Women's Squash Colleges in 2026: Best Programs by Division, Cost & Scholarships

A squash match is decided across nine positions, with each player facing the opponent ranked at the same slot. Rosters run a bit deeper than that match-day nine: the average women's program carries about 13 players, with D1 squads near 13.6 and D3 squads near 12.8. So a coach isn't just adding a name — they're recruiting you toward a specific position in the lineup, and where you'd slot in shapes the whole four years.

Because the competing lineup is short, the figure that matters most is how often a position comes open. We estimate that by assuming a roster cycles through over four years, so a 13-player team gives up close to a quarter of itself each spring as a class graduates.

On that basis a typical D1 program opens about 3.4 spots a year and a typical D3 program about 3.2 — roughly 38 openings a year across Division I and 61 across Division III. These are estimates rather than guarantees, and transfers or a player stepping away can move the count either way. But the steady pattern is the useful part: even a small sport refills itself every season, and the openings you're aiming at are the ones this spring's seniors leave behind.

Squash is concentrated at schools that are very hard to get into and very good at carrying students through to a degree, and that holds on both sides of the division line. Across D1 programs, 94% of students finish their degree (the graduation rate) and 97% come back for sophomore year (first-year retention, an early sign the school is a fit). D3 programs run a touch lower but stay strong, at 87% graduation and 92% retention.

The earnings picture — what graduates typically make about six years after they start — splits more sharply. D1 programs average $86,013 and D3 programs $57,905. That difference is about the schools, not the squash: the D1 group leans on Ivy League and similar institutions whose graduates often land in high-paying fields.

The named programs show how little the division letter matters here. In the D1 group, Harvard graduates 98% of its students and reports $99,572 in median earnings, while admitting just 4% of applicants — a plain measure of how hard it is to get in. Stanford (4% acceptance, $102,887 earnings) and the University of Pennsylvania (5% acceptance, 97% graduation) sit right beside it. On the D3 side, Williams College (8% acceptance, 94% graduation), Bowdoin College (7% acceptance, 95% graduation), and Tufts University (12% acceptance, 94% graduation) make the case that a top degree is no less available below D1. If the classroom is what draws you, the school is the thing to weigh, not the level it plays at.

The number to anchor on is net price — what a family actually pays per year after grants and need-based aid, not the published sticker. Across squash, that figure follows whether a school is public or private far more than which division it plays in. Public programs average $18,427 a year after aid; private ones average $28,435.

That public-versus-private spread is wider than the gap between the divisions. By division, D1 averages $24,855 and D3 $29,981 — but within D1 the public schools come in at $18,427 against $25,498 at the privates. Almost every D3 squash program is private, which is the real reason D3 shows the higher average net price; it isn't the level of play.

So a smaller division is not automatically the cheaper one. A state-funded school — at either level — usually costs a family less than a private college, and some of the lowest net prices in squash belong to the wealthiest, most selective schools, because their financial aid is so deep.

The two divisions pay for squash in completely different ways, and the difference is worth understanding before any budget figure makes sense. Division I programs can award athletic scholarships; Division III, by NCAA rule, awards none. So a D3 program's spending says nothing about scholarships — there are none — while a D1 program's budget divides into aid and everything else.

Across Division I, the average program spends $649,813 on women's squash, with $446,596 going to athletic scholarships and $203,217 to other costs like coaching, travel, and equipment. Divide that scholarship pool across the roster and it comes to roughly $33,247 of athletic aid per spot. In Division III, the average program spends $115,990, all of it on those operating costs and none on scholarships.

A D3 program offering no athletic money is not out of reach. Those are mostly the selective private colleges with deep need-based aid, which is why their net prices can still land low. The help simply arrives as financial aid through the admissions office rather than as a scholarship from the coach.

Women's college squash is small enough to learn completely — 30 programs, packed mostly into a few Northeastern states, opening a handful of lineup positions each spring as a class moves on. The smallness is the edge: with so few programs, a family that studies each one carefully ends up with a genuinely informed list rather than a guess.

The data keeps pointing one direction. Most of the sport is D3, not D1. A degree that holds its value shows up at both levels. What you pay tracks who funds the school far more than the division it competes in. And the openings you're recruiting toward are the ones this year's seniors are vacating.

So judge each program on what it actually offers your family — the academics, the net price, the lineup position you'd realistically fill — and treat the division as the first cut, not the final word.

Roster sizes and program finances — total spend, athletic scholarships, and other operating costs — come from the Equity in Athletics Data Analysis (EADA) reports that colleges file each year. Open-spot estimates assume a roster cycles through over four years, so the figures are guides to how often a lineup position tends to come open, not promises about any single season. Scores are computed within sport, gender, and division, so D1 programs are measured against other D1 programs and D3 against D3.

Cost, graduation rate, first-year retention, post-college earnings, and acceptance rate come from the U.S. Department of Education's College Scorecard and IPEDS datasets, which report at the school level. Because women's squash has no NCAA performance archive comparable across these programs, this report includes no win-loss or scoring section. All figures reflect the most recent reporting available at the time of publication.