Selective Colleges With The Most Athletes

College Search & Selection
1

I was curious about the colleges with the most athletes, so I downloaded some information from the Equity in Athletics website (https://ope.ed.gov/ ). If anyone else is curious, some numbers are below for the year 2017. I only included selective colleges. Note that many of these totals underestimate the total number of athletes due to not including a few less common sports or situations.

Most Athletes

  1. Cornell – 1116 students (8%)
  2. Harvard – 1115 students (16%)
  3. Princeton – 988 students (19%)
  4. Penn – 936 students (9%)
  5. Brown – 910 students (14%)
  6. Michigan – 910 students (3%)
  7. UCB – 898 students (3%)
  8. Dartmouth – 889 students (21%)
  9. UNC-CH – 871 students (5%)
  10. Yale – 850 students (15%)

Highest Percentage Athletes

  1. Webb – 56%
  2. Williams – 36%
  3. Bowdoin – 36%
  4. Bates – 36%
  5. Colby – 35%
  6. Haverford – 33%
  7. Amherst – 32%
  8. Hamilton – 32%
  9. Kenyon – 31%
  10. Washington and Lee – 28%

Lowest Percentage Athletes*

  1. NYU – 2%
  2. UCSD – 2%
  3. UCLA – 2%
  4. GeorgiaTech – 3%
  5. USC – 3%
  6. UCB – 3%
  7. Michigan-- 3%
  8. UVA – 4%
  9. Tulane – 5%
  10. UNC-CH – 5%
    *Several schools are not available due to shared teams with other colleges and are likely low, such as Barnard

Largest Average Roster Size

  1. Football – 94 athletes
  2. Women’s Rowing – 59 athletes
  3. Men’s Rowing – 53 athletes
  4. Men’s Ice Hockey – 47 athletes
  5. Men’s Lacrosse – 46 athletes
  6. Women’s Indoor Track - 42 athletes
  7. Women’s Outdoor Track - 42 athletes
  8. Men’s Indoor Track - 39 athletes
  9. Men’s Outdoor Track - 38 athletes
  10. Men’s Baseball – 34 Athletes

Most Common Athletic Teams

  1. Men’s Basketball – 100% of colleges
  2. Women’s Basketball – 98% of colleges
  3. Men’s Tennis – 98% of colleges
  4. Women’s Tennis – 98% of colleges
  5. Women’s Volleyball – 97% of colleges
  6. Men’s Baseball – 95% of colleges
  7. Women’s Soccer – 95% of colleges
  8. Men’s Soccer – 90% of colleges
  9. Football – 86% of colleges
  10. Men’s Golf – 84% of colleges
2

Definition?
(Who counts as an “athlete”?)
What specific document(s)/table(s) are you citing?

It must take a roughly similar number of individuals to fill a football/basketball/baseball/other team roster
(tens of athletes, typically – more than the number of positions, but not hundreds).
So, it wouldn’t be surprising if a LAC student body tends to have a higher percentage of athletes than a large university student body.

3

Any reason for the different rankings of schools that appear to be tied (e.g., Williams, Bowdoin and Bates)?

4

This data comes from this site https://ope.ed.gov/athletics/#/ and is for the academic year 2017/18. Looks like data10 ran some nice custom reports! The athlete numbers that schools report are rostered athletes, which is typically greater than the number of athletes receiving scholarships in DI/II and greater than those who were recruited/slotted athletes in DIII schools (and the Ivies).

Here is what the EADA site says re: data source:

One deficiency of this database is that it does not include NCAA women’s emerging sports (equestrian, rugby, triathlon) for all schools. DI and DII schools can offer scholarships for these sports, and “are allowed to use emerging sports to help meet the membership minimum sports-sponsorship requirements and, in Divisions I and II, minimum financial aid requirements”. At some schools, there are not-insignificant numbers of women competing in these three sports, so it could impact the proportionality of the numbers in the OP, obviously to a greater degree in smaller schools.

5

It is not too surprising that the percentage of athletes is inversely correlated to the number of students at the school.

Of course, that can have implications with respect to the percentage of admits who have the recruited athlete “hook”, reducing the effective number of non-recruited-athletes the school will admit (but note that some athletes are walk-ons who were not recruited or given special admission preference as recruited athletes, beyond the sport being seen as an extracurricular).

6

The schools that are more preppy in my mind, tend to have higher percentage of student athletes. Not surprised.

