Fifty-nine NCAA Division III schools increased athletes on campus by more than 10 percent in the past four years

33 of those schools also exceed 44 percent of athletes on campus

After writing last week about the number of NCAA schools across all three divisions for which the overall percentage of athletes on campus is greater than 44 percent, I was invited to be a guest on my friend Dr. Karen Weaver’s podcast, Trustees and Presidents. I was joined by Washington Post reporter Jesse Dougherty. The timing of Karen’s podcast was impeccable, as the Philadelphia Inquirer published a lengthy story on Nov. 13 regarding the financial health of 13 small schools in the Philadelphia area.

In preparation for the podcast, I took a deeper dive into DI Mount St. Mary’s University, the focus of Dougherty’s recent article on the school’s choice to add women’s flag football. I zeroed in on two percentages = the overall percentage of athletes on The Mount’s campus and whether that percentage was growing. 

What I discovered, and mentioned on the podcast, was The Mount’s overall percentage of unduplicated athletes was 31.8% for the 2022-23 reporting year. During the 2019-20 reporting year, the last year prior to COVID, The Mount’s overall percentage was 28.5%. In raw numbers, The Mount added seven undergraduate students during that time, but added 59 athletes. In other words, it enrolled fewer non-athlete undergraduates, but not by an amount that could alarm.

I was curious how DIII schools approached this, so I examined, as a random case, Bethany College (WV). I found 75.5% of its overall undergraduates are athletes, a 9.7% increase during the similar time period. Again, the raw numbers revealed an increase in undergraduate students (501 to 593) but an increase in athletes from 330 to 448. In other words, despite an enrollment growth of 92 overall students, Bethany enrolled 26 fewer non-athlete students.

Why would this matter? It might not. But it is true that athletes trigger additional expenses (coach salaries, equipment, travel, etc.) which non-athletes do not. So, if, as a way of growing enrollment, a campus adds a sport, it must also recognize it is adding expenses. If overall non-athlete enrollment does not also increase, it is possible the university is creating, or deepening, a negative financial situation. Of course, other factors are in play here, chief among them is the discount rate the school is giving to students. It is important to remember I am merely looking at numbers, and I am not involved in cabinet meetings on any of these campuses.

I enjoy the visual of a good Venn diagram and I began to wonder how rapidly the Division III 44 Percenters were growing their overall percentage of athletes. So, again using the publicly available data at the Equity in Athletics Data Analysis website, I compared numbers from 2019-20 and 2022-23 for all Division III schools. Recall that my analysis last week revealed 61 DIII schools that were at 44 percent or greater. In this analysis, I found 59 DIII schools had increased the overall percentage of athletes on their campuses by more than 10 percent in the four-year period, an average of 2.5 percent a year or more. Four campuses grew their percent of athletes by greater than 25 percent during that period. 

The intersection of those two circles has 33 schools. Fontbonne University, which grew by 33.7%, has already announced closure, but because it is still competing in DIII this year, I included the school in this analysis. Not included is Eastern Nazarene College, which grew by 17.3% and closed at the end of last year. Clarks Summit University also announced closure but grew by just 7.6%. Wells College, another school to close, grew by only 3.0%. All four of those schools were members of the 44 Percent club at the time of closure. So, one should not automatically assume growing athletes by 10 percent or more is precursor to anything.

I don’t want to speculate on decisions made on any of the 33 campuses, so I am not going to identify them here publicly, but will send the list to my paid subscribers in a separate paid subscriber-only post later this week. In an attempt to identify any commonalities among the 33 schools, I sorted them by athletic conference membership.

A logical explanation for the high growth athlete growth rate for these 33 schools is that they added a bunch of sports to grow enrollment. But that is not what the data says. Since March 2020, I have, to the best of my ability, curated a list of all sports added or dropped. Across all of Division III, 354 sports teams have been added during that time. Amazingly, these 33 schools only added 35 sports during that period, an average of 1.06 per school. How can this be? I offer a couple hypotheses.

First, these 33 schools might be losing non-athlete students at a disproportionate rate. Consider Fontbonne as an example. In 2019-20, the school reported 768 total undergraduate students. In 2022-23, the campus disclosed 612 total students. Its athlete raw numbers, meanwhile, increased from 224 to 385, meaning Fontbonne enrolled 544 non-athletes in 2019-20 compared to just 227 non-athletes in 2022-23.

Second, it is possible we have not yet seen the impact for schools that added a lot of sports since the pandemic. The Division III schools which have added the most sports include Hobart and William Smith Colleges (12), Hiram College (9), Western Connecticut State University (7), Hilbert College (6), and the Milwaukee School of Engineering (6). None of them fall into the middle of the Venn diagram and only Hiram (51.5%) exceeds the 44 percent threshold.

As a general observation, the public universities in Division III (think SUNYAC schools and WIAA schools) do not come close to either circle, nor do schools that score well on U.S. News & World Report rankings for academic excellence (think UAA, NESCAC, Centennial, etc.). I wrote about the latter group last month.

As my schedule allows over the next few weeks, I will analyze the numbers in Division I and Division II. In addition, I am working on a master database that includes a number of variable such as these percentages, Learfield Directors Cup rankings, USNWR rankings, etc. I am available to consult as needed so please reach out if I can add value.