Battle of the top-ranked Division III schools

College Search & Selection
1

<p>Some students would prefer to attend highly ranked colleges that have strong academic reputations, but have dissimilar athletic scene reputations to the other Top 30 ranked National Universities and play their athletics in Division III. Their social reputations vary widely and posters are encouraged to give their thoughts on what types of students are best placed at these schools. </p>

<p>For students who are interested in the Top 30-ranked Division III schools, here are some interesting facts & data points for these schools:</p>

<p>UNDERGRAD SIZE<br>
Cal Tech 864<br>
MIT 4127<br>
U Chicago 4807<br>
Wash U StL 7386<br>
J Hopkins 4478<br>
Emory 6646<br>
Carnegie Mellon 5669<br>
Tufts 4995 </p>

<p>ACCEPTANCE RATE<br>
Cal Tech 17%<br>
MIT 13%<br>
U Chicago 38%<br>
Wash U StL 21%<br>
J Hopkins 27%<br>
Emory 32%<br>
Carnegie Mellon 34%<br>
Tufts 27% </p>

<p>TOP 10% STUDENTS<br>
Cal Tech 88%<br>
MIT 97%<br>
U Chicago 80%<br>
Wash U StL<br>
J Hopkins 80%<br>
Emory 85%<br>
Carnegie Mellon 75%<br>
Tufts 83% </p>

<p>% OF STUDENTS FROM PUBLIC SCHOOLS<br>
Cal Tech 74%<br>
MIT 75%<br>
U Chicago 59%<br>
Wash U StL 63%<br>
J Hopkins 69%<br>
Emory 65%<br>
Carnegie Mellon 68%<br>
Tufts 60% </p>

<p>ENDOWMENT PER CAPITA<br>
Cal Tech $ 728,200<br>
MIT $ 819,916<br>
U Chicago $ 457,382<br>
Wash U StL $ 387,136<br>
J Hopkins $ 383,858<br>
Emory $ 394,717<br>
Carnegie Mellon $ 92,844<br>
Tufts $ 137,615 </p>

<p>25/75 SAT LEVELS<br>
Cal Tech 1470 - 1570
MIT 1380 - 1560
U Chicago 1320 - 1530
Wash U StL 1370 - 1530
J Hopkins 1290 - 1490
Emory 1270 - 1430
Carnegie Mellon 1300 - 1490
Tufts 1340 - 1480</p>

2

<p>Hawkette…Hopkins does have the top ranked Division I Lacrosse team in the nation. Although its baseball team is D-III, it is always ranked at the top of its division. Not sure about the rest of Hopkins athletics.
Also, Hopkins acceptance rate is 24%. The 27% you have posted is old data.</p>

3

<p>Speaking about the top LACs, I recently found out that Middlebury and Bowdoin are optional SAT schools. Do you think they do this to help those students who are capable students, but who do not always fare well on standardized tests, or do you think that this is a way to manipulate their SAT scores for ranking purposes? Consider that Middlebury does require 3 SAT IIs…No info on Bowdoin in that regard. Comments? Opinions?</p>

4

<p>Contrary to the thread title, this listing is not a tabulation of “Top-Ranked Division III Schools”. Rather, it is a listing of “Top-Ranked National Universities that are Division III Schools”.</p>

<p>A true listing of “Top Ranked Division III Schools” would have to include LACs. The top LACs would easily place in the lists above, in all categories except size. Futhermore, many LACs have more successful Division III sports teams than the schools listed above, despite their smaller size.</p>

<p>LACs are quite literally in the “same league” as the listed universities. For example, Tufts is a member of NESCAC (along with LACs like Williams and Amherst), Johns Hopkins is a member of the Centennial Conference (along with LACs like Swarthmore and Haverford), and Caltech is a member of SCIAC (along with LACs like Pomona and Claremont McKenna).</p>

5

<p>gabriellah,
Thank you for pointing out the success of the Blue Jays lacrosse teams. I would guess that your child went to a few of the games last year and enjoyed their success. I can imagine that those games were a lot of fun!</p>

<p>Re the acceptance rates, I think you are quoting the rate for the class due to enter in Fall, 2007. All of the data here is from collegeboard.com which takes it from the most recently posted Common Data Sets, so all of the data from all of the schools is on a one-year lag. This past spring, nearly all of the schools in the Top 30 saw a further decline in their already low acceptance rates.</p>

<p>Corbett,
You are absolutely right and I realized my error after the time for editing the title had run out. You will notice that the prose in the OP references National Universities. My apologies for the unintentionally false headline.</p>

6

<p>I think most obviously, the top DIII schools are for students who would prefer to play sports rather than watch them.</p>

7

<p>They’re all great atmospheres</p>

8

<p>mollie,
Re the Division III national universities listed above, I disagree with your comment above about sports participation vs many other top colleges. These Division III national universities have just decided that a low-key approach to collegiate athletics is right for them and their institutions. Other similarly sized schools have made different decisions, eg, Stanford, Duke, Rice, Vanderbilt, Georgetown, Wake Forest and frequently field nationally competitive teams while still having high student participation. The participation rate is also high at many of the Ivies (although the quality level is lower). </p>

<p>Also, don’t forget about intramurals. The intramural programs are the way that most college students get their “playing fix” and the absolute top school for this is Notre Dame (8352 students or only modestly larger than Wash U).</p>

9

<p>What are the participation percentages for the academically-strong DI schools?</p>

<p>At any rate, it’s possible at the DIII schools to play in a sport which one didn’t play in high school – I joined the cheerleading squad at MIT with no high school experience (and even became the captain), which I’m sure would have been impossible at a school with a rah-rah sports program.</p>

