virginia Military – 39%
- Connecticut – 39%
- Hamilton – 37%
- Williams – 36%
- Amherst – 36%
- …
- Caltech – 27%
Webb is one of the easier colleges to manually review since it only has ~100 students. Team totals are as follows. Webb’s website at Athletics | Webb Institute also mentions 56 athletes and the same teams. IPEDS lists total undergraduate enrollment as 106. 56/106 = 53% – same as above.
M Basketball – 25
M Soccer – 20
M Volleyball – 18
Tennis – 18
Sailing – 15
Total Above – 96
Total Unduplicated – 56
56 / 105 = 53% Participation
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I disagree, at least based on what I have heard from my kid and her other friends who attended LACs (none of the friends are athletes). Well, if by “social life” one means “large parties on weekend nights with cheap booze, loud music, and drunk students”, for students on their first and sophomore years, yes, the athletes are the ones who host those parties, and control access.
They do have an active social life, at least when they’re on campus and not practicing. Because of their training and playing schedules, the athletes generally do have floors of dormitories which they all live in, and they are willing to use their rooms and common spaces for a party.
However, even at LACs with a very high percent of athletes, athletes are still not the majority. At Middlebury, for example, they are 27%-28% of the student population.
There are so many other things going on for people who don’t find that particular type of party to be a way to spend every weekend, including other parties. Social lives at LACs include many many other things than periodic large loud parties with a lot of drunkenness. There are many other social circles at LACs.
When we’re talking about rural colleges, a large part of the social activities have to do with outdoor activities. There are groups that organize around hiking, birding, etc, all which rarely have athletes, because athletes rarely have time to engage in this. There are club sports, which have students who are often very different from Varsity athletes. My kid dances, so she was part of a dance group, which had an amazing social life (the dance group overlapped a lot with her Posse group)
At Middlebury, for juniors and seniors, there are 18 Special Interest and Academic houses (like French House, Sustainable Design Houses, etc), as well as five Social Houses (which also are for students who share more general interests like Art or Social Justice). There are more juniors and seniors living in these houses than there are athletes, by a good margin. My kid was at a Social House (for students who have interest in arts), and my kid’s social life was at the house (her friend group all joined this house), at other houses, her dance company, and with the Posse kids.
My kid said that the craziest parties are actually not in the Athlete’s dorms, they were at The Mill - the other social house for “artsy” kids.
Varsity athletes tend to form larger group earlier, and tend to live together. They also tend to be wealthy, as stated above. So they are able to have large parties, and varsity athletes are part of active set groups as son as their arrive, because they join their upper classmates.
But that doesn’t, by any means, give them a stranglehold on the social lives of the other 2/3rds - 3/4ths of the students at the college.
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Results look more aligned with my expectations, if I take median of past 3 years, so I exclude a unique rare outlier year. Results are below:
Highest % Athletes Overall
1 . Ottawa (KS) – 95%
2. Erskine – 94%
3. Emmanuel – 90%
4. Jacksonville (TX) – 87%
5. Life University – 86%
Highest % Athletes: NCAA
1 . Erskine – 94%
2. Emmanuel – 90%
3. Wheeling (WV) – 83%
4. Lake Erie (OH) – 76%
5. Bethany – 76%
Highest % Athletes: Familiar NCAA
1 . Bates – 40%
2. Bowdoin – 35%
3. Williams – 35%
4. Hamilton – 33%
5. Trinity – 33%
6. Hartwick – 33%
7. Connecticut – 32%
8. Colby – 32%
9. Amherst – 32%
10. Washington & Lee – 32%
Highest % Athletes: Familiar NCAA, Not LAC
1 . Rose Hulman – 27%
2. Caltech – 27%
3. Dartmouth – 20%
4. Princeton – 19%
5. MIT-- 16%
Lowest% Athletes: Familiar NCAA
1 . UCF – 1%
2. Cal Poly: Pomona – 1%
3. Texas A&M – 1%
4. UT Arlington – 1%
5. UC Irvine – 1%
…
& NYU – 2%
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UCF has the same 800 or so athletes that most Power 4 schools have, it’s just that the denominator is 50,000
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Let’s face it. In your first two categories, a lot of kids wouldn’t be going to those schools, or even know of those schools, if they weren’t looking for a place to play their sport in 13th grade. When you’re not a top athlete, but your whole focus is on playing in college, you don’t care about majors (Life University is purely chiropractic), religious affiliation, or much else. Lots of these places are surviving by giving a kid an athletic jersey.
Just checked Erskine’s baseball rooster. It’s 60 players. Most majoring in exercise science or business (for the former CC players). Less than 1/2 will dress or travel for games as there is a 34 travel rooster spot rule and the number can be reduced by the school or tournament rules. Only 9 of them can receive athletic scholarships. The first half of their roster is made up of kids coming out of CC, who want to say they play D2 rather than D3, or transferring from better programs where they probably didn’t get playing time (few have awards listed for their previous schools). The lower half are kids coming out of high school who will most likely sit on the bench for a couple of years waiting for their shot, only to learn that the new incoming Jrs and Srs will be the ones actually on the field.
I can only speak for baseball, but we see the same thing over and over for all but the top academic D2 schools. There are also many small D3 schools engaging in the same tactics and with NAIA it’s a given. It’s a way to keep the lights on.
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