Choose wise the kids you play with, that’s the advice kids in school can learn from this new study. Joining an extra-curricular team or club with members that get good grades can double a high school student’s odds of going to college. Still, I do think it’s worth nothing what the authors write in their conclusion:

“Although the precise causal mechanisms operating within extracurricular associations are still uncertain, finding that “extracurricular associations” are strongly correlated with college enrollment suggests that EAs may be meaningful “local positions” that increase the risk of college enrollment for students from all GPA levels.”

Yep, correlation. Still, the researchers checked for many different elements (including education level of the parents).

Highlights of the study:

• Study examines extracurricular participation with high achieving peers.
• Study finds a link between the GPA of peers in an EA and college enrollment.
• Study finds that only participation in academic activities has added impact on enrollment.
• Study finds no association between the number of extracurricular activities and enrollment.

From the press release:

Brigham Young University sociologist and study co-author Lance Erickson knows how to sell the study to teens.

“Tell your parents, whatever they ground you from, it shouldn’t be from practice or a club activity,” said Erickson. “If they ground you from a school club, you are more likely to end up living at their house because you won’t be going to college.”

Erickson spent four years constructing a dataset and statistical model that could answer critics’ arguments. The sample includes 90,000 high school students and up to 10 of their friends. Since friends often join a team or club together, the model subtracts out the positive influence of friends who are also teammates. That isolates the impact of teammates who aren’t otherwise in a student’s social circle.

To the surprise of the researchers, the type of team or club didn’t really matter. It simply came down to being around high-achieving peers (as measured by GPA). So in one school that might be the swim team or the orchestra, while at another school it’s the computer science club or cross country.

“Typically you think the benefits of participating come from the type of club or the intensity of the skills you learned there,” said Ben Gibbs, the lead study author. “I think we’re the first to show that who you are hanging out with in those activities really matters.”

The study is forthcoming in Social Science Research, which posted an accepted version of the report. As noted in the study, simply participating in any extracurricular activity increased a student’s chances of college enrollment regardless of that team’s average GPA. In addition, the odds of college enrollment double for a student if they join a group with an average GPA that is 1 point higher – i.e. one with a 3.6 GPA rather than a team with a 2.6 GPA.

The role of teammates is an added piece of a puzzle that co-author Mikaela Dufur started in 2007. That’s when she published research showing that playing high school sports increased women’s chances of getting a college degree.

She notes that providing extra-curricular activities can be especially critical in schools that serve low-income students. And the earlier the start, the better.

“I would encourage middle schools and junior high schools to devote resources to those kinds of things so that as they transition to high school, they are prepared to join a team,” Dufur said.

Abstract of the study:

There is consistent evidence that student involvement in extracurricular activities (EAs) is associated with numerous academic benefits, yet understanding how peer associations within EAs might influence this link is not well understood. Using Add Health’s comprehensive data on EA participation across 80 schools in the United States, we develop a novel measure of peer associations within EA activities. We find that EA participation with high achieving peers has a nontrivial link to college enrollment, even after considering individual, peer, and school-level factors. This suggests that school policies aimed at encouraging student exposure to high achieving peers in EAs could have an important impact on a student’s later educational outcomes.