10

<p>

It seems unlikely that the athletic participation rates at many national universities can match those found at LACs. At [Williams</a> College](<a href=“http://www.williams.edu/home/fast_facts.php]Williams”>http://www.williams.edu/home/fast_facts.php), for example, 34% of all students participate in intercollegiate sports at the varsity level. The number rises to around 40% if JV teams are included. </p>

<p>LACs are obviously much smaller than universities, but they commonly offer just as many – if not more – athletic programs. For example, Williams currently sponsors 32 varsity men’s and women’s athletic teams. For comparison, Notre Dame only sponsors 26 (the extra sports at Williams include men’s and women’s skiing, men’s and women’s squash, women’s ice hockey, and men’s wrestling). </p>

<p>Mathematically, the participation rates have to be much higher at LACs.
Small # of students / Large # of teams = High rates of participation.</p>

11

<p>corbett,
Statistically, I agree with your point about the LACs. They do offer a lot of sports for their students to play and the undergrad enrollments are much smaller. For the universe of Division III national universities listed above, however, with the exception of Caltech, these colleges are all twice or several times more the size of Williams. They really aren’t athletic comps to the LACs if measured on size. In fact, size-wise, the others without Caltech are larger or about the same average size as Princeton, Dartmouth, Yale, Columbia, Rice and Wake Forest and only slightly smaller than Harvard, Stanford, Duke, Brown, Vanderbilt and Georgetown. </p>

<p>Re participation rates, don’t forget to factor in the large numbers on the major Division I football teams (Stanford, Duke, Northwestern, Vanderbilt, Notre Dame, Wake Forest) which increases their student participation rates and so the differences in student participation may not be as great as you think. In addition, nearly all of these colleges have strong intramural and club programs that are much larger and more active than those found at any of the Division III programs and the Ivies. This is an important point if you are thinking that these schools have low student participation in sports activities as that is just not the case. If anything, these schools will have better athletic facilities for its student body (and almost certainly for its athletes participating in Division I sports). </p>

<p>One of the distinctions that I have made elsewhere is the difference in undergraduate life outside of the classroom and the scenes that the respective athletic programs afford for the major sports. Here is one way to group the schools ranked in the Top 20:</p>

<p>1) Division III National Universities: Caltech, MIT, U Chicago, Wash U, Johns Hopkins, Emory
2) Division I National Universities with low profile sports: Ivies, Rice (although they have outstanding baseball)
3) Division I National Universities with high profile sports: Stanford, Duke, Northwestern, Vanderbilt, Notre Dame</p>

<p>If you expand beyond the USNWR Top 20 National Universities, other categories would include the Division III LACs (W/A/S, etc) and the much larger, mostly public, universities that play big time sports.(UC Berkeley, U Michigan, U Virginia, UCLA, USC, U North Carolina).</p>

12

<p>hawkette, you might want to reconsider a couple of the Division I schools you rank highly for sports. I don’t know if this has been brought up somewhere else on CC, but Sports Illustrated came up with a list of “America’s Best Sports Colleges” in 2002 (don’t know if they’ve updated it, but the 2002 list is the only one I’ve found):</p>

<p>

</p>

<p>Using the above criteria, they ranked all 324 Division I athletic programs. 6 of the Ivies are in the top 100 and, significantly, Harvard (#41), Princeton (#56), Penn (#72), and Cornell (#74) all rank ahead of Georgetown (#88) and Northwestern (#89).</p>

<p>Since you seem to be quite interested in this subject, you should take a look at the complete list of the top 200–you might find some other surprises:</p>

<p><a href=“http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/si_online/news/2002/10/01/1_10/[/url]”>http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/si_online/news/2002/10/01/1_10/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

13

<p>Johns Hopkins was grandfathered into Division I lacrosse. All the rest of its sports are D-III.</p>

14

<p>Likewise, Tufts has Division I “country club” sports like fencing, squash, and co-ed sailing.</p>

15

<p>bowdoin has been SAT optional since 1969. it is not to boost their usnews rank. besides, if you submit your SATs to bowdoin, they are considered against all the other applicants who submit, and are an important consideration. so the averages in USNEWS while inflated to the degree that they don’t represent 100% of the student body, are useful for applicants to decide whether or not to submit. </p>

<p>furthermore, i don’t think the difference in SAT scores as they are would significantly alter the ranking. it’s a portion of a selectivity assessment, which itself is 1/4 of the score.</p>

16

<p>hawkette, I forgot to mention that Sports Illustrated ranked Vanderbilt at #63, in the middle of the top 4 Ivies (I wish the edit function didn’t have such a short fuse).</p>

17

<p>

There are actually several Division III schools that have special exemptions to play certain sports at the Division I level. According to [url=<a href=“http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Division_III]Wikipedia[/url”>Third Division - Wikipedia]Wikipedia[/url</a>], they are:</p>

<p>Clarkson University (men’s and women’s ice hockey)
Colorado College (men’s ice hockey, women’s soccer)
Hartwick College (men’s soccer, women’s water polo)
Hobart College (men’s lacrosse)
Johns Hopkins University (men’s and women’s lacrosse)
Lawrence University (fencing)
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (men’s and women’s ice hockey)
Rochester Institute of Technology (men’s ice hockey)
Rutgers University-Newark (men’s volleyball)
St. Lawrence University (men’s and women’s ice hockey)
Union College (men’s and women’s ice hockey) </p>

<p>

Technically, Tufts has no Division I exemptions, and so it is not on the list above. Squash and sailing are not NCAA sports, so Division I vs. Division III is a non-issue. Fencing is an NCAA sport, but neither the men’s team nor the women’s team at Tufts is in Division I, although they both apparently schedule Division I opponents. The women’s team is in Division III, and the men’s team is a non-NCAA “club” team.</p>