<p>Has anyone seen any studies that correlate academic success in high school with the specific sport played? I've heard numerous anecdotal stories about certain sports having an abundance of highly ranked, high SAT scorers, but I haven't seen any detailed studies.</p>
<p>I googled but couldn't find anything on specific sports. Only this- high school athletes perform better academically than non-athletes:</p>
<p>I would guess there would be differences between sports that involve huge time commitments (5 hour baseball practices vs. 2 hour cross country workouts), less flexible schedules, and more competitive tryouts (have to devote even more outside time in order to keep up).</p>
<p>Try "The Game of Life", and "Reclaiming the Game", both by Bowen. Extensive analysis of the academic performance of athletes, including by sport.</p>
<p>afan,</p>
<p>Can you give us some examples?</p>
<p>I know of the 12 seniors in my daughter's "class" at her fencing club, 7 went to the Ivy League (only one was recruited, for sure, I don't know about one other -- the others weren't), and some others went to some pretty nonslouch schools like Johns Hopkins.</p>
<p>Source = Reclaiming the Game (Bowen and Levin) </p>
<p>At the Ivies only males on the sailing team performed at or above the college mean academically. Individual sports like tennis, sailing, squash, golf, fencing, crew, CC, tend to be respectable, with class rank averaging in the 40th percentiles. Average percentile rank in class for team sports, particularly high profile sports, are generally very low: football (21); basketball and hockey (26); swimming (28); baseball (30), etc.</p>
<p>At the NESCACs, the story is virtually the same: wrestling (20), football (26), baseball and hockey (30), basketball (33), golf (34), lacrosse (34).</p>
<p>This isn't particularly surprising, since those numbers include athletic tips, students whose athletic ability was key to their admission.</p>
<p>What was really surprising about Bowen's research is how badly athletes underperform once admitted, even relative to the already lowered expectations that you would predict given their initially lower standardized test scores and GPAs.</p>
<p>I also read a study, sorry I have no idea where, that showed that musicians, even when they put just as many hours in as athletes, performed better than average while athletes performed worse. (This is once they get into college - as we all know sports is probably a better hook than music for getting admitted.)</p>
<p>Mathmom,</p>
<p>This may well have come form "Reclaiming the Game." Bowen and Levin looked specifically at musicians, figuring that they would be a good check on their data about athletes. Musicians certainly had things in common with athletes: they may be given special consideration in the admissions process; they tend to "hang together," and they are involved in an activity that is time intensive.</p>
<p>Your memory is correct. Once they were in admitted, musicians not only had academically averages that were dramatically above average, and they actually overperformed slightly relatively to what their HS records might predict. An earlier book, The Game of Life, documented something similar: students who were actively engaged in time-consuming extracurriculars other than athletics overperformed academically.</p>
<p>At my college (top 50 DIV III, but consistent with data from other top LAC's,
female athletes tend to perform at or above the mean. Cross Country and Fencing students (both male and female) tend to outperform the student body. Football player's fall below the mean, but at many colleges do better than Lacrosse and Baseball (mens).
Notable, nevertheless, is data rarely published. On exit surveys athletes report higher satisfaction with college, wich is not surprising, because there is strong socialization. I am not sure whether you would find the same results in big-time sport schools.</p>
<p>I bet that sports with a lot more of a "WASP-y" clientelle will have higher performance, just like everything else seems to indicate.</p>
<p>But from the other kids on my lacrosse team, I guess that's not absolutely true, haha.</p>
<p>Brian,</p>
<p>You're right about some co-ed liberal arts colleges where women are more representative of the student body, but as of "Reclaiming the Game" (publ. 2003): in the Ivies, not a single women's team had an average class rank that equalled the average of women at large. In NESCAC, the only exception was women's cross country. </p>
<p>Women athletes do perform slightly above the level of men athletes, and not surprisingly walk-ons do better on nearly every measure than recruited athletes, but still generally significantly below the rest of the student body. (The stats are getting dated, and before some modest efforts toward reform in the past few years.)</p>
<p>At the college level, where Athletes are given special consideration as far as admissions goes, I dont think its any surprise that most athletes would have a lower GPA than the average, espcially for sports that are high profile.</p>
<p>However in High School I think that this rule does not really apply. For example, as a swimmer/water polo I noticed that most of my teamates were either taking advanced classes, on the honor roll or both.</p>
<p>That is why "scholar-athletes" are highly sought after by selective colleges.</p>
<p>Just athletes, too. In fact, at my alma mater, you are more likely to get an athletic "tip" with a lower SAT/GPA rather than a higher one. The reason for that is simple: assuming that the athlete meets the minimum requirements, coaches are much less likely to utilize their tips on scholar-athletes who might be admitted anyway. </p>
<p>But I'm trying to figure out why this is supposedly a problem. Someone is going to be in the bottom half of the class regardless, and if the college has concluded that having competitive athletic teams is good for the institution as a whole, why shouldn't it be athletes? Is anyone arguing that students who meet the minimum requirements benefit any less from their education just because they happen to spend a lot of their time on sports and may end up in the bottom half of their class? Isn't this better than Harvard's old "happy bottom quarter", filled with scholastically challenged sons of the economic elite? And is there any evidence that they did less well in the game of life because they happened to end up in the lower half of the class?</p>
<p>I happen to believe that the best way to judge the value of a college is in its "value-added", which is best measured in what happens to the average member of the graduating class, not the superstars who would likely have done well wherever they happened to attend.</p>
<p>mini</p>
<p>I agree on the value-added concept. It's the premise on which "Colleges That Change Lives" is based and I totally buy it.</p>
<p>It's hard to disagree with the value-added concept. Institutions have an interest in maximizing the value added, both by admitting students who will benefit the most from the educational experience, and who will, in turn, contribute the most to the college experience of their peers. Some of the most contentious problems about the role of athletics in the admissions process hinge on exactly this calculation. The questions are nuanced and the solutions are certainly not easy. </p>
<p>This article from the Chronicle of Higher Education, I think, provides fairly balanced coverage of some of the issues, and recent responses by some of the institutions in relatively compact form:</p>
<p>wrestling...</p>
<p>at the highest levels of wrestling, at national or state tournaments students will almost always have very high gpas. wrestling is the most rigorous, intense, dedication-neccessary work your ass off to suceed sport. ive played numerous sports and done very many intensive workouts, as have a few of my friends (mostly football-wrestling-lax). they all say that wrestling is by far the hardest and makes them work the hardest...</p>
<p>For a school-by-school listing, look under "Graduation Rates" at ncaa.org<br>
It lists overall percentages, student-athlete percentages, and percentages by sport.</p>
<p>If you use it, make sure to compare athletes with non-athletes of the same race and economic class on the campus. (The results are surprisingly positive - actually not so surprising, given the economic supports given to athletes.) Comparing graduation rates of minority, first generation, low-income athletes with white, full-pay, middle and upper income non-athletes doesn't tell you a heck of a lot.</p>