Small Colleges Spent 41% of Sports Budgets on Women's Teams
From The Chronicle of Higher Education - June 18, 2004
By WELCH SUGGS

The NCAA's Division III is a mixed bag of small colleges, some big state institutions, and private research universities. The division, which is the only one in the NCAA that prohibits athletics scholarships altogether, requires members to field at least 8 teams, while Division II colleges must have 10 and Division I institutions 16.

Some Division III members abide by the restrictions to save money. Others do so as a moral statement. Athletics officials in the division often say that their way of doing sports is "purer" than what happens at colleges in Divisions I or II.

Athletes in Division III compete before small crowds, often in two or even three sports, and are subject to the same admissions process as other students at their institutions, although they may have certain advantages. Divisions I and II have minimum course requirements, grades, and standardized-test scores for athletes.

In the division as a whole, the proportion of female students was 58 percent in 2002-3, while less than 41 percent of athletes were women. In all, colleges spent only about 41 percent of their total athletics budgets on women's teams. And only 35.2 percent of Division III coaches were women.

Most of Division III's members are small, liberal-arts colleges -- only 101 of the 376 colleges that reported data in 2002-3 had more than 4,000 full-time undergraduates. But all of the campuses of the University of Wisconsin System except for the flagship, at Madison, belong to Division III, as do other state institutions.

Over all, athletes represented nearly 10 percent of students at Division III institutions -- a proportion much higher than in any other division. In some leagues, like the New England Small College Athletic Conference, more than 20 percent of students were athletes. At the Wisconsin state universities, athletes were only 5 percent of students.

Division III colleges trailed those in other NCAA divisions when it comes to such measures of gender equity as the participation "safe harbor," under which colleges with roughly the same proportions of female athletes and female students will be found in compliance with the law.