Notre Dame competes in 25 NCAA sports and has a total of 893 student athletes: 506 men and 387 women. Approx. 225 athletic scholarships per year, most student athletes being admitted through REA. Students and parents, please feel welcome to post and share your ND admission experience here.
Hi @hpcsa. Am curious as to any hard stats to which you can refer supporting this. My understanding is that ND REA is pretty strict, with not a ton of wriggle room. Thanks!
@BrooklynRye Support what? # of NCAA sports?, # of student athletes?, approx. # of athletic scholarships/year?, the fact that most recruited athletes are being admitted to the university early during the REA admission cycle? All of these are facts, there is no surprise that approx. 10% of admitted students/year are recruited athletes - Notre Dame has excellent sports programs and regularly receives rewards for athletes’ graduation rates etc.
Presumably the number of NCAA sports and total number of NCAA student athletes at the university are empirically verifiable. As you note, the number of athletic scholarships/year is approximate and, therefore, a fact only as to its status as an approximation. But, no. What I am actually interested in is empirical data showing that “most recruited athletes are being admitted early, during the REA admission cycle”. Does the university release data showing a breakdown of its REA accepted applicants, including those that are recruited athletes?
@hcpsa Stats from collegefactual are often incorrect/outdated. Looking at Notre Dame’s athletic website, there are 20 sports. Don’t have time to research the rest of the data, but many ND athletes do not receive athletic scholarships…so the math in collegefactual’s numbers doesn’t work
@Mwfan1921 - Had a feeling…
@BrooklynRye No, the university does not release such data, no reason to. There is no question, however, that recruited athletes are naturally being admitted to the university early during the admission cycle.
It is true that athletes signing an NLI are generally expected to apply REA, though certainly there are exceptions
If the university does not release such data, reason or not, then you are making an assumption regarding the early admissions demographics. However reasonable an opinion, this is not a “fact”…
@Mwfan1921 Absolutely, Notre Dame is no exception here and naturally will admit the vast majority of recruited athletes during the REA cycle.
Notre Dame has 26 Division I teams to be exact.
https://admissions.nd.edu/discover/student-life/athletics/
Athletic recruits signing an NLI are generally expected to apply during the REA admission cycle. Of course there are exceptions for late commits, which are few however.
The exceptions are not just for “late commits”. There are athletes who do not make the academical statistical cut-off to be admitted REA. While these applicants are generally assured of an admit, schools such as ND attempt to maintain certain academic standards, including when it comes to early admission. For the record, @HPCSA, I am not in disagreement with you regarding the presumption that recruited athletes tend to apply early. I am just not aware of any empirical data supporting this contention. For instance, in the sport in which my child was recruited, ND has a strict academic cut-off and those who do not meet that level apply RD, even if they are top recruits.
@BrooklynRye You are correct in that Notre Dame, like other Division I Universities, is not fully transparent on its admission process for athletic recruits. You are also right that Notre Dame has comparably higher academic standards for athletic recruits, as does Stanford and a few other nationally successful sports programs.
In fact, this is one of the reasons I decided to set up this sub-forum, focused on athletic ND recruits - to hear directly from them and their parents on their experience. Thanks.
Does the academic cutoff vary by sport? Is someone willing to share specific information on the cutoff?
@darcy123 - My guess (really just an educated sense based on both personal experience and general knowledge) is that any such differences in cutoffs are probably determined by a variety of factors and may even vary year to year. Specifically as it relates to athletic recruits, I believe athletes recruited for the sports that bring in the money (big college football being the most notable of these), as well as sports that bring national attention to the university, probably see the most ‘flexibility’ in admissions standards. This probably also varies from school to school. Whereas football may rule the roost at PSU or OSU, smaller schools less able or not able to compete with scholarships or for big time sports athletes, may put their recruiting clout at more niche sports. My guess would be that one would have a better chance at athletic recruitment to UNH as an ice hockey player than as a footballer. Probably a nice shot as a fencer at Columbia or as a squash player at Princeton.
Not a recruited athlete, but I wish I were. That said, the original poster is correct that there are roughly 900 varsity student-athletes at Notre Dame, somewhere between 200-225 per class. However, remember that Notre Dame, like any big-time college athletic dept, has athletes recruited for a full-ride, some recruited for a partial scholarship, some recruited as preferred recruit without aid, and some who just end up walking on and being good enough to make a varsity team (cue the Rudy reference, but it happens across all sports – at ND and everywhere else).
Where the original poster is not correct is in stating that ND offers 225 athletic scholarships per year. Check out page # 19 in ND’s 2017-18 Common Data Set at the link below and you’ll see that of ND’s 8,509 undergraduates, 441 of them received an athletic scholarship / grant. That’s closer to about 110 athletes per class on athletic scholarship.
And bear in mind, of those 441 on athletic scholarship / grant, only athletes in the big revenue sports (Football, Men’s & Women’s hoops) or athletes who are truly elite would receive a full ride. For example, the NCAA allows men’s track to award 12.6 scholarships per year. There are something like 50-60 male athletes on ND’s track team alone. I guarantee you that those track coaches are splitting up scholarships to attract as many potential track athletes who also meet whatever ND’s admissions clip level is for track athletes.
Thanks, @GeronimoAlpaca - good information and discussion contribution, as always!
Have had two daughters go through ND; both were assigned varsity scholarship athletes as freshman roommates. Based on info from them, the only “fully funded” sports are football, basketball, both men’s and women’s, and possibly hockey, though I could be wrong about the last one. Both had several friends who were preferred, though not scholarship, recruits. While there are somewhat relaxed admissions standards for athletes, their experience has been that the vast majority of athletes are not far below standards academically, and ND will let recruits out of their NLI if it becomes apparent they won’t meet minimum standards. This happened relatively late in the last recruiting cycle for a fairly prominent recruit. I’m not saying all athletes graduate with honors, but nor are they “not there to play school.”
My son is in a dorm with several football players, including a few of the well known starters. He’s impressed to see them “grinding” in the study lounge!!
“Based on info from them, the only “fully funded” sports are football, basketball, both men’s and women’s, and possibly hockey.”
Your terminology is a little bit off. I’m sure that every single sport at ND is “fully funded”, which means that the school provides all of the athletic scholarships that it is allowed to provide under NCAA rules. But the number of scholarships that the NCAA allows varies widely between sports.
NCAA allows a D1 football team to have 85 kids on full scholarship each year. In contrast, the mens lacrosse team is only allowed 12.6 scholarships per year, which are sliced/diced among 50 or so kids on the roster.
Many D1 mlax teams at other schools are not “fully funded”, meaning they provide even fewer than the 12.6. But ND’s “fully funded” mlax team is a very different animal than its “fully funded” football team.
But you are right that the teams where most/all of the players are receiving full/almost full scholarships are the featured sports like football, hoops and ice hockey. That’s not special to ND – just how the NCAA rules work.