title: College-Going Benefits of High School Sports Participation: Race and Gender Differences over Three Decades.
abstract: The long touted athlete advantage in college enrollment has been tempered by assertions that this advantage is actually due to characteristics that precede participation. Moreover, it remains unclear whether the benefits of sports extend into contemporary times, and apply equally to female and racial minority athletes. This study uses three nationally representative longitudinal datasets of students who were 10thgraders in 1980, 1990, and 2002. We find that high school sports participation was positively associated with college enrollment, even with the utilization of propensity score modeling, for white boys and girls, black boys, and Latino boys and girls during the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s. The most important gender and race differences include black female athletes' college-going disadvantage in the 1980s and 1990s, and girls' persistently lower rates of high school sports participation than boys'.
authors.affiliation: (Previously at the University of Texas, Now at Rice University), Houston Education Research Consortium, Kinder Institute for Urban Research, MS-208, Rice University, 6100 Main Street, Houston, TX 77005.
authors.forename: Dara
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Shifrer
authors.affiliation: Wichita State University, 400 Lindquist Hall, Wichita, KS 67260.
authors.forename: Jennifer
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Pearson
authors.affiliation: Chandra Muller, University of Texas at Austin, 305 E. 23rd Street, Stop G1800, Austin, Texas 78712-1699.
authors.forename: Chandra
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Muller
authors.affiliation: Lindsey Wilkinson, Portland State University, Department of Sociology, P.O. Box 751, Portland, OR 97207-0751.
authors.forename: Lindsey
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Wilkinson
keywords: College Enrollment; Gender; High School Sports; Race