What would a split of NCAA Division III look like?

A preview of my panel discussion at CSRI on Thursday

I am excited to moderate a panel discussion about the current, and future, of NCAA Division III this Thursday afternoon at the College Sport Research Institute (CSRI) annual conference. Now in its 17th year, CSRI was a conference I began eagerly attending at its inception while housed on the campus of UNC-Chapel Hill. It has since moved to Columbia, SC and the University of South Carolina.

The academic conference brings together faculty and student researchers focused on all aspects of college sport. Frequently, the topics revolve around the dynamic landscape that is Division I athletics. My interest lately has been in the space of small colleges and the use of sports as an enrollment tool.

I am pleased to be joined on my panel by Greensboro College Athletic Director Jerry Fisk who has spent the majority of his career in Division III athletics including stops at Hobart and William Smith Colleges, Elmira College, and SUNY-Fredonia. Greensboro College, according to 2023-24 EADA data, enrolled 637 undergraduate students, more than 62 percent of whom were athletes. Mr. Fisk is eminently qualified to provide a practitioner perspective.

We will also get a faculty perspective from my colleague Dr. Craig Crow, professor of business and sport management at Geneva College in Beaver Falls, Pa. Dr. Crow and I overlapped in 2007-08 at East Stroudsburg University before he joined faculty at his alma mater, West Liberty University in West Virginia. According to 2023-24 EADA data, Geneva College enrolled 959 undergraduate students, 39 percent athletes. Dr. Crow and I had a presentation at the inaugural 2009 iteration of CSRI, then known as the Scholarly Conference on College Sport, “Competitive balance in the founding BCS conferences: Regular and post-season implications.” My how times have changed…

My full abstract, with hyperlinks added, is below the logo. You can also find it, and the many other interesting presentations, at the conference’s event schedule page.

When the NCAA voted in 1973 to split into three divisions, one of the key drivers was the ability of institutions to self-determine which division aligned best with their respective campus missions. Since the split into Division III, member institutions have maintained a philosophy that “athletics were an integral part of a well-rounded college experience,” (Moyen & Thelin, 2024, p. 307).

Division III has grown considerably over the past 50 years. Many institutions have embraced the idea that athletics are not just part of a well-rounded college experience, but a key driver of desperately needed revenue, in the form of enrollment and tuition dollars, to sustain operations.

When the 1973 split occurred, 237 institutions chose Division I, 194 chose Division II, and 233 chose Division III (Falla, 1981). Today, a total of 430 schools, nearly double the size from a half century ago, participate in NCAA Division III athletics, making it the largest of the three NCAA divisions. Predictably, that large tent attracts schools of varying sizes and philosophies.

Using 2023-24 data from the Equity in Athletics Data Analysis website, the most recent year for which data is available, the average DIII institution enrolled 2,406 undergraduate students. However, that number is misleading as many public universities in DIII have 8,000 or more undergraduate students. In fact, the median enrollment for a DIII school in 2023-24 was just 1,630, with a low enrollment of 267 students at Bryn Athyn College in Pennsylvania to a high enrollment of 28,491 at New York University. (Bryn Athyn dropped athletics after the 2024-25 academic year. Blackburn College in Illinois was the next smallest with 335 undergraduate students.)

Many of the low enrolled campuses turn to athletics as a way to sustain enrollment. Sixty-one of the 430 DIII institutions reported at least 45 percent of its 2023-24 undergraduate student enrollment were athletes. Bethany College in West Virginia reported the highest percentage with 77 percent of its 639 total undergraduates as athletes. The aforementioned Bryn Athyn College reported 52 percent of its 267 students were athletes. For the most part, these athlete-dependent schools are not necessarily competing academically against the elite private Liberal Arts colleges and universities with deep traditions and rich endowments. But, they all compete against one another athletically, under the large DIII tent.

The diversity of DIII institution type has long been a source of discussion, both among DIII administrators and academics. In their impactful book published in 2001, The Game of Life: College Sports and Educational Value, James L. Shulman and William G. Bowen investigated the role of athletics at highly selective private colleges and universities in both Division I and Division III. Comparing, say, football at Vanderbilt University with football at Oberlin College allowed the authors to examine “the nature and effects of radically different kinds of athletic programs … without leaving a world of shared academic expectations and requirements” (p. xxxvii).

In a follow-up to The Game of Life, Bowen and Sarah A. Levin (2003) noted in Reclaiming the Game: College Sports and Educational Values the need for schools to “have suitable competitors - institutions that share their philosophies, admissions practices, playing/practice rules, and educational priorities. Needed is an overall structure that reinforces, rather than undermines, their efforts” (p. 303).

Most DIII athletic conferences bring together like-minded institutions. For example, the United Athletic Association (UAA) has a large geographic footprint, stretching from Boston to New York to Chicago to St. Louis to Atlanta. Its members, with average institutional undergraduate enrollment of 9,230 according to data from the 2023-24 EADA report, are elite, highly selective, private universities such as New York University, the University of Chicago, Washington University, Emory University, and Carnegie-Mellon University. In contrast, the Wisconsin Intercollegiate Athletic Conference (average institutional undergraduate enrollment of 6,585, according to data from the 2023-24 EADA report) includes eight public, regional universities scattered throughout the state of Wisconsin, from La Crosse to Stevens Point.

