James H Grant
Andrew D Foote
April 2010
Recently attention has been devoted to the effect that peers have on a college student’s academic achievement. Most of the early research on peer effects in higher education has focused on roommates. This paper looks at the unique peer group formed by teammates in intercollegiate athletics at Lewis & Clark College, a NCAA Division III college. College athlete peer groups are distinct from others because they are consistently cohesive throughout the athlete’s college experience. We focus on peer group formation during the entering student’s fall semester. The literature generally acknowledges the importance of for student achievement of early academic experiences. We consider a number of different athlete peer groups that might be formed at that time: fellow teammates in the same section of the student’s introductory course, fellow athletes who are in the student’s course section, and all first semester teammates.
Following Manski’s 1993 approach, we model athlete peer effects as one of three effects on a student-athlete’s academic achievement.
- Endogenous effects: a student’s academic performance varies with peer group performance;
- Exogenous effects: a student’s academic performance varies with exogenous peer group characteristics; and
- Correlated effects: a student’s academic performance varies as the peer group’s performance varies because peer group members have similar characteristics and share similar experiences.
Our empirical model is:
Achievementi= β0+β1(PGPAi) +γ(Peer Characteristicsi)+θ(Controlsi)+εi
Where for each student-athlete (i), Achievement is one of a number of different achievement measures: Course grade, first semester GPA, first and second year GPA, cumulative GPA and persistence to graduation. PGPA is a student-athlete’s predicted GPA based on a regression of actual GPA on variables including high school GPA, high school class rank, percentile in class, admission rating, racial background and year entering college. Peer Characteristics are aggregate academic performance measures of the student-athlete’s peer group of interest: mean predicted GPA, standard deviation of predicted GPA, the student athlete’s relative position within the peer group. Controls are other appropriate control variable.
Our regression results suggest that there are positive significant teammate peer effects on student athlete academic achievement that cumulate over the student’s college tenure. Though we did not find significant peer effects on first semester academic achievement, we did find positive, academically significant, and statistically significant peer effects on cumulative GPA . In particular, if we take a student athlete’s peer group to be his or her teammates from the same graduating class, we estimate that a 1-point increase in this peer group’s GPA increases the student athlete’s GPA by about ½-point, ceteris paribus.