Having smart teammates can increase a high school student's odds of going to college, according to a recent study.
Researchers from Brigham Young University in Ohio found that joining an extracurricular club or team with members that get good grades can double a high school student's odds of going to college.
"Tell your parents, whatever they ground you from, it shouldn't be from practice or a club activity," Lance Erickson, co-author of the study, said in a statement. "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."
For the study, Erickson and his colleagues collected and analyzed data from about 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.
They found that the type of team or club really didn't matter. It simply came down to being around high-achieving peers (as measured by their grade point average or GPA).
"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, lead author of the study. "I think we're the first to show that who you are hanging out with in those activities really matters."
Researchers noted that simply participating in any extracurricular activity increased a student's chances of college enrollment regardless of that team's average GPA. Providing extra-curricular activities can be especially critical in schools that serve low-income students.
"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," Mikaela Dufur, lead author of the study, said in a statement.
