How about skiing - downhill and Nordic? Nordic is very competitive in New England.
Womens rowing has the highest number of scholarships per high school competitor. Pretty much any female rower who wants to get signed on at least a book scholarship will.
@ Shellz: Your statement "D1 Men’s scholarships are extremely limited outside of football, where every player is on a full ride. " is unequivocally and demonstrably false, even at the biggest of Football and Basketball Factories. Heck, it’s common for the Big Football Factories to have 100+ players “suit-up” for home games, most of whom are “walk-ons”.
As to sweetnerd, the original poster, the reason you can’t find a single data source is that there’s not a single answer. The simplest answer is that there are different types of scholarships – needs based, academically based, reward based, and athletically based.
Division 3 and Division 1 Ivy League colleges do not offer athletic scholarships at all.
Division 2, mostly smaller Liberal Arts colleges or offshoots of D1 schools, offer some athletic scholarships.
Division 1 offers athletic scholarships. “Free Rides” usually involve a combination of needs-based and athletically-based aid. I don’t know a single student in any sport who got a “free ride” solely based on athletic scholarships.
Then there are the Title 9 and NCAA and Conference compliance conundrums. There are many schools that compete in D1 in some sports, and D2/D3 in others, if they compete at all.
The scholarship “pie” varies from school to school. How each school slices that pie varies. The biggest slices often go to the sports that generate the most revenue or are an integral part of that school’s “branding” effort, but that’s not even true 100% of the time. Usually, what it comes down to is a budget decision of “What do we need to do to attract the students we want to attract?”.
My question is Why Do You Ask?
Spaceman, the experience we have might be limited, but looking at a number of football rosters, the number of players is pretty much equal to the ncaa max of 85 scholarships. So generally, the entire line up is on full scholly. Are there exceptions, probably, but I still think it’s safe to say football players ( and athletes in headcount sports) enjoy a very high likelihood of being on a full ride.).
Here’s a quick overview from Stanford on headcount vs equivalency sport scholarships:
http://www.stanforddaily.com/2010/02/05/belch-ncaa-scholarship-system-is-unjust/
@alwaysmom, the ivys do not provide any money for athletics. Yes, they recruit and your athletic skills can impact admissions decisions but the financial aid an athlete receives is 100% based on need. The rich, star athlete will get less money than the poor, bench warmer athlete.
With regard to the rarer sports (e.g. squash, fencing) keep in mind also that these teams are smaller and fewer schools have them. For men’s fencing (the only sport I have experience with at the D1 level) the roster max for men is 15 and there are only 34 varsity men’s teams in the country. That’s only 510 male varsity fencers nationwide. That’s not even 6 football teams or 19 soccer teams for the entire country. It’s not like anyone who does these sports is getting a note in their file from the coach. They only get a couple of spots and they reserve them for the best. If you’re the parent of a 5 year old and you’re trying to decide if you should push your kid towards fencing/squash or football/soccer, then yeah, maybe you can play the odds and it could make sense to pursue the rarer sport, but if you’re already in high school odds are the level of fencing/squash skill you’re going to get in the next couple years is going to do nothing for you on the college landscape.
SpacemanEd, some of your information is incorrect.
If it is a headcount sport (Division I football, basketball for men, and tennis, gymnastics,e volleyball and basketball for women) the scholarship cannot be split, so if the school funds the team, it is a full ride scholarship. Yep, all those D-1 female gymnasts are on a full ride (unless they are a walk on). At the top level football schools (Championship series), there are 85 scholarships and 105 allowed on the team (suit up limits are also there, and I think it is 65 per game, maybe more for a home game). Those extra 30 walk-ons have restrictions too. They can’t receive certain FA if they have had contact with the coaches and told to walk on. The NCAA is wise to these tricks. The next level of D-1 has a max of 65 full ride scholarships. Div 2 has other limits, but they aren’t full rides.
Most athletes on a scholarship do not get school based financial aid, as that would be a way around the maximum scholarships for the team. Merit aid, federal based aid (pell) are okay, but not school based. This is for any Div 1 or 2 NCAA athlete.
