The National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics (NAIA) is a college athletics association for colleges and universities in North America, established in 1940. The NAIA offers student-athletes an opportunity to earn athletic scholarships in 28 different sports at more than 250 schools across the country. Here are some key points about the NAIA:

• The NAIA has 241 member institutions for the 2023-24 season, of which two are in British Columbia, Canada, and the rest are in the United States.
• Most colleges and universities in the NAIA offer athletic scholarships to their student-athletes, and $1.3 billion in athletic scholarship financial aid is awarded to student-athletes annually.
• The NAIA has two divisions for football based on enrollment (Divisions I and II), but it was consolidated back into a single division in 1997.
• Basketball was the only NAIA sport in which the organizations member institutions were aligned into divisions from 1992 to 2020. Effective with the 2020–21 academic year, the NAIA returned to a single division for both mens and womens basketball.
• The NAIA is a smaller association than the NCAA, with just over 60,000 students. It includes two divisions (Division I and II) and Division I in the NAIA is comparable to Division II in the NCAA. Over 90% of schools in the NAIA offer scholarships and NAIA athletes receive an opportunity to compete.
• The athletic experience in the NAIA is essentially the same as the NCAA. The NAIA has scholarships, conferences, playoffs, and national championships just as the NCAA does. It is not unusual for NAIA and NCAA Division 2 and 3 teams to play each other.

In summary, the NAIA is a college athletics association that offers student-athletes an opportunity to earn athletic scholarships in 28 different sports at more than 250 schools across the United States and Canada. The NAIA has two divisions for football and basketball, and over 90% of schools in the NAIA offer scholarships. The athletic experience in the NAIA is similar to that of the NCAA.