Division III colleges do not award athletics scholarships, removing them from one of the more contentious debates over Title IX compliance. In 1998-99, women at Division II institutions received 40 percent of scholarship budgets. That puts most of them within range of standards set by the U.S. Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights, which require scholarship budgets for women to be within one percentage point of the proportion of women on varsity teams. If 40 percent of a college's athletes are women, for example, then the college should spend at least 39 percent and no more than 41 percent of its scholarship budget on female athletes. At Harding, for example, women received nearly 35 percent of scholarships, even though only 27 percent of the athletes were women.
Football is largely the reason for that disparity, too.
Mr. Harnden points out that Harding attracts walk-ons to its football team. As in Division I, the salaries of coaches of women's teams in Divisions II and III lag behind those of coaches of men's teams. Division II women's coaches were allocated only 32 percent of total salary budgets for coaches in 1998-99, while Division III institutions spent more than 40 percent of salary budgets on women's coaches. Unlike their peers at Division I universities, coaches in Divisions II and III usually handle more than one sport, making salary budgets hard to divide by gender. Some coaches handle both men's and women's sports, while others have administrative duties or teach classes, and are paid portions of their salary for each duty.