Universities from these conferences compete athletically against one another, and also against schools from conferences such as the USA South, and its average institutional undergraduate enrollment of just 861 students.

All eight UAA schools are ranked among the nation’s Top 100 Universities in 2025 by U.S. News & World Report. Seven of the eight UAA schools, including champion Emory University, finished in the Top 64 of the annual Learfield Directors’ Cup, a measure of overall athletic performance in NCAA post-season competitions. All eight of the WIAC schools finished in the top 101 of the Learfield Directors’ Cup. Just seven of the 10 members of the USA South earned points in the Learfield Directors’ Cup with Methodist University finishing the highest at 111th. None of the USA South schools are ranked nationally by U.S. News.

In total, 47 Division III schools placed in the top 100 in both U.S. News rankings and Learfield Directors’ Cup standings.

Given the vast institutional type diversity that exists in DIII, should the division consider further segmentation in the same way that Division I has Football Bowl Subdivision, Football Championship Subdivision, and Division I? Some of the challenges within DIII may be attributable to some DIII institutions modeling themselves after DI.

Writing in their 2024 book, College Sports: A History, noted higher education scholars Eric A. Moyen and John R. Thelin compared Division III with Division I, noting “over time, DIII coaches and athletics directors adopted or at least mimicked some of the characteristics of big-time sports programs” (Moyen & Thelin, 2024, p. 307). These characteristics included increased number of coaches and support staff, intensified recruitment of athletes, sport specialization, and informal year-round practices. “The result was that although Division III sports remained distinctive, their character and conduct were still shaped in part by innovations and ideas from Division I,” (Moyen & Thelin, 2024, p. 307).

Calls for Division III reform have regularly emerged from different sources during the past two decades. In Reclaiming the Game, Bowen and Levin (2003, p. 303) floated the idea of a new “Division X” emerging from Division III. They outline possible goals and objectives for this new Division but maintain that “any new division should depend on self-selection; it should be based on whether a particular school does or does not want to play within the parameters of a somewhat more restrictive, more educationally oriented organizational structure” (p, 307).

Stephen R. Lewis, Jr., long-time president of DIII Carleton College, advocated for reform of DIII even after he stepped away from the presidency. Speaking at the College Sports Project Integration Institute in June 2005, Lewis said, “Since there are very different interests of institutions within the current Division III, a new Division, comprising those institutions that would like to see intercollegiate athletics brought back into better balance with both the academic and the other co-curricular activities of our colleges and universities, still seems to me an outcome that could be highly beneficial” (Lewis, 2005, paragraph 10).

In his book on the history of the New England Small College Athletic Conference (NESCAC), perhaps the most prestigious conference of Liberal Arts colleges in Division III, Dan Covell notes a push by Middlebury College President Ronald Liebovitz to advocate for a “Division IV” in 2008. Covell quotes Liebovitz from an article in the school’s alumni magazine, “a number of D-III member institutions are encouraging colleges that share our conference’s philosophy on the balance between athletics and academics to support the proposal for a Division IV, which would ‘allow the new division to introduce new and perhaps more stringent rules guiding athletics’” (Covell, 2022, p. 175).

More recently, DePauw athletics director Stevie Baker-Watson told College.town’s Anthony Grassi in an interview posted on the Business of Small College Athletics website how Division I roster caps might impact Division III and the athletic experience.

In so doing, Baker-Watson intimated a potential Division IV might be close at hand. She suggested the schools who need 75 on a baseball roster or 40 on a softball roster for tuition revenue from sports will continue to do so. Those schools that “care about the experience are probably going to have a softball team with 25-30 and a baseball team with maybe 35-45,” Baker-Watson said.

“There was a conversation maybe 15 years ago, almost 20 years ago now, where they thought Division III needed to split into a Division IV,” Baker-Watson said. “I don’t think we would split into a Division IV, but I do think that there’s a pocket of presidents and a reasonable number, a significant number of presidents, that are going to say we want to do things differently. So this may be that moment where that group of 80 to 100 to 120 schools actually branches off into something else that is more of their liking and more aligned with how they think as a group compared to the rest of the division.”

Years later, the NESCAC appears to be doing just fine both academically and athletically. All 11 of its member institutions were ranked on U.S. News & World Report’s Top 100 Liberal Arts Colleges or Top 100 Universities list in 2025. And, all 11 member institutions finished in the Top 100 in the Learfield Directors’ Cup standings. The conference achieved this success despite not permitting its member schools to participate in post-season football competition.

The purpose of this paper, therefore, is to consider what factors have thus far prevented reform, or at least reorganization, of NCAA Division III. In addition, the paper will hypothesize regarding the criteria, both academic and athletic, which could be used in creating a new Division.