The Hillsdale College athletic department has long held itself to a high standard of promoting academic excellence among its student-athletes with the same urgency and emphasis as its pursuit of victories and championships in competition.

That emphasis has paid dividends for Chargers student athletes, as this year's announcement of the NCAA DII Presidents' Award for Academic Excellence recipients shows. For the period covered by the award, Hillsdale posted an Academic Success Rate of 99%, the highest in the nation among all 304 NCAA Division II Schools.

The Academic Success Rate (ASR) follows a class of freshmen athletes over six years and measures the percentage of those freshmen at each institution that over the course of that six-year period either graduated or left the institution in good academic standing and on track to graduate when they departed. Hillsdale's top rating means that 99% of Chargers athletes covered by the award met one of those two criteria at the end of the six-year period. 

Forty-three schools, including Hillsdale, received the 2024 NCAA DII Presidents' Award for Academic Excellence, which requires institutions to maintain an ASR of 90% or higher. This is the 14th year the award has been handed out by the NCAA, and Hillsdale is one of just seven schools at the NCAA DII level to receive the award every year it's been given. Along with receiving the award all 14 years, Hillsdale has finished among the top five schools in ASR at the NCAA DII level for seven years running. This is the first time, however, that Hillsdale has had the highest ASR of any school in the country.

"We celebrate this recognition of our student athletes' achievements," said Hillsdale College Athletic Director John Tharp. "Our students' ability to excel in both rigorous academics and athletics is a testament to their diligence as well as the support of their coaches and professors."

Bentley University in Massachusetts finished second to Hillsdale in the 2024 standings with a 98% ASR, with Saint Michael's and Thomas Jefferson University next at 97% and Rollins rounding out the top five with a 96% ASR. Hillsdale was one of two Great Midwest Athletic Conference schools to make the cut along with Cedarville University (93%) and the top school among seven from the Midwest Region.

The Division II ASR includes transfers into a school in the calculation and removes those who transferred out of the school while academically eligible. The ASR also includes over 30,000 non-scholarship student-athletes in the division who were enrolled in the four years covered in the most recent data.

Even when using the less-inclusive federal graduation rate, student-athletes are outperforming their peers in the general student population by 6 percentage points. For Division II student-athletes, the federal rate is 59%, while the general student body federal rate is 53%.