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All that study seems to show is that schools with more students in the sports programs also produce better students. Isn't it possible that schools that strive for better athletes also tend to strive for better students and those two groups could be separate? I know out of the 20 engineers I went to college with, only one of them was in any sports and he did pretty poorly and barely graduated.

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Of course, it's only correlation. Causality is unclear, the correlation isn't, and correlation is enough to render incorrect the inference that athletes perform worse academically than non-athletes.

Here's a review of the topic: http://library.la84.org/3ce/HighSchoolSportsParticipation.pd...

Notably, it starts out with "... research has time and again demonstrated a strong and positive correlation between high school sports participation and academic achievement. This basic, baseline finding holds for a wide variety of measures and on a whole range of data sets, methodological approaches, and social conditions."

"The crucial point for a general audience is that periodic updates, reviews, reappraisals and re-evaluations (Braddock 1981; Picou et al. 1985; Holland and Thomas 1987; and Marsh 1992) have, over the years, consistently and invariably yielded evidence concluding that there is a significant baseline correlation between high school sports participation and higher rates of academic achievement and aspiration for individual students... Even research that is critical of the sports/education nexus or that seeks to complicate and unpack this statistical association begins from this basic assumption and understanding."

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