Does It Pay to Play? Gender, High School Sport Participation, and Young Adult Attainment

Despite differences in the cultural meaning of sport for girls and boys, popular rhetoric implies that sport participation is always good for kids. Indeed, many youth sport organizations were built on the assumption that sport reinforces shared values—such as hard work, cooperation, leadership, and fair play—that help prepare youth for their future roles as engaged citizens. While there is ample evidence to suggest that sport positively affects educational attainment (Hartmann 2008), it is unclear whether such benefits extend beyond the college years to influence young Americans’ career trajectories or subsequent attainment. Evidence from a small number of empirical studies suggests that sport participants tend to report higher earnings, though the bulk of these studies focus exclusively on men. Those studies that do include women are often outdated, considering the influence of sport participation for U.S. women prior to the passage of Title IX of the Education Amendments in 1972 (which prohibited sex discrimination in education, including school-sponsored sports). Using longitudinal data from the Youth Development Study, this study explores how high school sport participation affects individual earnings and combined household income throughout young adulthood (ages 21 through 34). Multilevel mixed-effects regression models reveal that high school sport participation is positively associated with young adult attainment. This relationship is due, in part, to participants’ greater educational attainment: sport participants are more likely to enroll and graduate from college, which translates to greater earnings throughout young adulthood. At the household level, female sport participants, but not males, report larger incomes than their peers. While male sport participants report the highest individual earnings, female participants report the highest annual household income. Taken together, these findings suggest that focusing on individual earnings alone does not fully capture the gendered effect of sport participation on attainment.