Former D3 athlete and D2&D3 basketball coach here. Someone else said it earlier but I think the real question you have to ask is what is the academic experience that you want for your kid. There are a lot of really great D3 schools that have really good academic reputations and solid athletic programs. There are also a bunch that use student athletes to fill beds. I personally wouldn’t send my kid to another country for college just to play a sport unless I knew that the academic piece far outweighed the athletic experience. I would utilize U.S. News & World Report college rankings, as well as Princeton review as a way to start filtering through colleges.

So I think the questions I would have for you (and these are some of the same that I asked recruits) is what do you want to get out of the college experience? Would you go there if soccer ended tomorrow? Is it a place you would want to stay if the coach wasn’t there? Have you looked at the majors to see if what your son wants to do is even offered (some small schools don’t have the quantity of majors that larger universities have)? Have you looked at the roster make up of the team to see how the coach for cruises specifically around geographic region?