College Athletics Hinder Students' Academic Achievement
This article examines whether participation in collegiate sports has a significant effect on the players’ performance in the classroom. In 1991, member schools in the NCAA voted to curtail the number of hours players could practice per week. In-season playing time is restricted to 20 hours per week and organized out-of season time to 8 hours per week. One point the article raises is that in general, athletics help structure a student’s life and improve physical well-being but on the other hand, sports could hinder an athletes academic achievements.
In a study with Clemson University, from 1985-1988, 594 athletes’ grades were compared to that of students not participating in college athletics in that same time period. On average, athletes’ grades were lower by a statistically significant amount than the other students’ grades (2.379 versus 2.681 *see table for full data). However, this does not necessarily mean that sports are what’s causing athletes’ grades to be lower; confounding factors include difficulty of courses taken and family and past academic backgrounds also play a part.
The next study used a model to account for variables (roughly) where Grade is a function of average grade in a given course, popularity of the course, a dummy variable denoting semester, credit load of a student, percent of load taken at the college, the student’s major, past credit load, GPA, a dummy variable to denote freshman, size of high school graduating class, the student’s rank in his/her high school class at graduation, SAT scores and its ratio, race of student, a dummy variable for sex, and a dummy variable for athletes.
Grade = b0 + b1EASE + b2POPULARITY + b3SESSION + b4LOAD + b5COLLEGE + b6MAJOR + b7EXPERIENCE + b8GPA + b9FRESHMAN + b10H.S.SIZE + b11H.S.RANK + b12SAT + b13VERBAL/MATH + b14RACE + b15SEX + b16ATHLETE + e
A regression was run on this data and the results were that participating in sports does in fact hinder academic performance. However, results also concluded that on average, college athletes come to college with inferior SAT scores, lower high school rankings, and lower high school GPAs than non-athletes. Revenue and non-revenue sports (as in football versus tennis) also play an important role in the equation.
Maloney and McCormick, "An Examination of the Role that Intercollegiate Athletic Participation Plays in Academic Achievement." The Journal of Human Resources Vol. 28, No. 3 (1993): 555-570. JSTOR. Colorado College Lib., 27 February 2003 <http://www.jstor.org>.