308 Mathematics & Statistics Schools with Swim Teams, Ranked
Updated July 2026 · 2025-26 season data
By Kevin Tu · Swim parent and founder, On The Board
Yes. Math and statistics pair well with swimming for the right student: the work is demanding, but the schedule is usually more predictable than clinical or studio-heavy majors. On this list, 308 schools field swim teams and math or statistics programs, ranked by graduate earnings and selectivity.
Proof-based math rewards sustained focus in ways that a season of weekly travel meets actively disrupts. Real analysis, abstract algebra, and mathematical statistics sequences sit in late-afternoon blocks at most research universities, the same blocks that hold practice. The top of this list rewards math departments with strong graduate earnings and selective admissions at the same time. Harvard leads at first, MIT second, Stanford third. Swarthmore lands at fifth, a D3 Centennial college that outranks Penn, Brown, Duke, Cornell, and Columbia.
The sport's clearest recent example of math and swimming running in parallel, Kate Douglass at Virginia, is further down the page.
Swarthmore, a Division III college of about 1,600 students, ranks #5 for math, ahead of Penn, Cornell, and Columbia.
308 schools · Rankings use College Scorecard field-of-study outcomes, school selectivity, and swim program data from the 2025-26 season.
Start your swimmer’s list from this Mathematics & Statistics ranking.
You’re looking at 308 mathematics & statistics schools with swim teams. Save the ones worth a look, or add your swimmer’s times to see which belong on the list.
A school can rank high here and still be wrong for your swimmer. It may be too fast, too selective, too expensive, or missing the right academic path. On The Board helps narrow this list around the swimmer, not just the major.
All 308 Mathematics & Statistics schools with swim teams
| Rank | School | Division | Earnings | Accept |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Harvard Private · $19K net price · 7,600 students |
D1 | $128,716 | 4% |
| 2 | MIT Private · $20K net price · 4,500 students |
D3 | $117,572 | 5% |
| 3 | Stanford Private · $14K net price · 7,600 students |
D1 | $97,071 | 4% |
| 4 | Dartmouth Private · $30K net price · 4,500 students |
D1 | $103,078 | 5% |
| 5 | Swarthmore Private · $23K net price · 1,600 students |
D3 | $125,015 | 8% |
| 6 | Rice Private · $13K net price · 4,800 students |
D1 | $97,071 | 8% |
| 7 | Johns Hopkins Private · $19K net price · 5,700 students |
D3 | $86,867 | 6% |
| 8 | Penn Private · $29K net price · 10,700 students |
D1 | $84,653 | 5% |
| 9 | Brown Private · $25K net price · 7,200 students |
D1 | $88,506 | 5% |
| 10 | Duke Private · $30K net price · 6,400 students |
D1 | $83,546 | 6% |
| 11 | Cornell Private · $29K net price · 16,000 students |
D1 | $91,211 | 9% |
| 12 | Columbia Private · $22K net price · 9,000 students |
D1 | $84,653 | 4% |
| 13 | NYU Private · $37K net price · 28,700 students |
D3 | $86,424 | 9% |
| 14 | Carnegie Mellon Private · $32K net price · 7,300 students |
D3 | $88,506 | 12% |
| 15 | Vanderbilt Private · $16K net price · 7,200 students |
D1 | $80,309 | 6% |
| 16 | Chicago Private · $15K net price · 7,600 students |
D3 | $72,022 | 5% |
| 17 | Northwestern Private · $29K net price · 9,200 students |
D1 | $75,518 | 8% |
| 18 | Notre Dame Private · $27K net price · 8,800 students |
D1 | $80,273 | 11% |
| 19 | Bowdoin Private · $14K net price · 1,900 students |
D3 | $67,101 | 7% |
| 20 | Amherst Private · $23K net price · 1,900 students |
D3 | $67,660 | 9% |
| 21 | Washington & Lee Private · $24K net price · 1,900 students |
D3 | $76,460 | 14% |
| 22 | Northeastern Private · $31K net price · 17,300 students |
D1 | $64,196 | 5% |
| 23 | California Public · $13K net price · 33,100 students |
D1 | $69,338 | 11% |
| 24 | Tufts Private · $40K net price · 7,100 students |
D3 | $69,732 | 12% |
| 25 | Boston College Private · $42K net price · 10,100 students |
D1 | $70,596 | 16% |
Most families keep all this in a spreadsheet.
Here, you save a school and the roster times, standards, and academics come filled in.
See how the recruiting list works →One swimmer who chose this path
Kate Douglass is one of the most decorated swimmers in NCAA history. At Virginia she won 15 NCAA individual titles and 6 silver medals, and in 2022 became the first swimmer of any gender to win NCAA individual races in three different strokes at a single championship. She is a five-time Olympic medalist, with two golds in Paris 2024, and a 16-time World Championship gold medalist across long course and short course meters. Virginia sits at thirty-sixth on this list. Douglass finished a bachelor's in statistics at UVA in 2023 and is pursuing a master's in the same field at the same university while training. She is the lead author of a 2024 paper in The Mathematical Intelligencer titled "Swimming in Data," coauthored with Virginia mathematician Ken Ono, which applies statistical analysis to her own training. The degree, the career, and the research are the same project.
Swimmers who studied mathematics & statistics
Real college swimmers named to the CSCAA Scholar All-America team — a 3.5+ GPA and a swim at nationals — who majored in mathematics & statistics.
