Division 3 Does Offer Scholarships, Just Not Athletic

NCAA Division III Athletics is the largest division consisting of 443 member institutions. Division III schools are not permitted per NCAA rules to give scholarships based on athletic ability, but that does not take away from the level of competition. Many D-3 programs offer tremendous environments for not only learning but also college athletics. For example, an ESPN poll ranks the rivalry between Hope College and Calvin College, both small liberal arts D3 schools in West Michigan, as the 4th best rivalry in all of college basketball. That says a lot about the environment those two teams compete in.

D-3 schools are typically small, private, Liberal Arts colleges. In many cases they are old schools with a storied history and beautiful little (secluded) campuses. While many have excellent academic curriculums, they are limited in their offerings - at least compared to the larger universities. If you are planning on a degree in restoration of historic churches, you probably don't want to go there.

On the other hand, if you are looking, for example, for a solid foundation for law or med school many of these schools have a lot to offer. Unfortunately, due to the fact these schools are private; they are forced to charge higher tuition. As mentioned above, these schools are forbidden by NCAA rules from offering athletic scholarships. On the other hand, they are perfectly capable of offering an academic scholarship to a high school athlete with a good GPA and/or a high ACT/SAT score. Because they are mostly private schools with rather high tuitions, these colleges recognize that they must offer some financial assistance to entice student interest. Many have this ability because they are older schools and are heavily endowed. In any case, if you are good student and a good, but not-necessarily-professional-caliber athlete, these schools may be just what you are looking for. Keep in mind that when these schools offer scholarship money for academics they also are looking for students who will give back to the school by participating in activities or playing a sport. As we said earlier on in this tutorial however, an athlete cannot make the decision in his or her senior year to go after aid based on academic achievement. This has to start with the freshman year in high school. One last interesting fact about D-3: by not offering college scholarships D-3 schools are able to offer more sports and teams. For example, a lot of D-3 schools will offer a JV team, which not only offers more athletes the option to play college sports, it also offers the ability to season yourself before making the jump to the Collegiate Varsity level.

If you think D3 might be the place for you it is important to examine all avenues to divert the cost. There are several services online that help students find money for school that they otherwise might not be aware of. For example, FastWeb Free Scholarship Search , a Monster company, offers a no cost searchable database with something like 600,000 searchable scholarships. It is certainly worth the time of signing up. The same goes for Scholarships Experts and many other free services that only require a couple minutes to sign up but could turn out to be worth a lot more.