WSU study finds jocks are good students

A recent study at Washington State University found that freshmen who were enrolled in science and engineering programs, were members of fraternities or sororities or were varsity athletes had higher graduation rates than other students.

The study was of 6,000 WSU students who enrolled as freshmen in Pullman in the fall of either 2002 or 2003.

All other influences being equal, the study found students enrolled in science or engineering programs or members of a fraternity or sorority were nearly three times as likely to graduate within five or six years of their initial enrollment as students who were not.

Varsity athletes were more than twice as likely as non-athletes to graduate within five or six years.

The study was conducted by Vicki McCracken of the WSU School of Economic Sciences, Fran Hermanson, associate director of Institutional Research, and Diem Nguyen, an economics doctoral candidate.

"One of the things revealed in our research is the fallibility of a number of persistent stereotypes," McCracken said, including that many athletes are poor students.

The study looked at student performance after the first semester of their freshman year and again at graduation. It was intended to reveal how factors such as prior academic performance, gender, financial circumstances, race and ethnicity can be used to predict who will get a degree, McCracken said.

McCracken said one of the researchers' findings was that race and ethnicity were not statistically significant in predicting whether students earned a degree.

"What did prove useful in predicting academic success were factors such as financial and socio-economic status, which are sometimes related to race and ethnicity," she said.

Hermanson said other findings were that students who stayed enrolled all through the period were seven times more likely to graduate than students who suspended their attendance for one or more semesters.

They also found that high school grade-point-average was a more significant predictor of graduation potential than SAT scores, Hermanson said.

About 68 percent of the students who began as freshmen on the Pullman campus in 2002 or 2003 received a degree from WSU within six years or less, just above the national average for similar schools, the study said.