Anna Bradescu
Georgia Tech · Mathematics
Scholar All-America · 4 seasons
Alex Miller
Delta State · Mathematics
Scholar All-America · 4 seasons
Jordan Tierney
Colorado Mines · Applied Mathematics
Scholar All-America · 4 seasons
Mark Cavanaugh
Missouri S&T · Mathematics
Scholar All-America · 4 seasons
Montana White
Azusa Pacific · Mathematics
Scholar All-America · 4 seasons
Olivia Miles
Florida Southern College · Mathematics
Scholar All-America · 4 seasons
Donna Zhang
Amherst · Mathematics
Scholar All-America · 4 seasons
Issara Schmidt
NYU · Mathematics
Scholar All-America · 4 seasons
Named to the CSCAA Scholar All-America team, 2019–20 through 2025–26.
View the honorees ↗Rankings are a starting point. The list your family actually works from is shorter, built around your swimmer's times.
Start your swimmer's list →How the divisions compare
Division I
Thirty-three of the top fifty are Division I. Harvard leads at first. Dartmouth at fourth, Penn eighth, Brown ninth, and Cornell eleventh put the Ivy League in four of the top eleven spots, with Columbia adding a fifth at twelfth. Stanford at third and Duke at tenth carry the ACC. Rice at sixth is the strongest D1 mid-major result on the page, in a category that otherwise clusters around Ivy and research-university math departments.
Division II
No Division II programs land in the top fifty for Mathematics & Statistics. The ranking weighs graduate earnings and admit rates, and undergraduate math programs at D2 schools do not cluster in the career paths that drive the top of this list: quantitative finance, applied statistics, data science, and academic graduate school. For a swimmer whose times fit D2 and whose target is a data career, the size and direction of the home department's faculty matter more than a national rank here, because a first job in this field usually comes through a specific professor's research network.
Division III
Seventeen of the top fifty are Division III, the second-highest D3 share of any page on this site. MIT at second, Swarthmore fifth, and Johns Hopkins seventh put three D3 schools in the top seven, an unusual result for a category often assumed to be Ivy-dominated. The UAA contributes NYU at thirteenth, Carnegie Mellon fourteenth, Chicago sixteenth, Emory twenty-sixth, and Wash U forty-fifth. The NESCAC adds Bowdoin nineteenth, Amherst twentieth, Tufts twenty-fourth, Williams thirtieth, Hamilton thirty-fourth, and Colby thirty-eighth. For a swimmer aiming at quantitative finance, data science, or a math or statistics Ph.D., the D3 depth on this list is genuine.
Frequently asked questions
Can you realistically swim and study math?
Yes, and a growing number of elite swimmers are doing it. The coursework is rigorous but asynchronous, and problem sets get done anywhere. Proof-based math in particular rewards the kind of sustained attention that elite training already demands. The constraint is late-afternoon course timing: real analysis, abstract algebra, and the mathematical statistics sequence tend to meet when practice meets. Swimmers who finish the major tend to front-load foundational courses in the first two years and cluster the harder proof-based work in the summer and early junior year, before the busiest championship months.
What is the specific scheduling conflict between math and swimming?
Upper-division proof-based math courses cluster in late-afternoon weekday blocks at most research universities. Real analysis, abstract algebra, topology, and the mathematical statistics sequence are each two or three meetings a week in those hours. Undergraduate research with a math faculty member, which matters more than grades for admission to competitive math and statistics Ph.D. programs, expects 10 to 15 hours a week during the semester. The problem-set load is the manageable part. The in-person contact hours, especially seminar-style upper-division courses, are where the schedule actually breaks.
Which programs handle that conflict best and why?
Harvard, MIT, and Stanford lead the research-math pipeline, and each has athletic academic coordination that has placed swimmers in math and statistics for decades. Virginia, where Kate Douglass finished her statistics degree, has produced the sport's most visible collaboration between a math department and a swimmer through her research with mathematician Ken Ono. Swarthmore at fifth produces graduate earnings that outrank most of the Ivies, with smaller departments that give undergraduates more direct faculty access. Carnegie Mellon at fourteenth and Chicago at sixteenth round out the top D3 programs, both with small quantitative departments that give undergraduates direct faculty access.
Is D3 a better fit for swimmers in math?
For this major, D3 is genuinely competitive with D1. MIT at second, Swarthmore fifth, and Johns Hopkins seventh sit inside the top seven, ahead of five Ivies. Fourteen more D3 schools fill out the rest of the top fifty, many sending graduates into quantitative finance, data science, and math Ph.D. programs at rates that match the Ivy League. The tradeoff a D3 swimmer makes here is a less visible recruiting path and a smaller team, in exchange for a training schedule that leaves summer research genuinely available and a championship season that ends earlier in the spring.
What does admission actually require at the top programs?
The top ten on this list admit applicants at rates between 3.6% and 8.8%. The math major at most of these schools is declared after matriculation, so the department does not run separate admissions. The academic profile that clears the bar is AP Calculus BC, a strong performance in at least one post-calculus course (linear algebra or multivariable), competition math results where available (AMC, AIME, or Putnam), and a research or project portfolio. Recruit status gets a swimmer into the school. It does not waive the math department's expectations once you arrive and want to declare the major.
What do people who swam and studied math say about it?
Kate Douglass finished her bachelor's in statistics in 2023, began a master's in the same field, and coauthored a 2024 paper in The Mathematical Intelligencer with Virginia mathematician Ken Ono applying statistical analysis to her own training. The sport is producing the data she is already analyzing.
Rankings are based on field-of-study median earnings and institutional selectivity, with a bonus for nationally ranked universities. Data from College Scorecard. Learn how we rank programs →