NAIA vs NCAA

Smarter than a 5th grader wrote:

Are you kidding? Do you think applicants to St. Francis think that it is equivalent to Princeton? US News does a good job of ranking colleges. You can also just search the acceptance rates and test scores and graduation rates of any college. You can search the average starting salary and lifetime earnings. Those are all things that help categorize colleges.

Do you think applicants to Adams State, Ohio Valley or Valley Forge think that those schools are as prestigious as Stanford? You are comparing apples and oranges. But if you compare like institutions, the NAIA is as well represented as D2 or D3. Few D1s are considered regional or liberal arts.

D2 and NAIA both have the majority of the crappy academic institutions. There are very few good ones. D1 has very few bad ones while D3 has some very good and many that are average.

d2 can run wrote:

D2 and NAIA both have the majority of the crappy academic institutions. There are very few good ones. D1 has very few bad ones while D3 has some very good and many that are average.

D1 is majority state schools, I've taken classes at both state schools and private schools. At state schools most don't even need to go to class. I'm sorry, D1 undergrad education at state schools is horrible. Flagship schools are designed for research not undergrad education.

Typical Letsrun poster who bases an opinion on their own anecdotal information instead of broad based facts. Is Harvard a good school? How about Princeton? How about Michigan? How about UCLA? How about Florida? How about Notre Dame? I can provide the names of 100 great D1 schools before you can provide the names of 10 NAIA schools. There are ranking services who have done it for you so that you don't have to take classes at a few schools in order to try to broad brush the status of hundreds of schools. Guessing that you graduated from a D2 or NAIA school.

I've never really understood why there were folks that looked down upon the NAIA or any collegiate level. With the exception of the upper echelons of D1, the playing field is more or less pretty level. Your always going to have the "have" and "have nots" from a scholarship/funding standpoint, but the opportunities to compete are there. I coach at an NAIA school and I primarily recruit against mid-major D1s and D2s. Win some, lose some. The recruiting emphasis is equal parts academic and athletic and I'm finding that most athletes care more about the things that really matter...academic major, team culture, and the ability to keep growing as a runner. Financial aid/affordability is the driving factor for most as well.

The bottom line is that we should be celebrating the multitude of opportunities for high school students to keep competing at the college level, whether it be NJCAA, NAIA, NCAA, whatever. There are great insitutions across all the levels. My hope is that we'll see them all thrive and our sport grow in quantity and quality.

There are not great institutions at all levels. That is just false.

Smarter than a 5th grader wrote:

NAIA schools also focus on sports but they are just plain worse academically and athletically than NCAA D1 schools. If you put athletics aside and research the academics of NAIA schools as compared to NCAA D1 schools, you will find just as large of a disparity as you will find in athletics. Don't confuse their poor athletics with complacency.

You make it sound like every NCAA school is academically better than every NAIA school, which just isn't true. Both have some academically garbage schools, and the worst of the NCAA is certainly below the best of the NAIA. The difference is that you've heard of the d1 garbage schools, so they don't seem quite as bad until you actually look at the numbers.

For example, lsu is ranked around 150th for national universities. UC Merced, an NAIA school and probably the worst UC school academically is ranked about 80th.

NAIA also is a good home for some "weird" niche schools, like the maritime academies.

But yeah, NAIA also has a strong component of religious schools with absolutely atrocious academics. I had some low performing (athletically and academically) teammates in high school go to NAIA schools and their academics were just a continuation of their high school experience: very little learning combined with slow running and lots of church. How some of these schools are accredited is beyond me.