Schools do not compete in different levels, with some teams at Div 1 and others at Div 2/3. A division 3 school can have one women’s and one men’s team compete at a different level (D 1 or 2), and most schools do that in hockey or lacrosse because of tradition of playing those other schools before NCAA divisions were made. Originally, there were 4 schools with hockey teams that were grandfathered in when Title IX was passed for men’s hockey, and they have always played D1 in hockey, D3 in all other sports. Johns Hopkins is a Div 3 school for everything except lacrosse. Colorado College uses its ‘one up’ for hockey. Most big schools that do not support a Div 1 team have club teams for students who want to participate. A D-1 school can have a D-1 team and a club team too, but not a D3 team. The club teams have their own rivals and their own championships. Very competitive, but no scholarships.
Schools can choose whether or not to fund teams at the full level allowed by the NCAA, but of course it must stay in compliance with NCAA rules and Title IX (not two separate governing bodies, as NCAA makes sure the school meets Title IX requirements). A school can’t say “We’ll give enough money for 17 soccer scholarships but only 8 lacrosse players on a woman’s team, moving 3 lax scholarship to soccer.” NCAA doesn’t allow you to ‘move’ scholarships from sport to sport, even it the same number of women athletes are on scholarship, which would be Title IX compliant but not NCAA. The school can choose to only fund 8 lax scholarships instead of the 12 allowed, but is still limited to 14 soccer scholarships, so yes, the school can play favorites, but doesn’t have total control on how to ‘slice the pie.’
Spaceman is correct that scholarships outside D-1 football aren’t limited at all. Many schools have hundreds of students on athletic scholarships including females who don’t normally play football. Lots of scholarships, few full rides except in those D-1 headcount sports listed above.
My university has added Equestrian and a Rifle Team for women. A father I know is planning for his daughter to get a bowling scholarship.
I am well aware of the stated policy of no athletic scholarships. I have a D who is a grad of an Ivy school, and several nieces and nephews. I never said that the rich, star athlete would get more money than the poor, benchwarmer. What I said was that the schools will find the money to attract the ‘stars’ that they want. I have seen it happen to kids I know personally whose families were not necessarily rich, but certainly upper middle class. Their Ds graduated with zero debt.
What alwaysamom may be referring to (please correct me if I’m wrong alwaysamom) is that wealthy schools such as the Ivies have the financial might to provide need based aid that in some cases may reduce the FC for a student without need to lower that what a student with an athletic scholarship might pay at another school. For instance, we often hear of kids who received a “full ride” to play their sport in college, but this athletic scholarship may cover full tuition and fees but not room and board, and the student may not qualify for need based aid at their school or may receive any need based aid in the form of loans. Conversely, at a wealthy school with no athletic scholarships the threshold for qualification for need based aid may be substantially higher and that aid may come full or primarily in the form of grants that do not need to be repaid. Thus a kid from a family with an income of $150,000 might pay $10,000 (roughly 7% of income) for their child to attend Harvard but $11,000 (room and board) for their child to attend UMass Amherst on a full athletic scholarship.
But my point is that that has nothing to do with the kid’s athletic ability. The same financial situation would yield the same financial aid at Harvard for a kid who can’t even climb a flight of stairs without stopping to catch his breath. The only financial incentive an ivy league athlete gets is that his diploma will be from an ivy league school.
It’s true that there are no athletic scholarships in the Ivies, but for those who qualify for need-based financial aid - which is a large percentage of families - regular financial aid can result in a lower family contribution than an athletic scholarship at another school, particularly in sports where most athletes are on partial rather than full scholarships. This is especially true at the three Ivies with the most generous financial aid (Harvard, Yale, Princeton).
Here’s an article on this from a few years back.
D3 schools may also be generous with discretionary academic scholarships, even if the scholar-athlete happens to be a great athlete but a only a competent scholar.
As iwannabe_brown says, it’s almost impossible to get to the level of skill needed for serious recruitment even in these rarer sports with just a few years of practice. Every youth sport in this country has gone into serious overdrive. I still remember my husband and I looking at each other in amazement when we heard people were taking their elementary school children out of school and overseas so they could learn to sail at an international level.
For these rarer sport athletes, it’s not about scholarships but more about getting admitted. Its another perk of being upper income; not only are these athletes more likely to do well in school and have the right academics, they can pay for olympic level coaching and travel to national events.