7

I think there are probably more recruited athletes at the service academies than any other colleges - USNA, West Point & Air Force Academy (Div. 1) & Coast Guard Academy (Div. 3) (Not sure about # at Merchant Marine Academy)

8

@merc81 I suspect it’s because those percentages are rounded, while the exact percentages do allow for a proper ordering. That is unlike the exact figures for the number of athletes, where Brown and Michigan are indeed tied and are listed as such.

9

This doesn’t seem right at all. Hockey teams have about 25 so to have an AVERAGE roster size of almost double? I looked at a few schools, DU (26), BC (25), Harvard (29), Wisc (26). Yes, the service academies might have 60 on the roster but they do not have 60, or even 47, on the bench for a game.

59 for an average women’s crew team? That would mean some teams have 80 if others have 40. Not buying it.

10

@RandyErika: Thanks! You based your reasoning on a detail that I’d missed (that Brown and Michigan are properly listed as tied).

11

Good catch on Ice Hockey. I incorrectly listed the total participants (men + women) rather than just men’s. However, 59 for women’s crew is does match the ope.ed.gov website and also fits reasonably well with my personal experience rowing at Stanford. Some colleges compete in multiple rowing divisions such as heavyweight, lightweight, novice, … For example the first college website I checked was Harvard. Their Heavyweight Women’s crew roster at https://www.gocrimson.com/sports/wcrew-hw/2018-19/roster lists 50 athletes. Their Lightweight Women’s crew roster at https://www.gocrimson.com/sports/wcrew-lw/2018-19/roster shows another 37 athletes, for a total of 87 women’s rowers listed on the website roster. There are likely more who are not listed on Harvard’s website.

At Stanford, crew had a reputation for having a higher drop out rate than any other sport, due to a high rate of walk-ons and 6AM practices. Only a small fraction of athletes who started on the novice team in the fall remained on the team in the spring. As such, the count of athletes on the roster differed between the fall and the spring. The ope.ed.gov website states the roster is on “the day of the first scheduled contest”, which is in the fall.

12

I rounded to nearest integer percentage. The exact percentages are below and fit with the ranking order.

Williams – 36.252%
Bowdoin – 36.057%
Bates – 35.982%

13

Timely article re: athletic recruiting, with numbers matching the OP from the EADA database

https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/bribery-scandal-points-to-the-athletic-factor-a-major-force-in-college-admissions/2019/06/12/b2fc39dc-7e3a-11e9-8bb7-0fc796cf2ec0_story.html?utm_term=.64894b52cdf4

14

You forgot selective Trinity College Hartford in NESCAC 35% according to numbers from EADA databa They won 2018 NESCAC Hockey, Football, perenial Squash D1 and 2 All Americans for WTrack 2019.

15

What is the definition of Selective College in this case?

16

Trinity College appears to show under 30% athletes on the referenced EADA database – 371+251 = 622 unduplicated athletes / ~2100 undergraduates. I suspect you were looking at total participants, which double counts athletes who play on multiple teams.

The EADA outputs do not include good measures of selectivity. Instead selection was manual. I included only 59 colleges, so “highly selective” is probably a better description than “selective”. Looking at the list, it includes all top 30 USNWR national colleges, all top 20 USNWR LACs for which information was provided, as well as a minority of others.

The top 10 overall, regardless of selectivity, as listed in the EADA website are:

Most Athletes

  1. Lindenwood University* – 1416 students (23%)
  2. Cornell – 1116 students (8%)
  3. Harvard – 1115 students (16%)
  4. Ohio State – 1065 students (3%)
  5. Princeton – 988 students (19%)
  6. Penn – 936 students (9%)
  7. Brown – 910 students (14%)
  8. Michigan – 910 students (3%)
  9. UCB – 898 students (3%)
  10. Robert Morris-- 890 students (47%)
    *Lindenwood’s teams appear to be unrealistically large, yet the Lindenwood website at https://www.lindenwood.edu/athletics/ confirms a large student athlete roster stating, “The school has 55 athletic programs and over 1,750 student-athletes.”

Highest Percentage Athletes

  1. University of Saint Katherine – 88% athletes
  2. Ottawa University-Ottawa – 87% athletes
  3. Kansas Wesleyan University – 86% athletes
  4. York College – 83% athletes
  5. Brewton-Parker College – 80% athletes
  6. University of the Southwest – 76% athletes
  7. Tabor College – 75% athletes
  8. Williams Baptist College – 72% athletes
  9. Southwestern College – 71% athletes
  10. Presentation College – 71% athletes