elite programs in their sport are able to participate; some colleges offer athletic scholarships to intercollegiate sports competitors. The third tier includes intramural and recreational sports clubs, which are available to more of the student body. Competition between student clubs from different colleges, not organized by and therefore not representing the institutions or their faculties, may also be called "intercollegiate" athletics or simply college sports. The most competitive collegiate sport governing body in the first and second tiers is the NCAA, which regulates athletes of 1,268 institutions across the US and Canada. The NCAA uses a three-division system of Division I, Division II, and Division III. Division I and Division II schools can offer scholarships to athletes for playing a sport, while Division III schools cannot offer any athletic scholarships. Division I schools, which generally are larger than either Division II or III institutions, must further meet additional requirements: among them, they must field teams in at least seven sports for men and seven for women or six for men and eight for women, with at least two team sports for each gender. Each division is then further divided into several conferences for regional league play. The names of these conferences, such as the Ivy League, are also metonyms for their respective schools. College sports are popular on regional and national scales, at times competing with professional championships for prime broadcast, print coverage. In most states, the person with the highest taxpayer-provided base salary is a public college football or basketball coach. This does not include coaches at private colleges. The average university sponsors at least 20 different sports and offers a wide variety of intramural sports. There are approximately 400,000 men and women student-athletes that participate in sanctioned athletics each year. Varsity esports have been growing since the 2010s. As of 2019, there were 125 esports teams at colleges and universities in North America. Issues confronting higher education in the United States Entrance routes and procedures for choosing a college or university, their rankings and the financial value of degrees are being discussed. This leads to discussions on socioeconomic status and race ethnicity and gender. From the student perspective, issues include colleges failing to teach soft skills such as critical thinking, the wide ranges of remuneration and underemployment among the various degrees, rising tuition and increasing student loan debt, austerity in state and local spending, the adjunctification of academic