D is currently a sophomore. She has two winter junior national cuts and is looking to swim for a mid major D1 school on the east coast. She is a member of college swimming and has been able to search schools where she would be a ranked one of the top swimmers in her events on the team and a contributor at their conference champ meet. Curious as to which schools are ‘fully funded’ or are known for offering decent athletic scholarships?
It is very hard to figure out which schools are fully funded for scholarships. I know that my daughter’s team was not fully funded (because the coach told me) but I never figure out exactly how much the coach had to spread around… If the program was fully funded, the coach would have had about $520k (COA her first year was about $52k x 9.9 scholarships allowed by the NCAA) to spread around 22 players. No where near that! My guess is that the coach had about $200k to award in scholarships. There were also merit scholarships from the school and state scholarships for residents.
My daughter went to a school that had a football team and that forces the school to fund the women’s teams a little more than they might have otherwise done.
But I wouldn’t worry so much about whether the team is fully funded and just ask questions about how much the average award is, how many are on the team splitting the money, if jr/sr get more. A friend’s daughter went to Fordham with a swimming scholarship but she only received about 20% the first year. By senior year, she had a full tuition award.
For my D we’ve looked at it in terms of what will this cost per year? We add up merit, financial aid, and athletic scholarship and then subtract that off the Cost of Attendance. We don’t care how they get to the bottom line number.
For a lot of swimmers the best deal is HYP even though they don’t offer athletic scholarships because their financial aid is very generous.
my S23 is also interested in continuing with swimming in college… I found this article regarding how schools fund their swim teams very interesting: https://www.collegeswimming.com/news/2008/jun/3/tuesday-tip-how-common-full-ride/