The Benefits of Scholastic Athletics

We gratefully acknowledge Greg Curtner who introduced us to this subject in 2012 and framed the importance of the question of whether student-athletes benefit from or are exploited by participation in college athletics. We examine this question more broadly and consider the educational, social and economic outcomes of participation in scholastic athletics at all levels of schooling. We thank Jenna Bujalski, Alejandra Campos, Ron Laschever, Josh Sherman, Aniello Bianco, Daniel Stone, Fredrick Flyer, Soloman Polachek and Jennifer Pachon for research support and commentary. Heckman and Loughlin used a portion of this work on the impacts of participation in major college sports conferences in litigation on behalf of the NCAA, which funded this limited scope of the work. That research was summarized in The Hill (Heckman et al., 2021). The NCAA did not provide financial support for this paper. This paper greatly extends the scope of our previous research. This study uses restricted-use data from the Education Longitudinal Survey and the National Educational Longitudinal Survey provided by the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES). Access was granted under a restricted-use data license, and all analyses comply with NCES confidentiality standards. The findings and opinions expressed in the article do not necessarily reflect the views of the NCES or the U.S. Department of Education. Opinions and errors are solely those of the authors, and not the NCAA or Compass Lexecon. The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research.

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