Hundreds of thousands of student athletes are returning to their college teams this fall. Earning a spot on collegiate rosters, or athletic scholarships, takes years of work from young athletes — and thousands of dollars from their parents in fees, travel and other costs.
But the odds are long to get them there: Just 7% of high school athletes will compete on a college roster at any level, while 2% will go on to earn a National College Athletic Association, or NCAA, athletic scholarship. An even smaller fraction will go pro.
So as parents are ordering fall uniforms and planning tournament entries, CNN analyzed the odds for a high schooler to make a college roster, based on data compiled by Patrick O’Rourke on the website ScholarshipStats.com.
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A more popular sport doesn’t mean longer odds, since more schools sponsor collegiate teams. Football was by far the most popular high school sport, with more than 1 million high school athletes competing in the 2022-2023 school year, and more than 96,000 going on to play in college. Nearly one-third of those athletes played at the Division I level, typically schools with the more elite and well-funded sports programs. The size of football rosters — with most teams exceeding 100 players — helped those athletes’ odds further: 11:1 to make any college roster and 33:1 to make a Division I team.
Track and field was the second most common high school boys’ sport that year, with more than 580,000 high school track and field athletes vying for spots on just over 1,200 college teams. Those boys’ 16:1 odds of making any college roster were slightly longer than they were for the more than 465,000 girls competing to make one of more than 1,300 collegiate teams. Their odds were 13:1.
The more obscure sports had slimmer odds. Female wrestlers vying for a spot on one of the four Division I women’s teams in 2022-2023 faced the longest odds by far: 709:1. For male wrestlers, the odds were still slim but much less challenging: 86:1. Female bowlers had better odds than either at making a DI team: 79:1.
The cost, and benefits, of youth sports
There are caveats to these numbers: Just 70% of female high school athletes go on to play in college, while just about half of male high schoolers go on to play collegiately, according to O’Rourke’s data analysis.
Recent policy changes have cleared the way for college athletes to earn money from competing at that level, through scholarships at NCAA Division I schools or payments for their name, image and likeness, or NIL.
But NCAA teams don’t award scholarships to every eligible player, and NIL earnings are highly concentrated in major sports like basketball and football, O’Rourke’s analysis found when he crunched the numbers for his new site NIL-NCAA.com.
“If it was me, instead of paying a gazillion dollars on youth sports, I’d put the money in a 529,” O’Rourke told CNN. “Because that’ll play for college no matter what.”
Money isn’t the only reason athletes might pursue a spot on a college roster — athletic talent can give students an edge in admissions. While Ivy League schools, and other competitive academic institutions, have impossibly low general admission rates, many have student-athletes making up as much as a fifth of their whole student body — a possible opportunity for kids with athletic talents, O’Rourke said.
Childhood sports are good for children’s physical, mental and emotional health and development.
And of course, just darn good fun.
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