Ten D-III schools currently field
Division I programs in one or two sports, one maximum for each gender. These schools are allowed to offer athletic scholarships only for their D-I men's and women's sports. Five of them are schools that traditionally competed at the highest level of a particular men's sport prior to the institution of the three division classifications in 1973, a decade before the NCAA governed women's sports. These five colleges (plus three others that later chose to return their D-I programs to D-III) were granted a waiver (or
grandfather clause) in 1983 to continue offering scholarships, a waiver that was reaffirmed in 2004.
Hartwick College, which had been grandfathered in
men's soccer and women's water polo, moved its men's soccer program to D-III in 2018 and dropped women's water polo entirely. Until 2022, the other five schools that chose to field D-I programs in one sport for men and/or one sport for women after the original grandfather clause went into effect, so they were not grandfathered and thus were not allowed to offer athletic scholarships. This however changed in 2022 when the NCAA D-III membership voted to apply Division I legislation to its Division I programs. Academic-based and need-based financial aid are still available, as is the case for all of D-III. •
Franklin and Marshall College (men's wrestling) •
Hobart College (men's lacrosse) •
Massachusetts Institute of Technology (women's rowing) •
Rochester Institute of Technology (
men's and
women's ice hockey) •
Union College (
men's and
women's ice hockey) In addition,
Lawrence University was formerly a non-grandfathered program in fencing, but the NCAA no longer conducts a separate D-I fencing championship. Lawrence continues to field a fencing team, but that team is now considered D-III (see
below). In August 2011, the NCAA decided to no longer allow individual programs to move to another division as a general policy. One exception was made in 2012, when Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT) successfully argued for a one-time opportunity for colleges with a D-I men's team to add a women's team. Since no more colleges would be allowed to move individual sports to D-I, the five non-scholarship programs (led by RIT and Union) petitioned to be allowed to offer scholarships in the interests of competitive equity. D-III membership voted in January 2022 to extend the grandfather clause to allow all ten colleges to offer athletic scholarships, effective immediately.
Football and
basketball may not be D-I programs at D-III institutions, because their revenue-enhancing potential would give them an unfair advantage over other D-III schools. In 1992, several D-I schools playing D-III football were forced to bring their football programs into D-I, following the passage of the "Dayton Rule" (named after the
University of Dayton, whose success in D-III football was seen as threatening the "ethos" of Division III sports). This led directly to the creation of the
Pioneer Football League, a non-scholarship football-only
Division I FCS conference. ==D-III schools playing in non-divisional sports==